Books of utter greatness?
This was on FF's blog ... thought I'd see how I measure up.
US College Board's 101 Greatest Works
(Books I've read are bolded)
- Beowulf
- Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
- Agee, James - A Death in the Family
- Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
- Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
- Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
- Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
- Brontė, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
- Brontė, Emily - Wuthering Heights
- Camus, Albert - The Stranger
- Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
- Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
- Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
- Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
- Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
- Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
- Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
- Dante - Inferno
- de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
- Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
- Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
- Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
- Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
- Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
- Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
- Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
- Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
- Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
- Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
- Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
- Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
- Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
- Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
- Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
- Homer - The Iliad
- Homer - The Odyssey
- Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
- Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
- James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
- James, Henry - The American
- Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
- Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
- Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
- Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
- London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
- Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
- Marquez, Gabriel Garcķa - One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
- Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
- Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
- Morrison, Toni - Beloved
- O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
- O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
- Orwell, George - Animal Farm
- Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
- Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
- Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
- Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
- Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
- Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
- Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
- Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
- Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
- Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
- Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
- Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
- Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
- Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
- Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
- Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- Sophocles - Antigone
- Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
- Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
- Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
- Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
- Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
- Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
- Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
- Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
- Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Voltaire - Candide
- Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
- Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
- Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
- Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
- Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
- Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
- Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
- Wright, Richard - Native Son
I've read 67. But as I was telling FF, I don't remember much about several of them because I was forced to read them in school. There's something rebellious in me that fights any text being forced on me. Books should be chosen, enjoyed, read on one's own terms.
I have found far greater enjoyment in the classics I've read since I've been out of school. I feel like I've gained great understanding by approaching a book on my own time, in my own way.
But as I told FF, I know many people who wouldn't pick up a classic unless their lives (or their grades) depended on it. It's sad, but it's the truth. But it leads to an interesting question: Does forced reading turn students off to books? Do study units and quizzes do more harm than good?
Food for thought.
P.S. Art is from The Canterbury Tales and Walden, the latter of which is one of my favorite books of all time. Also, Crumb's interpretation of The Metamorphosis is an awesome book.
posted by Kate at 11:49 PM
Copyright 2001-2009, L.K.C.S. It's MINE, all MINE. If you wanna use it, gimme credit and a link, okies? And don't run with scissors, because you're just going to poke somebody's eye out with that thing. No, really. 
5 Comments:
I'm too lazy to count the ones I've read. I was an English major twice, so let's say over half.
A few comments: I'm surprised you've never read The Stranger. I thought every teen in America went through a nihilistic existentialist phase where they read that book, if only for the Cure song "Killing an Arab."
Death Comes for the Archbishop is a very tedious book, and I'm surprised that made the list over My Anontonia, which is a very sensual book.
Finally, Flannery O'Connor's last book A Hard Man is Good to Find didn't sell nearly as well. (English major joke.) Thank you! I'm here all week!
I thought death was going to come for me before I finished Death comes for the Archbishop.
Wow...I think I've read...20 or so of those. Max.
Note to self: Put down Harry Potter and read something else.
Willingly read, none. Though Slaughterhouse-Five is on the to-read list, oh, and i read at least some, if not all of metamorphasis during senior english, because i didnt really give a shit about what we were actually talking about, probably macbeth or hamlet.
Forced to read, and consequently slept through most discussions, 12, maybe 13.
USA Today can stuff it as far as literary works for me go. My tastes tend more toward the realistic-y sci-fi. Asimov,'s robot and foundation series are pretty damn good, as i burned through the entire book series in about 6 months.
Arthur C. Clarke sucks balls. As does L. Ron "Scientology" Hubbard - Battlefield Earth anyway.
I have heard vonnegut is some pretty good stuff, and as i said, on my to-read list.
Those books are recommended for college bound kids?
WHAT? What sane kid would WANT to read all that. I know all of that was WAY WAY WAY at the bottom of my to do list during school.
The best way to read most of these is to pick up the audio version at the public library and drive somewhere.
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