One of my life goals is to read at least one selection by each author on the reading lists from my AP classes. I did want to read each book on the lists, but the thought of reading another story by Morrison or Faulkner made me want to give up the entire project, so I’ve amended it. I’ve held onto the lists for years and finally have time extra time a little more time than I did in college to get around to reading.
- Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart
- Albee, Edward
- Alexi, Sherman, Flight
- Agee, James
- Anaya, Rudolfo
- Anderson, Sherwood
- Angelou, Maya
- Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale
- Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility
- Baldwin, James
- Baraka, Amiri
- Barth, John
- Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot
- Bellamy, Edward
- Bellow, Saul
- Benchley, Robert
- Berry, Wendell
- Bierce, Ambrose
- Biovanni, Nikki
- Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre
- Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights
- Buck, Pearl S.
- Bulgakov, Mikhail
- Butler, Samuel
- Camus, Albert, The Stranger
- Capote, Truman, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
- Carey, Peter
- Carver, Raymond
- Casey, John
- Cather, Willa
- Cervantes, Miguel De
- Cheever, John
- Chekhov, Anton
- Chopin, Kate, The Awakening
- Cisneros, Sandra, House on Mango Street
- Coetzee, J.M.
- Conrad, Joseph, Under Western Eyes
- Crane, Stephen
- Creeley, Robert
- Cunningham, Michael
- DeFoe, Daniel
- Desai, Anita
- Dickens, Charles, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, Bleak House
- Dickey, James
- Didion, Joan
- Dillard, Annie
- Doctorow, E.L.
- Dos Passos, John
- Dostoyevsky, Feodor, Crime and Punishment
- Dreiser, Theodore, An American Tragedy
- DuBois, W.E.B.
- Durrenmatt, Freidrich
- Eliot, George
- Eliot, T.S.
- Ellison, Ralph, The Invisible Man
- Emecheta, Buchi
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo
- Erdich, Louise
- Erlich, Gretel
- Euripides
- Falkner, William, Light in August
- Fielding, Henry
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, Flappers and Philosophers
- Flaubert, Gustauve, Madame Bovary
- Ford, Richard
- Forster, E.M., Where Angels Fear to Tread
- Fowles, John
- Friel, Brian
- Frost, Robert
- Gardam, Jane
- Gardner, John
- Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Yellow Wallpaper
- Ginsbert, Allen
- Goethe
- Golding, William, Lord of the Flies
- Goldsmith
- Gordimer, Nadine, Get a Life
- Greene, Graham, The End of the Affair
- Hamilton, Alexander
- Hamsun, Knut
- Hardy, Thomas
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlett Letter
- Heller, Joseph, Catch-22
- Hellman, Lillian
- Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, Short Stories
- Hersey, John, A Bell for Adano
- Hesse, Hermann, Steppenwolf, Demian, Siddhartha
- Hudson
- Hugo, Victor
- Hulme, Keri
- Hurston, Zora Neal, Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited
- Ibsen, Henrik, Ghosts, Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder
- Ionesco, Eugene
- Irving, John
- Irving, Washington
- Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go
- James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady, The American
- Jones, LeRoi (aka Baraka, Amiri)
- Jonson, Ben
- Joyce, James, Portrait of the Artist
- Kafka, Franz, Metamorphosis
- Keats, John
- Kerouac, Jack, On the Road
- Kesey, Ken
- Kingston, Maxine Hong
- Kincaid, Jamaica
- Kipling, Rudyard
- Kogaway, Joy
- Kosinsky, Jerzy
- Lardner, Ring
- Laurence, Margaret
- Lawrence, D.H.
- LeGuin, Ursula, The Left Hand of Darkness
- Lessing, Doris
- Levine, Phillip
- Lewis, Sinclair
- Lively, Penelope
- London, Jack
- Lopez, Barry
- Lorca, Frederico Garcia
- Mailer, Norman
- Malamud, Bernard
- Mann, Thomas
- Markham, Beryl
- Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus
- Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
- Maughan, Somerset
- Melville, Herman, Moby Dick
- Matthiessen, Peter
- McCullers, Carson
- Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman
- Mishima
- Mo, Timothy
- Moliere
- Momaday, N. Scott, The Ancient Child
- Morrison, Toni, Beloved, The Bluest Eye
- Mukherjee, Bharati
- Nabakov, Vladimir, Invitation to a Beheading
- Naipul, V.S.
- Norris, Frank
- O’Casey, Sean
- O’Conner, Flannery, Collected Stories
- Ondaatji, Michael
- O’Neill, Eugene
- Orwell, George, 1984, Animal Farm
- Ovid
- Ozick, Cynthia
- Paine, Thomas
- Pasternak, Boris
- Paton, Alan
- Percy, Walker
- Pinter, Harold
- Pirandello, Luigi
- Plath, Sylvia, The Bell Jar
- Poe, Edgar Allen, short stories
- Porter, Katherine
- Porter, William Sidney (aka O. Henry)
- Proulx, Annie
- Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49
- Quammen, David
- Rawlings, Marjorie
- Remarque, Eric
- Rich, Adrienne
- Robbins, Tom, Another Roadside Attraction
- Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children
- Salinger, J.D.
- Saroyan, William
- Sartre
- Scott, Sir Walter
- Shakespeare, William
- Shaw, George Bernard
- Shaw, Irwin
- Shelley, Mary
- Silko, Leslie
- Sinclair, Upton
- Snyder, Gary
- Soto, Gary
- Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus Rex
- Soyinka, Wele
- Stegner, Wallace
- Steinbeck, John
- Stoppard, Tom
- Strindberg, August
- Styron, William, Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire
- Swift, Graham
- Swift, Jonathan
- Synge, J.M.
- Tan, Amy, The Joy Luck Club
- Thackeray, William Makepiece
- Theroux, Paul
- Thomas, Dylan
- Thoreau, Henry David
- Tolstoi, Leo
- Turgenev, Ivan
- Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Tyler, Anne
- Updike, John, Seek My Face
- Valenzuela, Louisa
- Vidal, Gore
- Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse Five
- Walcott, Derek
- Walker, Alice
- Warren, Rober Penn
- Welty, Eudora
- West, Nathaniel
- Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth
- Wideman, John Edgar
- Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Ernest
- Wilder, Thornton
- Williams, Tennessee
- Wolfe, Thomas
- Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando
- Wordsworth, William
- Wright, Richard
- Yeats, William Butler
- Zamiatin, Yevgeny
That’s a pretty comprehensive list – you had well-read tutors. May I suggest throwing in a few more Nobel Laureates though, e.g. Solzhenitsyn is a glaring omission. I reckon you’d adore Herta Müller (2009). Are you going to write reviews as you go through them?
Yes, it is a pretty big list, but I’m confident that I can finish it (though it may take quite some time). I hope to review every one of them, but if I can’t I will definitely make it a point to review the best ones so others can be exposed to them. Thank you for the recommendations! Those will go on my “recommendations” list :)
Excellent. Are you working through them thematically or are you just mixing ‘em up?
I loaded most of them into a Barnes and Noble wishlist and am randomly picking them from there. It’s interesting, how different they all are.
I tend to stick to a theme for a few books at a time, usually based on nationality and era, e.g. C19th French, C20th American etc. I find this helps me appreciate the genre quickly. Thus I’m able to latch onto each new book faster than the last but the early books are still fresh in my mind, so as my understanding of the genre improves I am still able to draw more out of the ones I have completed. Try it some time.
All the best in your endeavour, Sitzen
Thanks for the recommendation, I might just give that a go.
This is a massive list of authors! Good luck!
That it is! But I’m really looking forward to the day when I finish it :) Thanks!
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Hi Ashley, I didn’t realize that anyone else did this – in middle and high school at Pine View I had a list of 100 books to read in preparation for the AP exams, and I dutifully read as many as I could. Somehow I lost my list since then… seeing your list inspires me to go find it and take it up again! Good luck!
Thanks, Caroline! This is a compilation of the lists Mrs. Janoff and Dr. Schleifer gave us. Good luck finding your list of 100! And I’d love to hear your opinion on these if you want to share :)