Lifetime Reading List
Mr. Malmed
Eagle Rock High School
This is a selection of literature that I recommend having read them through
middle school, high school, graduate school, and beyond for both work and pleasure.
I’ve included all titles that are worth experiencing because I think they are
important. It’s just good for your mind and soul to be always reading. In our age of
ever emerging distractions, there is universal benefit in cutting through the noise
and focusing on sustained works by accomplished authors. This list is by no means
exhaustive as there are hundreds of titles I ought to include but either still haven’t
read them yet or have simply forgotten to include them. It’s still a work in progress.
But what I have completed I leave for you. Enjoy!
Acehebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart
Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid’s Tale
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Sense and Sensibility
Baldwin, James: Go Tell it on the Mountain, Sonny’s Blues (short story)
Balzac, Honore de: Pére Goriot
Barnes, Djuna: Nightwood
Barnes, Julian: Talking It Over, Love, Etc., The Sense of an Ending
Bellow, Saul: The Adventures of Augie March, Humboldt’s Gift
Borges, Jorge Luis: Borges and I (short story), Labyrinths (collection of short stories
and essays)
Bowles, Paul: The Sheltering Sky
Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights
Bunyan, John: The Pilgrim’s Progress
Byatt, A.S.: Possession
Calvino, Italo: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Camus, Albert: The Stranger
Capote, Truman: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Carroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
Carter, Angela: Wise Children
Carver, Raymond: short stories
Cather, Willa: My Antonia
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote
Chabon, Michael: Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, the Amazing Adventures of
Cavalier and Clay
Cheever, John: short stories
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening
Cisneros, Sandra: House on Mango Street
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fennimore: Last of the Mohicans, The Pioneers
Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders
DeLillo, Don: White Noise, Underworld
Diaz, Junot: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities
Doctorow, E.L.,: Ragtime
Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot
Dreiser, Theodore: An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie
Egan, Jennifer: A Visit From the Goon Squad
Eggers, Dave: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Circle
Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man
Eliot, George: Middlemarch
Faulkner, William: Go Down Moses, Light in August, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the
Fury, The Wild Palms, Absalom, Absalom!
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
Foer, Jonathan Safran: Everything is Illuminated
Ford, Richard: The Sportswriter, Independence Day, short stories
Forster, E.M.: A Passage to India
Franzen, Jonathan: The Corrections
Garland, Alex: The Beach
Golding, William: Lord of the Flies
Greene Graham: The Quiet American, The End of the Affair
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlett Letter, Young Goodman Brown
Heller, Joseph: Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest: The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms,
For Whom The Bell Tolls, short stories
Hornby, Nick: About a Boy, High Fidelity
Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Alduous: Brave New World
James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady
Joyce, James: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegan’s
Wake
Kafka, Franz: The Trial, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony
Kingsolver, Barbara: The Poisonwood Bible
Kingston, Maxine Hong: The Woman Warrior
Knowles, John: A Separate Peace
Koestler, Arthur: Darkness at Noon
Kundera, Milan: Immortality, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Lagerkvist, Pär: The Dwarf
Lawrence, D.H.: The Fox, Sons and Lovers
Lebowitz, Fran: Metropolitan Life
Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, C.S.: Chronicles of Narnia
Mailer, Norman: The Naked and the Dead
Malamud, Bernard: The Natural, short stories
Mann, Thomas: Death in Venice
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera,
Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
Martin, George R. R.: A Song of Ice and Fire (the series that includes The Game of
Thrones as its first book)
Maugham, W Somerset: Of Human Bondage
Maupassant, Guy de: short stories
McCarthy, Cormac: The Road
McCourt, Frank: Angela’s Ashes, Teacher Man
Melville, Herman: Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener
Miller, Henry: Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn
Morrison, Toni: Song of Solomon, Sula, The Bluest Eye, Beloved
Munro, Alice: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Too Much Happiness
Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita
Oates, Joyce Carol: short stories
O’Brien, Tim: The Things They Carried
O’Connor, Flannery: short stories
Orwell, George: Animal Farm, 1984, essays
Parks, Gordon: The Learning Tree
Paton, Alan: Cry the Beloved Country
Pirsig, Robert: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Poe, Edgar Allan: short stories
Potok, Chaim: The Chosen
Proust, Marcel: Remembrance of Things Past
Puig, Manuel: Kiss of the Spider Woman
Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49
Renault, Mary: The King Must Die
Robbins, Tom: Jitterbug Perfume
Rodrigez, Luis: Always Running
Roth, Philip: Portnoy’s Complaint, Zuckerman Bound, When She Was Good, Goodbye
Columbus
Rushdie, Salman: Midnight’s Children, Shame
Salinger, J.D.: The Catcher in the Rye, short stories
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein
Sinclair, Upton: The Jungle
Smith, Betty: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Stegner, Wallace: Angle of Repose
Steinbeck, John: East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl
Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels
Tan, Amy: The Joy Luck Club
Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair
Tolkien, J.R.R.: The Lord of the Rings (trilogy), The Hobbit
Toole, John Kennedy: A Confederacy of Dunces
Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer
Updike, John: The Centaur, Rabbit, Run, Rabbit is Rich
Voltaire: Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse Five
Warren, Robert Penn: All the King’s Men
Welty, Eudora: short stories
Wharton, Edith: Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence
Wiesel, Elie: Night
Wolfe, Thomas: Look Homeward Angel
Woolf, Viginia: To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard: Native Son