book suggestions

College Confidential Community
1

<p>Hello. I'm making myself a reading list for this summer (currently at around 300), and I want to make sure that I have everything that I should be reading on there. What are some suggestions of books that every college-bound student should read? I want to make sure that my list is complete.</p>

2

<p>im reading 1984 right now and its really really good. if you havent read it yet you should.</p>

3

<p>I'd love to see your list, gigidaisy.</p>

<p>I also plan to make one.</p>

4

<p>Nervous Conditions, asap! and then, read the sequel, The Book of Not!
They are true treasures, these books.</p>

5

<p>yeah, i too would love to see your list</p>

<p>here are a couple good ones from college board:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.collegeboard.com/student/plan/boost-your-skills/23628.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.collegeboard.com/student/plan/boost-your-skills/23628.html&lt;/a>
<a href="http://www.collegeboard.com/student/plan/boost-your-skills/23630.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.collegeboard.com/student/plan/boost-your-skills/23630.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

6

<p>nice lists!!!!!!!!!!!!</p>

7

<p>anything by jonathan kozol, hes a real smart guy.</p>

8

<p>Okay, well...here it is...You might notice a few omissions, such as Shakespeare. That is because I did not include anything on this list that I already own or have read...and I bought myself the complete works of William Shakespeare (or whoever he might have been) for my birthday this past year. I'm going to have a lot of reading to do this summer, plus my four summer reading books and journals, my IB extended essay I have to write, my math that I have to study for, plus my college apps and essay contests I plan to do this summer....Oh, yeah, I think I'm supposed to have fun too....oops, I forgot my about 200-300 hours of volunteering and the job my parents want me to get....well, I'm going to have an awesome summer!</p>

<p>THE LIST: </p>

<ol>
<li> Abelove—Go and Come Back</li>
<li> Achebe—Things Fall Apart</li>
<li> Adams—Watership Down</li>
<li> Aeschylus—Oristeian Trilogy</li>
<li> Agee—A Death in the Family</li>
<li> Alcott—Little Women</li>
<li> Allison—Bastard Out of Carolina</li>
<li> Alvarez—In the Time of Butterflies</li>
<li> Amis—Lucky Jim</li>
<li>Amis—Money </li>
<li>Anderson—Feed</li>
<li>Anderson—Winesburg, Ohio</li>
<li>Anonymous—Beowulf</li>
<li>Aristophanes—The Clouds</li>
<li>Asimov—I, Robot</li>
<li>Atwood—Handmaid’s Tale</li>
<li>Austen—Mansfield Park</li>
<li>Austen—Northanger Abbey</li>
<li>Austen—Persuasion</li>
<li>Austen—Sense and Sensibility</li>
<li>Auster—The New York Trilogy</li>
<li>Bagdasarian—Forgotten Fire</li>
<li>Bainbridge—The Bottle Factory Outing</li>
<li>Beckett—Malone Dies</li>
<li>Beckett—Molloy </li>
<li>Bellow—Herzog </li>
<li>Bradbury—Dandelion Wine</li>
<li>Bradbury—Fahrenheit 451</li>
<li>Bradley—Mists of Avalon</li>
<li>Brontë (Charlotte)—The Professor</li>
<li>Brontë (Charlotte)—Shirley</li>
<li>Buchan—The Thirty-Nine Steps</li>
<li>Buck—The Good Earth</li>
<li>Bulgakov—The Master and Margarita</li>
<li>Bulwer-Lytton—Paul Clifford</li>
<li>Bunyan—Pilgrim’s Progress</li>
<li>Burgess—A Clockwork Orange</li>
<li>Calvino—If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler</li>
<li>Calvino—Invisible Cities</li>
<li>Camus—The Plague</li>
<li>Camus—The Stranger</li>
<li>Capote—In Cold Blood</li>
<li>Carey—Oscar and Lucinda</li>
<li>Carter—Wise Children</li>
<li>Cather—Death Comes for the Archbishop</li>
<li>Cather—Oh Pioneers</li>
<li>Celine—Journey to the End of the Night</li>
<li>Cervantes—Don Quixote</li>
<li>Chandler—The Big Sleep</li>
<li>Chaucer—The Canterbury Tales</li>
<li>Chekhov</li>
<li>Childers—The Riddle of the Sands</li>
<li>Cisneros—Caramelo</li>
<li>Coetzee—Waiting for the Barbarians</li>
<li>Collins—The Woman in White</li>
<li>Conrad—Heart of Darkness</li>
<li>Conrad—Nostromo </li>
<li>Cooper—The Deerslayer</li>
<li>Cooper—The Last of the Mohicans</li>
<li>Cortazar—Hopscotch </li>
<li>Crane—The Red Badge of Courage</li>
<li>Dante—The Divine Comedy</li>
<li>Dante—The Inferno</li>
<li>De Balzac—The Black Sheep</li>
<li>De Bernieres—Corelli’s Mandolin</li>
<li>Defoe—A Journal of the Plague Years</li>
<li>Defoe—Moll Flanders</li>
<li>Defoe—Robinson Crusoe</li>
<li>DeLaclos—Dangerous Liasons</li>
<li>De Lafayette—The Princess De Cleves</li>
<li>De Lillo—Underworld </li>
<li>Dickens—Bleak House</li>
<li>Dickens—A Christmas Carol</li>
<li>Dickens—David Copperfield</li>
<li>Dickens—A Tale of Two Cities</li>
<li>Dickens—Oliver Twist</li>
<li>Diderot—Rameau’s Nephew</li>
<li>Dineson—Out of Africa</li>
<li>Disraeli—Sybil</li>
<li>Dos Passos—USA </li>
<li>Dostoevsky—The Brothers Karamazov</li>
<li>Dostoevsky—The Idiot</li>
<li>Dostoevsky—Notes from Underground</li>
<li>Doyle—The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes</li>
<li>Doyle—The Hound of the Baskervilles</li>
<li>Dreiser—Sister Carrie</li>
<li>DuMaurier—Rebecca</li>
<li>Dumas—The Count of Monte Cristo</li>
<li>Dumas—The Three Musketeers</li>
<li>Eliot—Daniel Deronda</li>
<li>Eliot—Middlemarch</li>
<li>Eliot—Silas Marner</li>
<li>Eliot—The Wasteland</li>
<li>Ellison—Invisible Man</li>
<li>Ellroy—LA Confidential</li>
<li>Euripides—Medea </li>
<li>Faulkner—Absalom, Absalom!</li>
<li>Faulkner—The Sound and the Fury</li>
<li>Faulks—Birdsong </li>
<li> Fielding—Joseph Andrews</li>
<li> Fielding—Tom Jones</li>
<li> Fitzgerald—The Last Tycoon</li>
<li> Fitzgerald—Tender Is the Night</li>
<li> Flaubert—Madame Bovary</li>
<li> Follett—The Pillars of the Earth</li>
<li> Ford—The Good Soldier</li>
<li> Forster—Howard’s End</li>
<li> Forster—Maurice</li>
<li> Fowles—The Magus </li>
<li> Franklin—Autobiography </li>
<li> Frazier—Cold Mountain</li>
<li> Galt—The Provost</li>
<li> Gaskell—The Life of Charlotte Brontë</li>
<li> Gibbons—Ellen Foster</li>
<li> Gibran—The Prophet</li>
<li> Goethe—Faust</li>
<li> Golden—Memoirs of a Geisha</li>
<li> Grahame—The Wind in the Willows</li>
<li> Grass—The Tin Drum</li>
<li> Gray—Lanark </li>
<li> Greene—The Quiet American</li>
<li> Griffin—Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee</li>
<li> Grossmith—The Diary of a Nobody</li>
<li> Gunther—Death Be Not Proud</li>
<li> Haddon—The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time</li>
<li> Hansberry—A Raisin in the Sun</li>
<li> Hardy—Far From the Madding Crowd</li>
<li> Hardy—Jude the Obscure</li>
<li> Hardy—The Mayor of Casterbridge</li>
<li> Heller—Catch-22</li>
<li> Hemingway—For Whom the Bell Tolls</li>
<li> Hemingway—Men Without Women</li>
<li> Hemingway—The Old Man and the Sea</li>
<li> Hemingway—The Sun Also Rises</li>
<li> Herodotus—Histories </li>
<li> Hesse—Siddhartha </li>
<li> Hilton—Lost Horizon</li>
<li> Hobbes—Leviathan </li>
<li> Hosseini—The Kite Runner</li>
<li> Hugo—The Hunchback of Notre Dame</li>
<li> Hugo—Les Miserables</li>
<li> Hurston—Their Eyes Were Watching God</li>
<li> Huxley—Brave New World</li>
<li> Ibsen—Ghosts </li>
<li> Irving—The Legend of Sleepy Hollow</li>
<li> Irving—A Prayer for Owen Meany</li>
<li> Ishiguro—An Artist of the Floating World</li>
<li> James—The Portrait of a Lady</li>
<li> Jerome—Three Men in a Boat</li>
<li> Joyce—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</li>
<li> Joyce—Ulysses </li>
<li> Kafka—The Metamorphosis</li>
<li> Kafka—The Trial</li>
<li> Keller—The Story of My Life</li>
<li> Keneally—Schindler’s List</li>
<li> Kerouac—On the Road</li>
<li> Kesey—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</li>
<li> Keyes—Flowers for Algernon</li>
<li> King—The Stand</li>
<li> Kingsolver—The Bean Trees</li>
<li> Kingsolver—The Poisonwood Bible</li>
<li> Kipling—The Jungle Books</li>
<li> Knowles—A Separate Peace</li>
<li> Kundera—The Book of Laughter and Forgetting</li>
<li> Lawrence—Inherit the Wind</li>
<li> Lawrence—Lady Chatterly’s Lover</li>
<li> Lawrence—The Rainbow</li>
<li> Lawrence—Women in Love</li>
<li> Le Carre—Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy</li>
<li> Levi—The Periodic Table</li>
<li> Lewis—Babbitt </li>
<li> Lewis—Main Street</li>
<li> Lorca—Gypsy Ballads</li>
<li> Lord—A Night to Remember</li>
<li> Love Peacock—Nightmare Abbey</li>
<li> Machiavelli—The Prince</li>
<li> Mah—Chinese Cinderella</li>
<li> Mailer—The Executioner’s Song</li>
<li> Marquez—One Hundred Years of Solitude</li>
<li> Martel—Life of Pi</li>
<li> McCarthy—Blood Meridian</li>
<li> McCarthy—The Road</li>
<li> McEwan—Atonement </li>
<li> Melville—Bartleby the Scrivener</li>
<li> Melville—Billy Budd</li>
<li> Miller—The Crucible</li>
<li> Milton—Paradise Lost</li>
<li> Mitchell—Gone with the Wind</li>
<li> Mitford—The Pursuit of Love</li>
<li> Mori—Shizuko’s Daughter</li>
<li> Morrison—The Bluest Eye</li>
<li> Morrison—Love</li>
<li> Morrison—Paradise </li>
<li> Morrison—Song of Solomon</li>
<li> Morrison—Sula</li>
<li> Murakami—Kafka on the Shore</li>
<li> Murasaki—The Tale of Genji</li>
<li> Nabokov—Lolita</li>
<li> Nabokov—Pale Fire</li>
<li> Naipaul—A Bend in the River</li>
<li> Nietzsche—Beyond Good and Evil</li>
<li> Nietzsche—Thus Spoke Zarathustra</li>
<li> Niffenegger—The Time-Traveler’s Wife</li>
<li> O’Connor—Wise Blood</li>
<li> Orwell—1984</li>
<li> Orwell—Animal Farm</li>
<li> Paton—Cry, the Beloved Country</li>
<li> Percy—The Moviegoer</li>
<li> Pilcher—The Shell Seekers</li>
<li> Plath—The Bell Jar</li>
<li> Plato—The Republic</li>
<li> Plutarch—Caesar </li>
<li> Pottnoy—Complaint </li>
<li> Proust—In Search of Lost Time</li>
<li> Proust—Remembrance of Things Past</li>
<li> Proust—Swann’s Way</li>
<li> Pullman—Northern Lights</li>
<li> Pynchon—Gravity’s Rainbow</li>
<li> Rand—Atlas Shrugged</li>
<li> Rand—The Fountainhead</li>
<li> Rawlings—The Yearling</li>
<li> Remarque—All Quiet on the Western Front</li>
<li> Rhys—Wide Sargasso Sea</li>
<li> Richardson—Clarissa</li>
<li> Robinson—Housekeeping</li>
<li> Roth—American Pastoral</li>
<li> Rushdie—Haroun and the Sea of Stories</li>
<li> Salinger—The Catcher in the Rye</li>
<li> Sartre—No Exit</li>
<li> Scott—Ivanhoe</li>
<li> Sebald—Austerlitz </li>
<li> Sebold—The Lovely Bones</li>
<li> Shaara—Killer Angels</li>
<li> Shaw—Pygmalion </li>
<li> Shute—A Town Like Alice</li>
<li> Shute—On the Beach</li>
<li> Smollett—The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker</li>
<li> Solzhenitsyn—One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch </li>
<li> Sophocles—Antigone</li>
<li> Sophocles—Oedipus at Colonus</li>
<li> Sophocles—Philoctetes </li>
<li> Spark—The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie</li>
<li> Spenser—The Faerie Queene</li>
<li> Steinbeck—East of Eden</li>
<li> Steinbeck—Of Mice and Men</li>
<li> Steinbeck—The Pearl</li>
<li> Stendhal—The Charterhouse of Parma</li>
<li> Sterne—Tristram Shandy</li>
<li> Stevenson—Treasure Island</li>
<li> St. Exupery—The Little Prince</li>
<li> Stoker—Dracula</li>
<li> Stowe—Uncle Tom’s Cabin</li>
<li> Styron—Sophie’s Choice</li>
<li> Swift—Gulliver’s Travels</li>
<li> Taylor—Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont</li>
<li> Thackeray—Vanity Fair</li>
<li> Tolstoy—War and Peace</li>
<li> Toole—A Confederacy of Dunces</li>
<li> Trollope—The Way We Live Now</li>
<li> Twain—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</li>
<li> Twain—Puddn’head Wilson</li>
<li> Updike—Rabbit Run</li>
<li> Virgil—The Aeneid</li>
<li> Voltaire—Candide</li>
<li> Vonnegut—Slaughterhouse Five</li>
<li> Walker—The Color Purple</li>
<li> Waugh—Brideshead Revisited</li>
<li> Waugh—Scoop </li>
<li> Weisel—Night</li>
<li> Wells—The Time Machine</li>
<li> Wells—War of the Worlds</li>
<li> Wharton—The Age of Innocence</li>
<li> Wharton—Ethan Frome</li>
<li> Wharton—The House of Mirth</li>
<li> Whitman—Leaves of Grass</li>
<li> Wilde—The Picture of Dorian Gray</li>
<li> Wilder—Our Town</li>
<li> Wilson—The Story of Tracy Beaker</li>
<li> Wodehouse—Right Ho Jeeves</li>
<li> Woolf—Mrs. Dalloway</li>
<li> Woolf—To the Lighthouse</li>
<li> Wright—Native Son</li>
</ol>

<p>Oh, and another addition I forgot to include: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows...that's a given, so I forgot to even count it...I'm one of the freaks that dresses up at midnight to go and get it</p>

<p>Oh, yeah, I also did not include anything I know I'm supposed to read next year or that I've already read....hope you can find this useful!</p>

9

<p>thank you for including graham greene!!!!!</p>

10

<p>is that list for this summer? or every summer until youre 135 yrs old?</p>

11

<p>Some miscellaneous comments: </p>

<p>If you're reading Vonnegut, I reccommend Cat's Cradle in addition to Slaughterhouse-Five. </p>

<p>A Clockwork Orange is pretty good too. That's what I'm reading right now. </p>

<p>1984 was good, but I haven't read Animal Farm yet. In Cold Blood was absorbing. Kafka is... kafka. He's an interesting writer. I've read the Metamorphosis. Poor Gregor. I like Hemingway's prose, but I've only read A Farewell to Arms so far. Ayn Rand is amazing. </p>

<p>It's an ambitious list for just one summer. Best of luck.</p>

12

<p>the great gatsby is good. fitzgerald</p>

13

<p>Tuesdays With Morrie</p>

14

<p>The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, as something that's very quick and ENJOYABLE to read. I'm reading Dorian Gray right now but my all time favorite book is The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence. It's not for the faint of heart. The Life of Pi is also very nice reading.</p>

<p>An aside - read because you want to and you enjoy reading, not to say, "I've read <insert title="" here="">" or other reasons. Trust the people you like. I had a friend's mom suggest a funny novel about time travel and I read it and loved it, even though I never would have picked it up otherwise. Reading based on online lists is like buying a record based on critics' reviews and the Billboard chart (New York Times Best...). Be your own critic!</insert></p>

15

<p>"Memoirs of a Geisha" by Arthur Golden</p>

16

<p>Re: Wodehouse. I never did like the Jeeves books though, try reading the Psmith volumes or Blandings for perhaps a better example of the true Wodehouse!
In addition to what you have, I'd recommend Vikram Seth's "The Golden Gate" (a beautiful novel in verse); if you like Science Fiction, then Clarke (Rama) or Herbert (Dune), would be a better read than I, Robot. Some of Asimov's other books are worth reading as well.</p>

<p>Judging by the books you've listed, try "The Dispossessed" by Ursula Le Guin, a brilliant book that can be read on many levels.</p>

<p>"The World is Flat"'s also a goodish book to read; although you might already know/understand much of what's written in it.</p>

<p>All in all, a very good list, sounds like the sort of thing I'd love to do if I had access to all of these books :).</p>

17

<p>I second Tuesdays with Morrie. Also:</p>

<p>The Unbearable Lightness of Being
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Prep<a href="haha,%20don't%20judge%20me">/b</a>
**The Secret Life of Bees
On The Road by Kerouac</p>

<p>I'm also thinking about picking up Life of Pi....</p>

18

<p>The Foundation Series -- Asimov</p>

<p>
[quote]
219. Rand—Atlas Shrugged
220. Rand—The Fountainhead

[/quote]
=] We the Living is also good.</p>

<p>The Moviegoer -- Walker Percy</p>

<p>The Perks of Being a Wallflower -- Stephen Chbosky</p>