Achebe, Chinua. A Man of the People. Arrow of God. Things Fall Apart.
Adeyemi, Tomi. Children of Blood and Bone.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. Half of a Yellow Sun. Purple
Hibiscus.
Adiga, Aravind. White Tiger.
Agbabi, Patience. Telling Tales.
Albee, Edward. The American Dream. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The Zoo Story.
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Men. Little Women.
Alexie, Sherman. Reservation Blues.
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise).
Allende, Isabel. House of the Spirits.
Alvarez, Julia. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. In the Time of
the Butterflies.
Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima.
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Anonymous. Beowulf.
Anonymous. The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Anonymous. Everyman.
Aristophanes. Lysistrata.
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. The Blind Assassin. Cat’s Eye.
Handmaid’s Tale. Testament.
Austen, Jane. Emma. Mansfield Park. Northanger Abbey. Pride and Prejudice.
Sense and Sensibility.
Baldwin, James. Another Country. Giovanni’s Room. Go Tell It on the
Mountain.
Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones). Dutchman.
Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse.
Barthelme, Donald. Snow White. The Dead Father.
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot.
Bellow, Saul. Henderson the Rain King.
Berendt, John. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Bolt, Robert. A Man for All Seasons.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths.
Bradbury, Ray. Dandelion Wine. Fahrenheit 451. Martian Chronciles.
Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Bradley, Marion Zimmer. The Mists of Avalon.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights.
Brown, Rita Mae. Rubyfruit Jungle.
Bryson, Bill. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.
Buck, Pearl. The Good Earth.
Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress.
Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange.
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden.
Butler, Octavia. Kindred.
Camus, Albert. The Plague. The Stranger.
Cao, Lan. Monkey Bridge.
Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In Cold Blood.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Through the Looking-Glass.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.
Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. My Ántonia. O Pioneers!
Cela, Camilo José. The Family of Pascual Duarte.
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales.
Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening.
Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street.
Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. The Ox-Bow Incident.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Water Dancer.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Collodi, Carlo. The Adventures of Pinocchio.
Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. The Heart of Darkness.
Cortázar, Julio. Hopscotch.
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions.
Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. The Farming of Bones.
Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. Robinson Crusoe.
Desai, Anita. The Fire on the Mountain.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.
Dìaz, Junot. The Brief Windrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. A Christmas Carol. David Copperfield.
Great Expectations. Hard Times. NicholasNickleby. Oliver Twist.
A Tale of Two Cities.
Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Dimaline, Cherie. The Marrow Thieves.
Dinesen, Isak. Out of Africa.
Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. One Amazing Thing. Sister of My Heart.
Doctorow, E. L. Ragtime.
Doerr, Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See. Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Dorris, Michael. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
Dostoevsky, Feodor. Crime and Punishment.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie.
du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca.
Dumas, Alexander. The Count of Monte Cristo. The Three Musketeers.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. The Mill on the Floss. Silas Marner.
Eliot, T. S. Murder in the Cathedral.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Juneteenth. Shadow and Act.
Erdrich, Louise. The Beet Queen. Love Medicine. The Night Watchman.
The Round House. Tracks.
Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate.
Euripides. Medea.
Everett, Percival. Erasure. James.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! As I Lay Dying. The Light in
August. The Sound and the Fury.
Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Tender Is the Night. This Side of
Paradise.
Flagg, Fannie. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary.
Forster, E. M. Howard’s End. A Passage to India.A Room with a View.
Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature like a Professor.
Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl.
Friel, Brian. Dancing at Lughnasa.
Fugard, Athol. Master Harold…and the Boys.
Fuller, Charles. A Soldier’s Play.
Gaines, Ernest. A Gathering of Old Men. A Lesson Before Dying.
Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban.
Gardner, John. Grendel.
Garmus, Bonnie. Lessons in Chemistry.
Ghali, Waguih. Beer in the Snooker Club.
Glancy, Diane. Pushing the Bear.
Glaspell, Susan. Trifles.
Goodall, Jane. In the Shadow of Man.
Golden, Arthur. Memoirs of a Geisha.
Golding, William. The Lord of the Flies.
Goldman, William. The Princess Bride.
Green, John. The Anthropocene Reviewed.
Greene, Graham. Brighton Rock. The Heart of the Matter.
Guest, Judith. Ordinary People.
Gyasi, Yaa. Homegoing.
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Hale, Janet Campbell. Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter. The
Jailing of Cecelia Capture.
Hami, Mohsi. Exit West.
Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun.
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. The Mayor of Casterbridge. The
Return of the Native. Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
Harris, Thomas. Red Dragon. The Silence of the Lambs.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of Seven Gables. The Scarlet Letter.
Heinlein, Robert. Starship Troopers. Stranger in a Strange Land.
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22.
Hellman, Lilian. The Little Foxes. Watch on the Rhine.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. In Our Time. The Old Man and
the Sea. The Sun Also Rises.
Herrera, Yuri. Signs Preceding the End of the World.
Herriot, James. All Creatures Great and Small.
Herbert, Frank. Dune.
Hersey, John. Hiroshima.
Hesse, Herman. Demian. Siddhartha. Steppenwolf.
Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Hilton, James. The Lost Horizon.
Hinton, S. E. The Outsiders.
Hogan, Linda. Power.
Hokeah, Oscar. Calling for a Blanket Dance.
Homer. The Iliad. The Odyssey.
Honeyman. Gail. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.
Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. A Thousand Splendid Suns.
Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Les Misérables.
Howe, LeeAnne. Shell Shaker.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Huxley, Aldous. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Brave New World.
Brave New World Revisited.
Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll House. An Enemy of the People. Ghosts. Hedda
Gabler.
Irving, John. A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. The Remains of the Day.
James, Henry. Daisy Miller. The Portrait of a Lady. The Turn of the Screw.
Jen, Gish. Typical American.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. Ulysses. Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis.
Kawabataq, Yusunari. The Old Capital. Snow Country. Thousand Cranes.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Keyes, Daniel. Flowers for Algernon.
Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy.
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Bean Trees. Demon Copperhead. High Tide in
Tucson. Poisonwood Bible. Small Wonder.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. China Men. The Woman Warrior.
Kinsella, W. P. Shoeless Joe.
Knowles, John. A Separate Peace.
Kogawa, Joy. Obasan.
Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild.
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Lagerkvist, Pär. Barabbas.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake.
Lalami, Laila. The Other Americans: A Novel.
Larsen, Nella. Passing.
Larson, Erik. The Devil in the White City.
Lawrence, D. H. Sons and Lovers. St. Mawr. The Rainbow.
Lawrence, Jerome and R. L. Lee. Inherit the Wind.
Lee, Chang-Ree. A Gesture Life. Native Speaker.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lee, Min Jin. Pachinko.
Le Guin, Ursula. The Left Hand of Darkness.
London, Jack. The Call of the Wild.
Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince.
MacLeish, Archibald. J.B.
Malamud, Bernard. The Natural.
Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur.
Manzoni, Alessandro. The Betrothed.
Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. The Jew of Malta.
Tamburlaine the Great.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Love in the Time
of Cholera. One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. Daughters. Praisesong for the
Widow.
Mathabane, Mark. Kaffir Boy.
Mathews, John Joseph. Sundown.
McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. The Crossing. No Country for
Old Men. The Road.
McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes.
McCullers, Carson. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
McEwan, Ian. Atonement.
McMurtry, Larry. The Last Picture Show. Lonesome Dove.
Melville, Herman. Benito Cereno. Billy Budd. Moby Dick. Typhoo.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. The Crucible.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost.
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind.
Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn.
Moore, Christopher. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s
Childhood Pal.
More, Sir Thomas. Utopia.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. The Bluest Eye. The Song of Solomon. Sula.
Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita.
Naipul, V. S. A Bend in the River. A House for Mr. Biswas. Middle
Passage.
Narayan, R. K. The English Teacher.
Naylor, Gloria. Linden Hills. Mama Day. The Women of Brewster Place.
Neruda, Pablo. Memoirs.
Ng, Celeste. Everything I Never Told You. Little Fires Everywhere.
Ng, Fae M. Bone: A Novel.
Oates, Joyce Carol. We Were the Mulvaneys.
Obama, Michelle. Becoming.
O’Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato. The Things They Carried.
O’Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood.
Okada, John. No-No Boy.
O’Neill, Eugene. The Iceman Cometh. Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter. The English Patient.
Orange, Tommy. There, There. Wandering Stars.
Orwell, George. 1984. Animal Farm.
Owens, Delia. Where the Crawdads Sing.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club.
Pan, Emily X. R. The Astonishing Color of After.
Pasternak, Boris. Dr. Zhivago.
Patchett, Ann. Bel Canto.
Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country. Too Late the Phalarope.
Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell-Jar.
Plato. The Republic.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. V.
Rand, Ayn. Anthem. The Fountainhead.
Reed, Ishmael. The Last Days of Louisiana Red. Yellow Back Radio
Broke-Down.
Remarque, Eric Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front.
Renault, Mary. The King Must Die.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea.
Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory.
Ronyoung, Kim. Clay Walls.
Rose, Reginald. Twelve Angry Men.
Rostand, Edmond. Cyrano de Bergerac.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things.
Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Paramo.
Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad.
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. The Little Prince.
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye.
Saroyan, William. The Human Comedy.
Sartre, John Paul. No Exit.
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood.
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.
Scott, Paul. The Raj Quartet (The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the
Scorpion. The Towers of Silence. A Division of the Spoils).
Scott, Sir Walter. Ivanhoe.
See, Lisa. Snow Flower and and the Secret Fan.
Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. King Lear. Macbeth. Merchant of Venice.
Othello. Taming of the Shrew. The Tempest.
Shamsie, Kamila. Home Fire.
Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. Saint Joan.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein.
Shepard, Sam. True West.
Shute, Nevil. A Town Like Alice. On the Beach.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony.
Silverstein, Shel. The Giving Tree. Where the Sidewalk Ends.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle.
Singer, Isaac Bashevis. Shosha. The Penitent.
Smith, Zadie. White Teeth.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Sophocles. Antigone. Oedipus Rex.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.
Standage, Tom. The History of the World in Six Glasses.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. Of Mice and Men. Travels with
Charley.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels.
Tan, Amy. The Bonesetter’s Daughter. The Joy Luck Club.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.
Toews, Miriam. Women Talking.
Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. The Death of Ivan Ilych.
Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces.
Toomer, Jean. Cane.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Life on the Mississippi.
Pudd'head Wilson. Roughin’ It. Tom Sawyer.
Tzu, Sun. The Art of War.
Valdez, Luis. Los Vendidos. Zoot Suit.
Voltaire. Candide.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five.
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. In Search of Our Mother's Gardens.
Meridian.
Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle.
Ward, Jesmyn. Salvage the Bones. Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Waters, Frank. The Man Who Killed the Deer.
Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief. The Loved One. Scoop.
Welch, James. Winter in the Blood.
Wharton, Edith. Age of Innocence. Ethan Frome. House of Mirth. Summer.
White, T. H. The Once and Future King.
Whitehead, Colson. Crook Manifesto. Harlem Shuffle. Nickel Boys.
The Underground Railroad.
Wiesel, Elie. The Fifth Son. Night.
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. The Picture of Dorian
Gray.
Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Our Town.
Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. A Streetcar Named Desire.
The Glass Menagerie.
Wilson, August. Fences. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The Piano Lesson.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. To the Lighhthouse.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy. Native Son.
Yoshimoto, Banana. Kitchen.

I have worked on this list for more than forty years. As I discover new authors I love, I am often tempted to go back and delete older works which have lost some of their charm. Yet, I could not love Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, if I had not first loved Jane Eyre by Charotte Brontë. Certainly most of my new favorites don’t have such a direct connection to earlier works, but all my favorites are somehow interconnected. There are titles on here I do not like, that I read gritting my teeth -- that does not make them less valuable. This is also certainly not a recommended list for Advanced Placement® courses or for college entrance reading -- just books I found worthwhile and still love well. (15 December 2024)