Classic Books

Passing along this meme from Tiny Little Librarian. The titles in bold are the ones I have read. I'll let you come to your own conclusions about what this says regarding my public school education and very expensive, small, private liberal arts college degree. And this is coming from someone who loves to read and took extra literature classes in college as my electives. However, I do remember that some of the other English classes in high school having to read The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, so these books were taught in the Baltimore County public school system, just not in the classes I was taking.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice (No, but Emma. This is actually next on my Project Gutenberg reading list.)
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre (I wrote my high school senior English term paper on this)
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
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 (I vaguely remember reading sections of this for a unit in H.S.)
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (H.S. required reading was Great Expectations instead.)
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 (college)
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 (H.S. and college. We were reading this in H.S. when the version of the movie starring Balthazar Getty came out.)
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 (I seem to remember spending a lot of time on both of these in H.S.)
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 (college)
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird (H.S.)
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild (H.S.)
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener (Actually reading this is questionable, however, I do distinctly remember watching the movie of this, featuring a v. young Barry "Greg Brady" Williams as one of the office assistants. I would prefer not to.)
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick (No, but I had to read Billy Budd in both H.S. and college)
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible (H.S.)
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find (Another H.S. term paper topic)
O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm (H.S. and college)
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar (read on my own while in college)
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales (Poe was big in Maryland schools. We read different stories every year.)
Proust, Marcel - Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front (H.S.)
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye (also read on my own in college)
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet (As well as Julius Caesar for us in H.S.)
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein (college)
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex (H.S.)
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath (No, but The Red Pony and The Pearl. And I read East of Eden on my own pre-Oprah.)
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin (just read this on my own last year)
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels (college)
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David – Walden (college)
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (H.S. and college. And Tom Sawyer, too.)
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five (No, but I read Cat’s Cradle in college.)
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories (No, but I have read Delta Wedding.)
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass (college)
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son