Independent Reading: Choose from a List of “Classics”
You will read one work of literature from this list by the due date (TBD). Be prepared to participate in an “inner circle”
discussion group. If you have an idea for a book that is not on this list, you must clear it with me. Parental approval is always
a must. Each book is coded with a certain number of *’s. The lower the number of *’s, the simpler the book. When you
choose a very simple book, you must be prepared to compensate for its simplicity with the complexity of your own ideas
about its literary value. A designation of + means that it is acceptable to read only selected parts of the book. A designation
of = means that it is acceptable to read the work over two sessions.
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Things Fall Apart
Letters
Watership Down
Emma
Mansfield Park
Northanger Abbey
Persuasion
Sense and Sensibility
Go Tell it on the Mountain
Pere Goriot
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
The Stranger
In Cold Blood
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
O, Pioneers!
Don Quixote
The Awakening
The Big Sleep
Their Finest Hour
The Inferno
The Moonstone
Heart of Darkness
The Last of the Mohicans
The Analects
The Open Boat
The Red Badge of Courage
The Descent of Man
Origin of the Species
Robinson Crusoe
Bleak House
David Copperfield
Great Expectations
Crime and Punishment
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The Souls of Black Folks
Invisible Man
Silas Marner
As I Lay Dying
The Sound and the Fury
The Great Gatsby
Tender is the Night
Madame Bovary
A Room with a View
Howard’s End
Civilization and its Discontents
Interpretations of Dreams
The Snow Goose
Autobiography
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Dead Souls
The Lord of the Flies
In the Shadow of Man
The Panda’s Thumb
Wind in the Willows
I, Claudius
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Jude the Obscure
Chinua Achebe
Abigail Adams
Richard Adams
Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen
James Baldwin
Honore de Balzac
Emily Bronte
Charlotte Bronte
Albert Camus
Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Willa Cather
Miguel de Cervantes
Kate Chopin
Raymond Chandler
Winston Churchill
Dante
Wilkie Collins
Joseph Conrad
James Fenimore Cooper
Confucius
Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Daniel Defoe
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
W.E.B. DuBois
Ralph Ellison
George Eliot
William Faulkner
William Faulkner
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gustave Flaubert
E.M. Forster
E.M. Forster
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Paul Gallico
Mohandas Gandhi
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Nicolai Gogol
William Golding
Jane Goodall
Stephen Jay Gould
Kenneth Grahame
Robert Grames
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
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59. Catch 22
60. The Old Man and the Sea
61. Siddhartha
62. Kon-Tiki
63. The Odyssey
64. The Iliad
65. Les Miserables
66. Their Eyes Were Watching God
67. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
68. The Metamorphosis
69. The Trial
70. Profiles in Courage
71. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
72. Tao-te Ching
73. The Call of the Wild
74. White Fang
75. The Prince
76. The Communist Manifesto
77. Autobiography
78. Moby Dick
79. Billy Budd
80. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
81. Essays
82. Beloved
83. Gone with the Wind
84. Lolita
85. The Scarlet Pimpernel
86. 1984
87. Doctor Zhavago
88. Cry, the Beloved Country
89. The Bell Jar
90. The Republic
91. Gargantua and Pantogruel
92. Anthem
93. The Fountainhead
94. All Quiet on the Western Front
95. How the Other Half Lives
96. Catcher in the Rye
97. No Exit
98. (play not used in English classes)
99. The Jungle
100. Frankenstein
101. The Agony and the Ecstasy
102. Dracula
103. Travels with Charley
104. The Grapes of Wrath
105. East of Eden
106. Gulag Archipelago
107. Uncle Tom’s Cabin
108. The Confessions of Nat Turner
109. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
110. The Hobbit
111. Anna Karenina
112. A Confederacy of Dunces
113. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
114. Exodus
115. Slaughterhouse Five
116. Candide
117. The Island of Dr. Moreau
118. The Time Machine
119. The Picture of Dorian Gray
120. Look Homeward, Angel
121. To the Lighthouse
122. The Caine Mutiny
123. Native Son
Joseph Heller
Ernest Hemingway
Herman Hesse
Thor Heyerdahl
Homer
Homer
Victor Hugo
Zora Neal Hurston
Harriet Jacobs
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Ken Kesey
Lao-tzu
Jack London
Jack London
Nicolo Machiavelli
Karl Marx
Malcolm X
Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Carson McCullers
Michel de Montaigne
Toni Morrison
Margaret Mitchell
Vladimir Nabokov
Emmuska Orszy
George Orwell
Boris Pasternak
Alan Paton
Sylvia Plath
Plato
Francois Rabelais
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
Erich Maria Remarque
Jacob Riis
J.D. Salinger
Jean Paul Sartre
William Shakespeare
Upton Sinclair
Mary Shelley
Irving Stone
Bram Stoker
John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Harriet Beecher Stowe
William Styron
Mildred Taylor
J.R.R. Tolkien
Leo Tolstoy
John K. O’Toole
Mark Twain
Leon Uris
Kurt Vonnegut
Voltaire
H.G. Wells
H.G. Wells
Oscar Wilde
Thomas Wolfe
Virginia Woolf
Herman Wouk
Richard Wright
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