Reading List for English Literature A Level and Beyond...
You should not necessarily aim to read all of the reading list suggestions (time and sanity
would not allow it), but dip into some, and aim to show a broad but good knowledge of
literature. The classics are obvious and you should have a good understanding of key
players and key influences.
Everyone’s read that, have you?
Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Science-fiction comedy)
Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. (academic satire, very funny)
Atkinson, Kate. Behind the Scenes at the Museum. (1995 Whitbread Winner, very popular writer)
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. (The classic observational witty romance)
Austen, Jane. Emma (Considered by many to be the perfect novel of the English language).
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. (If you like your heroines sturdy and your heroes mysterious).
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. (creates the same reaction as Marmite)
Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. (a little on the bawdy side – understatement)
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. (Read for yourself the description of Miss Havisham).
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. (No one does characterisation quite like CD)
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. (worth a try if you like Dickens without the humour)
Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (Before the Audrey Hepburn film there was...)
Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. (Complex thriller)
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. (A classic ghost story)
Du Maurier, Daphne. Rebecca. (Part Romance, part murder mystery)
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. (Highly rated by some, never read by millions)
Faulkes, Sebastian. Birdsong. (Novel about Battle of the Somme and trench life)
Fitzgerald, F.Scott. The Great Gatsby. (A novel of romance, wealth and loss)
Forster, E.M. A Room With a View. (A romance, and a critique of society, some lovely comic touches)
Fowles, John. The Collector. (In a word – creepy)
Graves, Robert. I Claudius. (written in form of autobiography of Emperor Claudius)
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. (Unless you enjoy endless symbolism and an irritating ‘heroine’ avoid)
Harris, Robert. Fatherland. (A thriller, based on the concept of Nazi Germany winning WW2)
Harris, Robert. Pompeii. (Fictional account of the actual event)
Heller, Joseph. Catch 22. (Satirical novel, highly regarded)
Hornby, Nick. High Fidelity. (A novel of relationships and music)
Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s Schooldays. (An influential novel and a classic look at public school life)
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. (Dystopian fiction)
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. (A novel of ‘downstairs’ life in a country house)
Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat. (Originally a travel guide, turned out to be a very good comic novel)
Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (semi-autobiographical, free indirect speech)
Larkin, Philip. Jill. (Larkin but in novel form)
Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers. (could be retitled Sons and Mothers!)
Le Carré, John. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. (Spy thriller classic)
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. (A classic novel of growing up)
Lee, Laurie. Cider with Rosie. (post war childhood in Gloucestershire)
McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes. (Autobiography of a childhood in Ireland, some lovely comic touches)
McEwan, Ian. Atonement. (Highly considered by many, a recent film adaptation made this more popular)
Mitford, Nancy. Love in a Cold Climate. (An amusing romance, think Jane Austen and P.G Wodehouse)
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. (More dystopian fiction)
Peake, Mervyn. The Gormenghast Trilogy. (fantasy but with an edge)
Poe, Edgar Allen. Collected Stories. (Gothic fiction at its peak and concisely so!)
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. (An American classic dealing with angst, sexuality and adolescence)
Sharpe, Tom. Wilt. (comic novel, try also Porterhouse Blue)
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. (Lengthy, tedious opening section. That said, a classic in the Gothic genre)
Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle. (A very famous opening line…)
Sparke, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. (Short novel, highly rated, very interesting style)
Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. (A satirical novel, heavy going in places but very good in others)
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. (A bestselling novella)
Swift, Jonathan. Guilliver’s Travels. (Satire done by a master)
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. (Fantasy but with a hobbit – or two, or three...)
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Similarion. (Fantasy for the serious fantasy reader)
Waugh, Evelyn. Scoop. (Satire based on sensationalist journalism)
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. (A classic look at a past era –Downton Abbey without the ITV acting)
Wodehouse, P.G. Summer Lightning. (From the Blandings Castle series, comic look at aristocracy and pigs)
Wodehouse, P.G. Code of the Woosters. (A classic Jeeves and Wooster novel)
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. (Modernist novel, interesting use of language; highly poetic prose)
Zusak, Marcus. The Book Thief. (An interesting novel narrated in part by Death)
Classical Traditions:
It is useful to have a grasp of classical allusions; Greek and Roman myths would be a good foundation for this.
Homer, The Iliad.
Homer, The Odyssey.
Virgil, The Aeneid.
Anon, Beowulf
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex.
Aeschylus, The Oresteia
(particularly Agamemnon).
Euripides, Medea.
Ovid, Metamorphoses.
Aristotle’s Poetics (especially his
definition of ‘tragedy’)
Biblical Allusions: An awareness of the allusions made by many writers to key bible references and stories is
fundamental to understanding Western Literature.
Poetry: (Not an exhaustive list) Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Dante, Sidney, Burns, Donne, Herbert,
Marvell, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Clare, Hopkins,
Arnold, R. Browning, Rosetti, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, R.S Thomas, Kipling, Owen, Sassoon,
Brooke, Graves, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney,
Simon Armitage, Whitman, Cummings, MacNeice, Frost, Pound, Roethke...
Drama: You might try watching or reading plays by some of the following: Tourneur, Kyd, Webster,
Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Dryden, Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Beckett, Miller, Osborne, Pinter,
Stoppard, Shaffer, Friel, Churchill, Bond, Barker, Williams, Sheridan, Rattigan,
Beckett, Bennett.
For the Study of Literature and Language:
Drabble, Margaret (ed). The Oxford Companion to English Literature, O.U.P.
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms, Thomson