Feb 05 2009
High School Reading List
I’ve posted this once before on one of my previous blogs… but it’s worth posting again. Some time back I was in the process of applying to a Graduate school’s English program, and I noticed that they had a recommended list of reading you were supposed to have completed before enrolling in the undergraduate English program (i.e. in High School.) As an exercise, why not check and see if you are ready to enroll in a undergraduate level English course by crossing off the materials below that you’ve already read? (Um. I’m apparently almost ready.)
Just to be all open and above-board, I’ll mark the ones I’ve already read with a smiley face.
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READING LIST: HIGH SCHOOL
Fiction
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
Cather, Willa. My Antonia or Death Comes to the Archbishop (I read “O Pioneers!” which evidently wasn’t important enough for the list)
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. Some Sherlock Holmes stories
Eliot, George. Silas Marner (again, I missed out: I read “Middlemarch” instead)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby
Golding, William. Lord of the Flies (I refuse to ever read this book)
Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun
Harte, Bret. “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” “Tennessee’s Partner”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter, “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms (I read “A Moveable Feast” instead)
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World
Irving, Washington. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “Rip Van Winkle”
London, Jack. The Call of the Wild
Maugham, Somerset. Of Human Bondage
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Benito Cereno
Orwell, George. Animal Farm
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Cask of Amontillado”
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye
Scott, Sir Walter. A novel (Waverly, Rob Roy), Ivanhoe
Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men or The Pearl
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island, Kidnapped or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Twain, Mark. Tom Sawyer or The Prince and the Pauper
Wells, H.G. War of the Worlds or The Time Machine
Wright, Richard. Black Boy
Poetry
Arnold, Matthew. “DoverBeach”
Browning, Robert. “My Last Duchess”
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
de la Mare, Walter. “The Listeners”
Dickinson, Emily. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” “I Like to See It Lap the Miles”
FitzGerald, Edward. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Frost, Robert. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Birches”
Gray, Thomas. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Housman, A.E. “To an Athlete Dying Young,” “When I Was One and Twenty”
Hunt, Leigh. “Abou Ben Adhem”
Keats, John. “Eve of St. Agnes,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “To Autumn”
Kipling, Rudyard. “A Ballad of East and West,” “Mandalay”
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. “The Village Blacksmith,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” The Song of Hiawatha
Marvell, Andrew. “To His Coy Mistress”
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Raven,” “The Bells,” “Annabel Lee,” “To Helen”
Sandburg, Carl. “Chicago,” “Grass”
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ozymandias”
Tennyson, Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Crossing the Bar”
Whitman, Walt. “I Hear America Singing,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
Wordsworth, William. “My Heart Leaps Up,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
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Well, that’s the list. I’m contemplating now whether I should embarrass myself by showing how well I scored on the list of books you’re supposed to have read before enrolling in a graduate level course. — Mrs. Hall
