Kirby's Reading Lists (so far!)
American Authors and Works
Colonial Period- Nonfiction
John Smith- The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles
William Bradford- Of Plymouth Plantation
Thomas Morton- The New English Canaan
William Byrd- Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia: and North Carolina
Ben Franklin- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Paine- The Crisis (all 16), The Rights of Man, The Age of Reason
Cotton Mather- Magnalia Christi Americana
J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur- Letters From an American Farmer
Mary Rowlandson- The History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson
Olaudah Equiano- The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, the African
Romantic Period-Fiction
Washington Irving- Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York from the Beginning of
the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, The Sketch Book ( a
collection of short stories, including “Rip Van Winkle” and “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow”)
James Fenimore Cooper- Any novel from the Leatherstocking Tales (Last of the
Mohicans, The Deerslayer, etc.)
Edgar Allan Poe- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Harriet Beecher Stowe- Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Louisa May Alcott- Little Women or Little Men
Herman Melville- Moby-Dick, Billy Budd ( I would suggest the Penguin Classic edition of Billy Budd with
an introduction by Fredrick Busch), Red Jacket, Typee, Omoo, The Confidence-Man,
Mardi, Pierre
Hugh Henry Brackenridge- Modern Chivalry Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and
Teague O'Reagan, His Servant
William Hill Brown- The Power of Sympathy (considered the first American novel by many)
Charles Brockden Brown- Wieland; or The Transformation; Edgar Huntly, Arthur
Mervyn
William Wells Brown- Clotel; or the President’s Daughter
Richard Henry Dana- Two Years Before the Mast
Nathaniel Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Bithedale
Romance, The Marble Faun
Romantic Period-Nonfiction
The Federalist Papers
Thomas Paine- The Rights of Man or The Age of Reason
Alexis (Charles Henri Maurice Clerel) de Tocqueville- Democracy in America
Ralph Waldo Emerson- His essays- must include these: “Self-Reliance,” “Nature,
“The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address,”
“The Over-Soul,” and “The Transcendentalist” (I would
recommend Penguin Classics Nature and Selected Essays by
Ralph Waldo Emerson with an introduction by Larzer Ziff)
Henry David Thoreau- Walden; or Life in the Woods
Margaret Fuller- Woman in the Nineteenth Century
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James Russell Lowell- The Writings of James Russell Lowell
Fredrick Douglass- Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass
Sojourner Truth- The Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Oliver Wendell Holmes- The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
Realism/Naturalism/Regionalism Period-Fiction
George Washington Cable- The Grandissimes, Old Creole Days: A Story of Creole Life (a collection of
short stories)
Bret Harte- any collection of his short stories
William Dean Howells- The Rise of Silas Lapham
Theodore Dreiser- An American Tragedy
Henry James-The American, Daisy Miller, The Europeans, Washington Square, The
Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Turn of the Screw, The Wings
of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl
Stephen Crane- The Red Badge of Courage or any collection of short stories
Sarah Orne Jewett- The Country of the Pointed Firs (actually a collection of connected short stories)
Mark Twain- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, The Gilded Age, The Tragedy of
Pudd'nhead Wilson
Jack London- The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, White Fang, Martin Eden, The Iron Heel
Frank Norris- McTeague, The Octopus, The Pit
Charlotte Perkins Gilman- Herland
Kate Chopin- At Fault, The Awakening
Hamlin Garland- Main-Traveled Roads (a collection of short stories)
Edith Wharton- The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth
Ambrose Bierce- any collection of short stories by Bierce
Sherwood Anderson- Winesburg, Ohio
Upton Sinclair- The Jungle
Willa Cather- My Antonia or O Pioneers!
Realism/Naturalism/Regionalism Period-Nonfiction
Mark Twain- Life on the Mississippi, The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad
Black Elk- Black Elk Speaks
W.E.B. Du Bois- The Souls of Black Folk
Ida Tarbell- The History of the Standard Oil Company
Booker T. Washington- Up From Slavery, An Autobiography
Marcus Garvey- any work by Garvey
Charlotte Perkins Gilman- Women and Economics
Modernism Period-Fiction
Ernest Hemingway- The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to
Arms, Across the River and into the Trees, In Our Time
F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby, Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night, This Side of Paradise
William Faulkner- Light in August, Intruder in the Dust, As I Lay Dying, The Unvanquished, Sanctuary,
The Wild Palms, The Sound and The Fury, The Reivers, Flags in the Dust, The Mansion,
Soldier’s Pay, Mosquitoes; Absalom, Absalom; Go Down, Moses
Eudora Welty- The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, Losing Battles, The Optimist’s
Daughter, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories,The Collected Short Stories of Eudora Welty
John Steinbeck- Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Red Pony, Cannery Row, The Moon is Down,
East of Eden, The Pearl, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, In Dubious Battle, Tortilla Flat,
The Winter of Our Discontent
Zora Neal Hurston- Their Eyes Were Watching God
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John Dos Passos- Three Soldiers, Manhattan Transfer
Sinclair Lewis- Main Street, It Can’t Happen Here, Arrowsmith, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth
Sherwood Anderson- Winesburg, Ohio (A Collection of short stories but with a common thread running
through it--- in your journals relate to it as if it were a novel)
Pearl S. Buck- The Good Earth, Dragon Seed, Peony
Willa Cather- My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, O Pioneers!
Edgar Rice Burroughs- Tarzan of the Apes, Pellucidar, A Princess of Mars, The Land That Time Forgot
William Saroyan- The Human Comedy
Nathanael West- Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust
Thomas Wolfe- Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River, You Can’t Go Home Again
Richard Wright- Native Son, The Outsider
H. P. Lovecraft- The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness
Ring Lardner- You Know Me, Al
James T. Farrell- Studs Lonigan (a series, and perhaps too long for a summer read; I would read Young
Lonigan if nothing else)
Ellen Glasgow- The Romantic Comedian, They Stooped to Folly, The Sheltered Life, The Deliverance,
Virginia, Life and Gabriella, Barren Ground
Erskine Caldwell- Tobacco Road, God’s Little Acre
Katherine Ann Porter- Noon Wine, Old Mortality; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; Ship of Fools, The Collected
Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
Robert Penn Warren- All the King’s Men
Anzia Yezierska- Bread Givers
Oliver LaFarge- Laughing Boy
MacKinlay Kantor- Andersonville
Post-Modernism Period-Fiction
James Agee- A Death in the Family
Sherman Alexie- Reservation Blues, Indian Killer
James Baldwin- Go Tell It on the Mountain
John Barth- The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy
Donald Barthelme- Snow White, The Dead Father, The King, City Life
Saul Bellow- Henderson the Rain King, The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Humboldt’s Gift,
Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet
Paul Bowles- The Sheltering Sky
Ray Bradbury- Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way
Comes
Richard Brautigan- Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General from Big Sur
Raymond Carver- Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Raymond Chandler- The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely
John Cheever- The Wapshot Chronicles, Falconer
Sandra Cisneros- The House on Mango Street, Caramelo
Don Delillo- White Noise, Libra, End Zone, Underworld, Mao II: a Novel, The Names, The Body Artist
James Dickey- Alnilam, To the White Sea
Joan Didion- Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer
E. L. Doctorow- Ragtime, Loon Lake, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate
Ralph Ellison- Invisible Man
Louise Erdrich- Love Medicine, The Bingo Palace, The Beet Queen, The Master Butcher’s Singing Club,
The Plague of Doves
Joseph Heller- Catch 22, God Knows
John Hersey- A Bell for Adano
Gish Jen- Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife
Jack Kerouac- On the Road
Ken Kesey- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion
Barbara Kingsolver- The Bean Trees, The Poisonwood Bible, Pigs in Heaven, Flight Behavior
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Maxine Hong Kingston- Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book
Harper Lee- To Kill a Mockingbird
Ursula K. Le Guin- any of her novels
Norman Mailer- The Naked and the Dead, Harlot’s Ghost
Bernard Malamud- The Natural, The Assistant, The Fixer, The Magic Barrel
Cormac McCarthy- All the Pretty Horses, The Road, No Country for Old Men, Child of God,
The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, Blood Meridian, Suttree, The Outer Dark
Carson McCullers- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Café
and Other Stories
N. Scott Momaday- House Made of Dawn
Toni Morrison- The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Beloved, Song of Solomon
Tim O’Brien- Going After Cacciato, In the Lake of the Wood, The Things They Carried (actually a
collection)
Flannery O’Connor- Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, A Good Man is Hard to Find, The Complete
Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor
John Gardner- Grendel, Mickelsson’s Ghost, Nickel Mountains
John O’Hara- Appointment in Samarra, Butterfield 8
Cynthia Ozick- The Puttermesser Papers
Ann Petry- The Street, The Narrows
Thomas Pynchon- Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland
Ayn Rand- Anthem, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We, the Living
J. D. Salinger- The Catcher in the Rye
Leslie Marmon Silko- Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead
Wallace Stegner- Angel of Repose, The Spectator Bird
William Styron- The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, The Long March
Amy Tan- The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, Saving Fish from Drowning
Walker Percy- The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming, Love in the Ruins, The Thanatos
Syndrome,
Lancelot
John Kennedy Toole- A Confederacy of Dunces
John Updike- any of his novels
Gore Vidal- Burr
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.- Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, Deadeye Dick, Mother Night,
Jailbird, Slapstick, Welcome to the Monkey House
Alice Walker- The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar
Margaret Walker- Jubilee
Tom Wolfe- Bonfire of the Vanities
David Foster Wallace- Infinite Jest
Richard Yates- Revolutionary Road
James Jones- From Here to Eternity
Isaac Bashevis Singer- Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories
Tillie Olsen- Tell Me A Riddle
Jean Stafford- Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
Richard Ford- The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Rock Springs (a collection of short stories)
John Pipkin- Woodsburner
David Benioff- City of Thieves
Marilynne Robinson- Housekeeping, Gilead, Home
Jonathan Franzen- Freedom: a Novel, The Corrections
John Irving- A Prayer for Owen Meany, Cider House Rules, The Hotel New Hampshire, The World According to
Garp
Annie Proulx- The Shipping News
Paul Theroux- The Lower River, The Mosquito Coast, The Elephanta Suite, My Other Life, My Secret History, OZone,
Millroy the Magician
Modernism/Post-Modernism Period-Nonfiction
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William Alexander Percy- Lanterns on the Levee
Ernest Hemingway- A Moveable Feast
Black Elk- Black Elk Speaks
Studs Terkel- Working
Gertrude Stein- The Autobiography of Alices B. Toklas
John Steinbeck- Travels With Charley in Search of America
Richard Wright- Black Boy
Maya Angelou- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
John Agee- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Truman Capote- In Cold Blood
John Hersey- Hiroshima
Jack Kerouac- The Dharma Bums
N. Scott Momaday- The Way to Rainy Mountain
John Gardner- On Moral Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist
Richard Rodriguez- Hunger of Memory
Rachel Carson- Silent Spring
Mike Rose- Lives on the Boundary, Possible Lives, Why School
Tom Wolfe- Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, The Right Stuff, The Pumphouse Gang, The Rubber
Ba
Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley)- The Autobiography of Malcolm X
H. L. Mencken-The American Language
William Carlos Williams- In the American Grain
Joseph Campbell- The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Annie Dillard- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Michael Herr- Dispatches
M. F. K. Fisher- The Art of Eating
Vine Deloria, Jr.- Custer Died for Your Sins
bell hooks- Aint’ I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
Joan Didion- Slouching Toward Bethelem
Maxine Hong Kingston- The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Li-Young Lee- The Winged Seed: A Remembrance
Gore Vidal- The United States: Essays 1952-1992
Ruth Reichl- Tender at the Bone
Marilynne Robinson- Mother Country, The Death of Adam
Dan Koeppel- Banana, To See Every Bird on Earth
Paul Theroux- The Great Railway Bazaar, The Tao of Travel, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China,
The
Old Patagonian Express, Sunrise with Seamonsters
Walker Percy- Lost in the Cosmos, The Message in the Bottle, Signposts in a Strange Land
American Poets from the Various Literary Periods
Anne Bradstreet- The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America or any collection of her
poems
Phillis Wheatley- Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral or any complete
collection of her poems
Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass or any collection
John Greenleaf Whittier- any collection
Emily Dickinson- The Poems of Emily Dickinson or any collection
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow- any collection of his poems
Sidney Lanier- any collection
Paul Lawrence Dunbar- The Complete Poems or any collection
Hart Crane- Collected Poems or White Buildings or The Bridge
Edgar Allan Poe- any collection of his poetry
William Cullen Bryant- any collection of his poetry (but must contain “Thanatopsis” and
“To a Waterfowl”)
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Langston Hughes
Amy Lowell
Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
Sylvia Plath
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams
Countee Cullen
Ezra Pound
H.D.
Robinson Jeffers
Robert Frost
Marianne Moore
Elizabeth Bishop
Jean Toomer
T. S. Eliot
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Louise Bogan
Hart Crane
Allen Tate
John Berryman
Randall Jarrell
Gwendolyn Brooks
Robert Lowell
James Dickey
Richard Wilbur
Denise Levertov A. R. Ammons
Allen Ginsberg
W. S. Merwin
James Wright
Anne Sexton
Adrienne Rich
Amiri Baraka
Wendy Rose Joy Harjo
Rita Dove
Cathy Song
Billy Collins
Ishmael Reed
Simon Ortiz
Maya Angelou e.e. cummings
Gary Snyder
Galway Kinnell
Robert Bly
Archibald MacLeish
Dana Gioia Alan Dugan
Stephen Vincent Benet
Nikki Giovanni
Charles Bukowski
Robert Creeley
William Stafford
Theodore Roethke
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Naomi Shihab Nye
Authors and Works- Non-American
Fiction
Dante- The Divine Comedy
James Joyce- Ulysses, Dubliners, Finnegan's Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Aldous Huxley- Brave New World, Eyeless in Gaza
Samuel Butler- The Way of All Flesh
Beowulf- Anonymous (the Rebsamen edition is the highly recommended one!)
Chinua Achebe- Things Fall Apart
Honore De Balzac- Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, Le Pere Goriot, Lost Illusions
Charlotte - Jane Eyre, Villette
Emily Bronte- Wuthering Heights
Geoffrey Chaucer- The Canterbury Tales
Miguel de Cervantes- Don Quixote
Arthur Koestler- Darkness at Noon
Italo Calvini- The Baron in the Trees, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, The Nonexistent Knight, Invisible
Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, The Cloven Viscount
Anton Chekhov- The Cherry Orchard, The Sea-Gull, Uncle Vanya, The Lady with the Dog and Other
Stories
Wilkie Collins- The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Armadale, No Name
Bram Stoker- Dracula
Mary Shelley- Frankenstein
George Eliot- Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Daniel Deronda
Ford Madox Ford- The Good Soldier
E. M. Forster- A Passage to India, Howards End, A Room with a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread
Joseph Conrad- Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, Almayer's Folly, Nostromo, Under Western
Eyes
Albert Camus- The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall
Daniel Defoe- Robinson Crusoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
Charles Dickens- Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, The
Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Bleak House, Little Dorrit
Fyodor Dostoevsky- Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Double, Notes from
Underground, The Gambler, The Brothers Karamazov
Gunter Grass- The Tin Drum
Euripides- Medea
Graham Greene- The Ministry of Fear, Our Man in Havana, Loser Takes All, Brighton Rock, The Heart of
the Matter, The End of The Affair, The Quiet American, A Gun for Sale
Thomas Hardy- Far From the Maddening Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge,
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Tess of the d-Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure
Franz Kafka- The Trial, The Castle, The Metaphorphosis and Other Stories
Jaroslav Hasek- The Good Soldier Svejk
Ivan Goncharov- Oblomov, A Common Story
James Hogg- The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Homer- Iliad, Odyssey
Jane Austen- Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility
One Thousand and One Nights- Anonymous
Mikhail Bulgakov- The Heart of a Dog, The Master and Margarita, The White Guard
Samuel Beckett- Waiting for Godot, Endgame
Evelyn Waugh- A Handful of Dust, Decline and Fall, Brideshead Revisited
Jorge Luis Borges- Ficciones (collection of short stories; 1956 edition probably the best to read)
Rudyard Kipling- Kim, The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, The Phantom Ricksaw and Other Eerie Tales,
Captains Courageous
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa- The Leopard
Thomas Mann- The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks
Gabriel Garcia Marquez- Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Matthew Lewis- The Monk
Sir Thomas More- Utopia
V. S. Naipaul- A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River
George Orwell- Nineteen Eighty-four, Animal Farm
Boris Pasternak- Doctor Zhivago
Alexander Pushkin- Eugene Onegin, Boris Godunov
Joseph Roth- Job, Radetzky March
Salman Rushdie- Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath
Her Feet, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence
Sir Walter Scott- Waverly, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, The Pirate, The Heart of Midlothian
Alexander Solzhenitsyn- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, Cancer Ward
Sophocles- Oedipus Rex, Antigone
Christina Stead- The Man Who Loved Children
Stendhal- The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma
Laurence Sterne- Tristram Shandy
Robert Louis Stevenson- Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Black Arrow
Jonathan Swift- Gulliver's Travels
William Makepeace Thackeray- Vanity Fair, The History of Henry Edmond
Leo Tolstoy- War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Hadji Murad
Ivan Turgenev- Fathers and Sons, A Month in the Country
Anthony Trollope- The Warden, Barchester Towers
Voltaire- Candide
Oscar Wilde- The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf- Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, Orlando, The Waves,
Night and Day
Emile Zola- Therese Raquin, The Human Comedy
J. M. Coetzee- Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, Age of Iron
William Golding- Lord of the Flies
Anthony Burgess- A Clockwork Orange, Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements
Arundhati Roy- The God of Small Things
Marjane Satrapi- Persepolis
Nadine Gordimer- The Conservationist
Virgil-Aeneid
Italo Svevo- Confessions of Zeno
Daphne du Maurier- Rebecca, Jamaica Inn
Juan Rulfo- Pedro Paramo
Vladimir Nabokov- Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, Pale Fire, Pnin, Despair
Antoine de Saint- Exupery- The Little Prince
Markus Zusak- The Book Thief
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Jhumpa Lakiri- The Namesake
Joy Kogawa- Obasan
Ha Jin- Waiting, War Trash, In the Pond, A Good Fall
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie- Purple Hibiscus
Sir Thomas Malory- Le Morte d'Arthur
David Malouf- Ransom
Michael Ondaatje- The English Patient, The Cat's Table, Running in the Family, Anil's Ghost: a Novel, Coming
Through Slaughter, In the Skin of a Lion, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Yiyun Li- The Vagrants
Louis-Ferdinand Celine- Journey to the End of Night
Alfred Doblin- Berlin Alexanderplatz
Joao Guimaraes Rosa- The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Knut Hamsun- Hunger
Nikos Kazantzakis- Zorba The Greek
Dai Sijie- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Kamala Markandaya- Nectar in a Sieve
Anthony Powell- A Dance to the Music of Time- 12 volume series; I would recommend reading the first
novel in the series but it's your call!
Milan Kundera- The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Nikolai Gogol- Dead Souls
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe- Faust, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Murasaki Shikibu- The Tale of Genji
Epic of Gilgamesh- Anonymous
Herman Hesse- Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Magister Ludi, Klingsor's Last Summer
Carlos Fuentes- The Most Transparent Region, The Old Gringo, The Good Conscience
Victor Hugo- The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserables
Kobo Abe- The Woman in the Dunes, The Ruined Map
Aharon Appelfeld- To the Land of the Cattails, Iron Tracks, Badenheim 1939
Alan Paton- Cry, The Beloved Country
Erich Maria Remarque- All Quiet on the Western Front
Laura Esquivel- Like Water for Chocolate
Margaret Atwood- The Edible Woman, The Handmaiden's Tale, Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, The Blind
Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood
Isabel Allende- The House of the Spirits
Jean Rhys- The Wide Sargasso Sea
Malcolm Lowry- Under the Volcano
Julio Cortazar- Blow-up and Other Stories (short story collection)
Mario Vargas Llosa-Conversation in the Cathedral, The Time of the Her, The War of the End of the World,
The Feast of the Goat
Yasunari Kawabata- The Sound of the Mountain
John Fowles- The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman
Nevil Shute- A Town Like Alice, On the Beach
W. Somerset Maugham- Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale, The Razor’s Edge
Muriel Sparks- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Driver’s Seat
Aphra Behn- Oroonko: or The Royal Slave
Iris Murdoch- Under the Net
Tolkien- The Hobbit, The Silmarillion
Jose Saramago- Blindness
Fernando Pessoa- The Book of Disquiet
A. S. Byatt- Possession, The Children's Book
Daniel Mason- The Piano Tuner
Kate Morton- The House at Riverton
Mark Haddon- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
Irene Nemirovsky- Suite Francaise
Ian McEwan- Atonement
Halldor Laxness- Independent People
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Elsa Morante- History
Christa Wolf- Cassandra
Yvonne Vera- Nehanda
Vassilis Vassilikos- Z
Mehmed Uzun- In the Shadow of a Lost Love
Jean-Phiippe Toussaint- Monsieur
Pramoedya Ananta Toer- All That is Gone, This Earth of Mankind, The Girl from the Coast
Fouad al-Tikerly- The Long Way Back
Julian Barnes- Flaubert's Parrot
Andre Brink- A Dry White Season
Kingsley Amis- Lucky Jim
Mary Renault- The King Must Die
Robert Graves- I, Claudius; Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina
Susan Hill- The Woman in Black
Kazuo Ishiguro- Never Let Me Go
Peter Ackroyd- The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
P. D. James- Death Comes to Pemberley, The Children of Men
Naguib Mahfouz- The Thief and the Dogs
Aristophanes- Birds and Other Plays
Alain-Fournier- The Wanderer
Peter Mayle- A Year in Provence
Jean-Paul Sartre- No Exit, Nausea, The Wall
C. S. Lewis- The Chronicles of Narnia (at least one of the books, depending on whether you've read any of
them or not), The Great Divorce, Till We Have Faces, The Screwtape Letters, Perelandra
Frank O'Connor- Collected Stories (or any other collection of his short stories)
Arturo Perez-Reverte- The Painter of Battles
G. K. Chesterton- The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday, Manalive
Agatha Christie- Any of her novels
Arthur Conan Doyle- Any collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, the
White Company
Alan Sillitoe- Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Ivan Bunin- The Gentleman from San Francisco(Collection of short stories)
Umberto Eco- The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, Baudolino, The Prague Cemetery, The
Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
Tobias Smollett- The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
William Godwin- The Adventures of Caleb Williams
T. H. White- The Once and Future King
Louis de Bernieres- Corelli's Mandolin
Kenneth Grahame- The Wind in the Willows
Joyce Cary-The Horse's Mouth
Giovanni Boccaccio- The Decameron
Nonfiction
Antoine de Saint-Exupery- Wind, Sand and Stars
Edward Gibbon- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume One only)
James Boswell- The Life of Samuel Johnson
Saint Augustine- The Confessions, City of God
Carl Von Clausewitz- On War
Herodotus- The Histories (any one of the nine books )
Soren Kierkegaard- Discourse (any of them), Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, Christian
Discourses, Stages on Life's Way, The Sickness Unto Death
Marcus Aurelius- Meditations
Simone De Beauvoir- The Second Sex
Lao Tzu- Tao-te Ching
Sun Tzu- The Art of War
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Niccolo Machiavelli- The Prince
John Stuart Mill- On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, Principles of Political Economy, A System of
Logic, Utilitarianism
Plato- The Dialogues
Jean-Jacques Rousseau- Discourses on Political Economy, Emile: or, on Education, The Social Contract,
Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages
Adam Smith- The Wealth of Nations, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Alexis de Tocqueville- Democracy in America, The Old Regime and the Revolution
Virgil- Aeneid
Mary Wollstonecraft- Vindication of the Rights of Men, Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Wole Soyinka- Ake: The Years of Childhood, The Man Died
Loung Ung- First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
Isak Dinesen- Out of Africa
Ji-li Jiang- Red Scarf Girl
Ann Frank- The Diary of a Young Girl
Azar Nafisi- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Charles Darwin- They Voyage of the Beagle, The Descent of Man, The Expression of the Emotions in Man
and Animals, The Origin of Species, The Power of Movement in Plants
Michel de Montaigne- Essays
Thomas Aquinas- Summa Theologica
Eve Curie- Madame Curie
Mark Mathabane- Kaffir Boy: the True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa
Karl Marx- The Communist Manifesto, Capital
Michel de Montaigne- Essays
Rene Descartes- Compendium Musicae, The World, Man, Discourse on the Method, Meditations on First
Philosophy, Principles of Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations, Beyond Good
and Evil, Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo
Aristotle- Metaphysics, Poetics, Politics
Xenophon- The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates
Plato- The Dialogues(especially Apology)
William Manchester- The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932; The Last
Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940; The Last Lion: Winston Spencer
Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
Samuel Pepys- The Diaries of Samuel Pepys
Lytton Strachey- Eminent Victorians
Robert Graves- Goodbye to All That
Edward Said- Orientalism
James Lovelock- The Revenge of Gaia
Hannah Arendt- Eichmann in Jerusalem
Thomas Babington Macaulay- The History of England
Ryszard Kapuscinski- Shah of Shahs
Philip Gourevitch- We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Tony Judt- Postwar
Chinua Achebe- An Image of Africa
Bruno Bettelheim- The Uses of Enchantment
T. E. Lawrence- The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Mahatma Gandhi- The Story of My Experiments with Truth
George Orwell- Homage to Catalonia
Primo Levi- The Periodic Table
Lorna Sage- Bad Blood
Sigmund Freud- The Interpretation of Dreams
Immanuel Kant- Critique of Pure Reason
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel- Phenomenology of Mind
Thomas Hobbes- Leviathan
James George Frazer- The Golden Bough
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Christine de Pisan- The Book of the City of Ladies
Erasmus- Praise of Folly
Voltaire- Letters Concerning the English Nation
Virginia Woolf- A Room of One's Own
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn- The Gulag Archipelago
Michel Foucault- Discipline and Punish
Gabriel Garcia Marquez- News of a Kidnapping
Ibn Battuta- The Travels of Ibn Battuta
Rebecca West- Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Jan Morris- Venice
Patrick Leigh Fermor- A Time of Gifts
Claudio Magris- Danube
Cao Jinqing- China Along the Yellow River
W. G. Sebald- The Rings of Saturn
Mario Vargas Llosa- Letters to a Young Novelist
Jean-Paul Sartre- Being and Nothingness, The Transcendence of the Ego
C. S. Lewis- God in the Dock, Mere Christianity, Surprised by Joy, The World's Last Night and Other
Essays, A Grief Observed, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses
Saint Bede The Venerable - An Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Boethius- Consolation of Philosophy
Dietrich Bonhoeffer- The Cost of Discipleship
Thomas a' Kempis- The Imitation of Christ
Thomas Browne-Religio Medici
Bernal Diaz del Castillo- the Conquest of New Spain
Duc de Saint-Simon- Memoirs
Fernand Braudel- The Structures of Everyday Life, The Wheels of Commerce, The Perspective of the World
Kwame Anthony Appiah- Cosmopolitanism
William Godwin- An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
Frank O'Connor- The Lonely Voice
Graham Greene- Journey Without Map
POETS
W. H. Auden
William Butler Yeats
Pablo Neruda
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Charles Baudelaire
Rimbaud
Li Po
Lord Byron
Milton
John Donne
William Shakespeare
Siegfried Sassoon
Seamus Heaney
Ted Hughes
T. S. Eliot
Alfred Lord Tennyson
John Keats
William Blake
Rainer Marie Rilke
Matthew Arnold
Guillaume Apollinaire
Robert Browning
Jorge Luis Borges
Andre Breton
Khalil Gibran
Rudyard Kipling
Nimah Nawwah
Wole Soyinka
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Dylan Thomas
Paul Valery
Paul Verlaine
William Wordsworth
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
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