Classic Considerations

Classical Foundations

The Prose Edda by Snurri Sturlson

Oedipus the King by Sophocles

Orestes or Medea by Euripides

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Metamorphoses by Ovid

Dante to Faust (1321-1832)

A play by William Shakespeare (not R&J or Julius Caesar)

“The Jew of Malta” or “Tamburlaine the Great”–Christopher Marlowe

Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory

Faust, Parts one and Two by Johann Wolfgang van Goethe

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccacio

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding

Tartuffe by Moliere

Candide by Voltaire

The Democratic Age (1832-1900)

Les Misérables or Notre-Dame of Paris by Victor Hugo

The Red and the Black by Stendahl

Madame Bovary; by Gustave Flaubert

Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire

Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen

Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion by Jane Austen

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Middlemarch by George Elliot

David Copperfield or Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Vanity Fair by William Thackeray

A Sportsman’s Notebook by Ivan Turgenev

Notes from the Underground or Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

War and Peace or Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Little Women by Louis May Alcott

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Bostonians by Henry James

The Modern Era (1900-2005)

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis or Blindness by Jose Saramago

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

White Noise; Libra or Underworld by Don DeLillo

Song of Solomon or Beloved by Toni Morrison

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

1984 by George Orwell

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Native Son by Richard Wright

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

The Plague by Albert Camus

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erick M. Remarque

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Heart is a Lonley Hunter by Carson McCullers

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul

Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

AP Reading Lists

Classic Considerations

Classical Foundations

Dante to Faust (1321-1832)

The Democratic Age (1832-1900)

The Modern Era (1900-2005)

Other Reading Lists