Got this from a friend of a friend, and thought it might be fun. My wife's not here right now, but when she (the english major and drama teacher) returns I'll get her to go through and mark those she's read with an asterisk or something.

UPDATE:

= My wife's list

College Board’s 101 Greatest Works of Literature:
[bold those you have read, italics for those you want to read]

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

Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre

Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights

Camus, Albert - The Stranger (in both English and French)
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 Turn of the Screw

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 García - 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 (in French)
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. - George Bergeron
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 36 of the 101, almost all of those were for in middle and high school and in college. And the word "read" might be misleading, at least until I got to college. Trust me, if it was boring and there were Cliffs Notes available, I "read" the abbreviated versions.

- posted by Rick @ 15:15