Book List

When it comes to education, I hit the jackpot. Mrs. Janoff and Dr. Schleifer were my AP Language and AP Literature teachers in high school, and they instilled in me a deep appreciation for diverse writing both within the literary canon and around its periphery. In addition to teaching me how to write, they imparted lasting gifts in the form of book lists. I kept these lists, their pages yellowing and edges softening with years of wear, and ultimately combined them into the list below. My goal is to read at least one book by each author.

• 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, The Bone People
• 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