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AP Lit Reading List – 50 Best Books to Read
November 16, 2023
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The AP English Literature and Composition exam is made up of two sections: a
multiple-choice section and a free-response section. Firstly, in the multiple-choice
section, students answer questions pertaining to passages of fiction, drama, or
poetry. Next, in the free-response section, students analyze poetry and prose and
write an argumentative essay centered on a text of their own choice or chosen from a
list of 40 literary works. The problem for students preparing for the test is that there is
no official AP lit reading list. Oedipus, Lady Macbeth, Madame Bovary, Mrs. Dalloway,
Scout Finch, Huck Finn—all of them, plus hundreds more plucked from the pages of
the literary canon, are liable to pop up on the AP Lit exam. That’s daunting.
So how exactly does one prep for this test, especially given the fact that there’s no
authoritative AP Lit reading list to consult? Also, if a student wants to write their
argumentative essay on a book not named on the test, how are they supposed to
know which books are AP exam-worthy?
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Luckily, by taking a look at AP Lit exams of years past, we can get a sense of which
works are likelier than others to make an appearance. And we can get a sense for
what the College Board considers exam-worthy. In other words: relax—you don’t have
to slog through the entire oeuvres of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin et al. Below, I’ve
compiled a totally unofficial AP Lit reading list—the 50 books that appeared most
frequently on the exam since 1971.
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1) Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison’s classic kicks off this unofficial AP Lit reading list. If my count is correct,
it’s appeared on the AP Lit exam 28 times. And that sounds about right: I don’t think
any scholar of literature—American or otherwise—would raise an eyebrow if you
argued that Invisible Man is the most important American novel of the 20th century.
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Published in 1952, Invisible Man is a deep dive into the mind of its unnamed narrator,
a Black man coming to terms with his identity in a white society that refuses to see
him. I’ll always be thankful that my 11th-grade American Lit teacher assigned this
book. It’s mesmerizing, violent, honest, devastating, cathartic…it wouldn’t be very
difficult to keep the list of superlatives going.
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2) Wuthering Heights ­– Emily Brontë
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As you go about preparing for the AP Lit exam, it’s probably productive to keep the
following question(s) in mind: why has such-and-such book come up on the test so
often? In other words: what makes such-and-such book a classic? It’s not an easy
question to answer. And I find that to be especially true here, thinking about
Wuthering Heights. Is it considered a classic today because it’s an early example of
psychological realism? Because of its depiction of abuse? Because it bucked the
Victorian status quo?
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The answer to all three of those questions is probably a decisive “yes, and…” What’s
fascinating to me about Wuthering Heights is how emotionally turbulent the story is—
and how emotionally turbulent it can be for the reader, too. Finally, Wuthering Heights
has appeared on the AP Lit exam 23 times in total, making it the second most cited
book in the test’s history.
3) Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Great Expectations has appeared on the AP Lit exam 20 times. Whenever I hear the
word “Dickensian,” I don’t think of Oliver Twist or David Copperfield; I think of Pip
Pirrip, Miss Havisham and co. Great Expectations is the ultimate Dickensian drama:
romance, social class, 19th century London, good versus evil—it’s all there.
Additionally, two other Dickens epics are amongst the top 50 most cited books on the
AP Lit exam: Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities have appeared 5 times each.
4) Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Drawing inspiration from his experience working for a Belgian trading company in
what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness is an exploration of the hypocrisies and horrors of imperialism. The novella
has been on the AP Lit exam 18 times, and for good reason—the story asks important
questions about morality, power, and racial subjugation, and the book itself can be
critiqued for how it objectifies and exoticizes Africans.
5) Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre, the eldest Brontë sister’s classic, has made the AP Lit exam 18 times. It’s a
first-person-narrated Bildungsroman in which the reader gets access to the rich inner
world of the book’s eponymous narrator. We witness Jane’s moral and spiritual
development, her transition from childhood to adulthood, and her budding romance
with Mr. Rochester. Further, the psychological intimacy of the prose has made Jane
Eyre an enduring classic.
AP Lit Reading List (Continued)
6) King Lear – William Shakespeare
Having appeared on the AP Lit exam 17 times, King Lear is the Shakespeare work
most well represented on the test to date. The tragedy is set into motion when King
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Lear decides to split his kingdom among his three daughters and in the process
disowns his youngest, Cordelia. Concurrently, the play deals with themes of betrayal,
self-deception, justice, and nihilism.
King Lear is a great place to start if you want to make sure you’ve got at least one of
your Shakespeare bases covered. But, let’s be real, it’d probably behoove AP Lit test
takers to have read a few more of the Bard’s greatest hits. Othello has been on the
test 10 times; The Tempest, 7 times; The Merchant of Venice, 6; Hamlet and Macbeth,
5 times each.
7) Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Hey, it’s one of those Russian tomes I mentioned in the intro! Crime and Punishment
has made the test 17 times, so if you’ve got to choose amongst the masterworks of
the Russian heavy hitters, it’s not a bad bet. Published in 1866, Crime and
Punishment is the inner monologue of a moral dilemma: Raskolnikov rationalizes his
way to murder and then has to deal with the consequences—both legal and psychic.
8) Moby Dick – Herman Melville
I’ll admit it: I haven’t read Moby Dick. I’ve tried, but I’ve never been able to get
beyond the first 50 or so pages. It’s dense and difficult and requires a serious
investment of mental energy. But I’ve never doubted that it’s worth it, and I still like
to think that someday I’ll clear my schedule for a week or two and finish the thing
once and for all. As much as I cringe at the label, it is one of those Great American
Novels. In other words: the story of American literature is much more than Moby Dick,
but you can’t tell the story of American literature without Ishmael, Ahab, and that
elusive whale.
So what can readers get out of it? It’s a meditation on America. But it’s also a
meditation on narrative, on how stories can be told, on style, language, allusion,
symbolism, and much more. Moby Dick has been on the AP Lit exam a total of 15
times.
9) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James
Joyce
The Joyce work that in some ways is the prelude to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the story of Joyce’s fictional alter ego Stephen
Dedalus and his struggle against prevailing Catholic and Irish conventions. It’s
appeared on the AP Lit exam 14 times. Consequently, this should make it a fixture of
any AP Lit reading list. Further, it’s a great example of a Künstlerroman, a story about
an artist’s maturation.
10) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Twain’s 1884 classic has appeared on the AP Lit exam 14 times and is frequently cited
as one of those aforementioned Great American Novels. Why? For starters, it was one
of the first examples of American Literature to be written in a slangy, regional
vernacular. It’s also full of humor, and it often satirizes the antebellum South and
American racism in general. But that’s not to say that Huckleberry Finn doesn’t come
without baggage. Even though Huck Finn and the attitude of the book can be read as
anti-racist, Twain’s use of racial stereotypes and epithets is worth questioning and
criticizing.
AP Lit Reading List (Continued)
11) Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
Catch-22, coming in at 14 appearances on the AP Lit exam, might be my personal
favorite on this entire list. It’s known as a brutal satire of the American WWII war
effort. And it certainly is a satire—a masterful satire. The caricature, the wordplay, the
paradox—at a certain point in reading Catch-22, you just have to sit back and admire
Heller’s virtuosity. But the book isn’t reducible to Heller’s chops. In fact, his
command of humor makes his depiction of war—the horrors of war—that much more
devastating.
12) Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale
Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God is a classic and influential love story published in 1937.
Of course, it’s much more than a love story—it’s an exploration of gender roles, the
enduring effects of racism, and, above all, it’s the story of protagonist Janie
Crawford’s search for her own voice and identity. In terms of how to see the novel
within the context of American literature, it’s often cited as a classic of the Harlem
Renaissance and African-American Literature. And while it is important to see it as a
part of those lineages, Their Eyes Were Watching God is just as much a candidate for
being the Great American Novel as is Moby Dick or Huck Finn. Lastly, it’s appeared on
the AP Lit exam 13 times.
AP Lit Reading List (Continued)
13) The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne (13 appearances)
14) The Awakening – Kate Chopin (12)
15) The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (12)
16) Billy Budd – Herman Melville (11)
17) Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko (11)
18) Light in August – William Faulkner (11)
19) Antigone – Sophocles (10)
20) As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner (10)
AP Lit Reading List (Continued)
21) Beloved – Toni Morrison (10)
22) The Color Purple – Alice Walker (10)
23) The Glass Menagerie – Tennessee Williams (10)
24) Native Son – Richard Wright (10)
25) Othello – William Shakespeare (10)
26) A Streetcar Named Desire – Tennessee Williams (10)
27) Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller (9)
28) A Passage to India – E.M. Forster (9)
29) A Raisin in the Sun – Lorraine Hansberry (9)
30) All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy (8)
AP Lit Reading List (Continued)
31) Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (8)
32) Bless Me, Ultima – Rudolfo Anaya (8)
33) Candide – Voltaire (8)
34) The Crucible – Arthur Miller (8)
35) The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (8)
36) Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy (8)
37) The Jungle – Upton Sinclair (8)
38) Portrait of a Lady – Henry James (8)
39) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Tom Stoppard (8)
40) Sula – Toni Morrison (8)
AP Lit Reading List (Continued)
41) Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett (8)
42) Pride and Prejudice ­– Jane Austen (7)
43) Madame Bovary ­Gustave Flaubert (7)
44) The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway (7)
45) Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (7)
46) Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton (6)
47) Frankenstein ­– Mary Shelley (5)
48) The Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov (5)
49) Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin (5)
50) Wise Blood ­– Flannery O’Connor (5)
AP Reading List – Additional Resources
In conclusion, if you are looking for additional high school literature resources, we
invite you to visit the High School Success section of the College Transitions blog.
Additionally, some relevant blogs that you may find interesting include:
▸ The Great Gatsby Themes & Analysis
▸ Great Gatsby Quotes about the American Dream
▸ Great Gatsby Quotes and Analysis
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Dane Gebauer
Dane Gebauer is a writer and teacher living in Miami, FL. He received his MFA
in fiction from Columbia University, and his writing has appeared in Complex
Magazine and Sinking City Review.
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