Overcoming the Huge Hole in My Education with a List of Books to Read or Read Again

This post was originally published on 6/3/2010 - I thought it would be interesting to revisit this post over a year later to see if I had chipped away at this list of classic books at all.  Over the past year, I have read 5 books from this list!  Five books is definitely not a ton of progress, but at least SOME progress was made!  

I went to college for over 9 years. I spent 4 years in an undergraduate program and 2 years in a Master's program - both of which I emerged from with degrees. I spent another 3 1/2 years in college working on a doctorate. I had a baby instead of finishing my dissertation.  I have absolutely no regrets.  The baby was far more interesting than my dissertation, to say the very least.

Reflecting back on my college experiences, most of which were very positive, I am amazed to realize that I read very few classics or recommended books. I spent my time reading academic journals and textbooks until my brain was fried but I read very few classics.

In fact, I was deeply bothered by the fact that of the 100 Most Recommended Works found in Reading Lists for College-Bound Students, I have only read a small handful of them.  The even more troubling part is that I only clearly remember the 2 that I have recently read so that my daughter and I could discuss them.

Honestly, I find that absolutely shocking.

The question now becomes, what am I going to do about this obvious deficit in my education?

I will start with a list, as all great projects must.

In an effort to overcome the huge hole in my education regarding classic/recommended books, I have compiled the following list combining the lists found at College Board and The Most Recommended Books List from Reading Lists for College-Bound Students.  My ultimate goal is to read all of the books on this list.  I expect that it will take me a very long time.

I have marked off any books that I have already read and clearly remember that are on this list.  While I have read some of the titles, I don't think I could have a three minute conversation about them so I should revisit them in my older and wiser age.  You can easily note that very few books have been crossed off the list.  As I work through the list, I will continue to update it by crossing off and highlighting books that I have read. 

With no further ado, here is the Overcoming the Huge Hole in My Education with a List of Books to Read or Read Again Book List

1. Beowulf
2. Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
3. Agee, James - A Death in the Family
4. Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
5. Baldwin, James - Go Tell It On the Mountain
6. Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
7. Bellow, Saul - Seize the Day
8. Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
9. Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
10. Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights
11. Camus, Albert - The Stranger
12. Carroll, Lewis - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
13. Cather, Willa - My Antonia
14. Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
15. Cervantes, Miguel de - Don Quixote
16. Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
17. Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
18. Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
19. Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
20. Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
21. Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
22. Dante - Inferno
23. Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
24. Dickens, Charles - Great Expectations
25. Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
26. Dostoevski, Feodor - Crime and Punishment
27. Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
28. Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
29. Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
30. Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
31. Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
32. Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
33. Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
34. Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
35. Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
36. Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
37. Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
38. Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
39. Forster, E. M. - A Passage to India
40. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel - One Hundred Years of Solitude
41. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
42. Golding, William - The Lord of the Flies
43. Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
44. Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
45. Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
46. Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
47. Homer - The Iliad
48. Homer - The Odyssey
49. Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
50. Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
51. Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
52. Ibsen, Henry - A Doll's House
53. James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
54. James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
55. Joyce, James - The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
56. Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
57. Kafka, Franz - The Trial
58. Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
59. Lawrence, D. H. - Sons and Lovers
60. Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
61. Sinclair, Lewis - Babbitt
62. London, Jack - Call of the Wild
63. Malamud, Bernard - The Assistant
64. Mann, Thomas - Death in Venice
65. Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
66. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - One Hundred Years of Solitude
67. Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
68. Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
69. Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
70. Morrison, Toni - Beloved
71. Morrison, Toni - Sula
72. O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man Is Hard to Find
73. Olsen, Tillie - Tell Me a Riddle
74. O' Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey Into Night
75. Orwell, George - Animal Farm
76. Paton, Alan - Cry the Beloved Country
77. Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
78. Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
79. Poe, Edgar Allan - The Fall of the House of Usher, The Purloined Letter, The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart
80. Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
81. Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
82. Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
83. Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
84. Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
85. Salinger, J. D. - The Catcher in the Rye
86. Scott, Sir Walter - Ivanhoe
87. Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
88. Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
89. Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer's Night Dream
90. Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
91. Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
92. Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
93. Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
94. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
95. Sophocles - Antigone
96. Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
97. Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
98. Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
99. Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
100. Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
101. Thackeray, William Makepeace - Vanity Fair
102. Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
103. Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
104. Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
105. Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
106. Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
107. Updike, John - Rabbit, Run
108. Voltaire - Candide
109. Vonnegut, Kurt - Slaughterhouse Five
110. Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
111. Welty, Eudora - From the book "Thirteen Stories" - Why I Live at the PO, The Worn Path, The Petrified Man
112. Wharton, Edith - The Age of Innocence
113. Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
114. Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
115. Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
116. Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
117. Wright, Richard - Native Son