SUGGESTED READING LIST
FOR COLLEGE-BOUND STUDENTS

The list below has been compiled by
the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English
to prepare students for college entrance.

NOTE TO HONORS ENGLISH STUDENTS:
This is not the same as the Honors English reading list;
please to the Honors English website for that information!


Very Highly Recommended

The Bible
Arthurian Tales
Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Bulfinch: Mythology
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Dickens: David Copperfield
Franklin: Autobiography
Hamilton: Mythology
Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
Melville: Moby Dick
Sophocles: Oedipus
Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
Thoreau: Walden
Twain: Huckleberry Finn
Virgil: Aeneid
 
Highly Recommended

Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Buck: The Good Earth
Carson: The Sea Around Us
Cather: My Antonia
Conrad: Lord Jim
Cooper: Leatherstocking Tales
Crane: Red Badge of Courage
Dickens: Great Expectations
Dickens: Oliver Twist
Dickens: Tale of Two Cities
Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
Doyle: Sherlock Holmes
Eliot: The Mill on the Floss
Emerson: Essays
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
The Federalist Papers
Goldsmith: She Stoops to Conquer
Hardy: The Return of the Native
Hawthorne: The House of Seven Gables
Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea
Hugo: Les Miserables
Huxley: Brave New World
Lewis: Babbit
Lewis: Main Street
London: Call of the Wild
Miller: Death of a Salesman
Nordhoff and Hall: Mutiny on the Bounty
O’Neill: Emperor Jones
Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell: Animal Farm
Parkman: Oregon Trail
Paton: Cry, the Beloved Country
Poe: Tales
Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front
Roberts: Northwest Passage
Robin Hood Tales
Rolvaag: Giants in the Earth
Rostand: Cyrano de Bergerac
Sarton: Six Wings—Men of Science in the Renaissance
Scott: Quentin Durward
Shaw: Pygmalion
Shaw: Saint Joan
Sheridan: The Rivals
Sienkiewicz: Quo Vadis
The Song of Roland
Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Tolstoy: War and Peace
Verne: Around the World in Eighty Days
W. H. White: Organization Man
Wilder: Our Town

Recommended

Adler: How to Read a Book
Allen: Only Yesterday
Austen: Mansfield Park
Butler: Way of All Flesh
Carroll: Alice in Wonderland
Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
Chesterton: Father Brown
Clark: The Ox-Bow Incident
Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Conrad: Victory
Dante: Inferno
Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo
Dumas: The Three Musketeers
Eliot: Adam Bede
Faulkner: The Bear
Faulkner: Intruder in the Dust
Fermi: Atoms in the Family
Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Galsworthy: Man of Property
Greene: The Power and the Glory
Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge
Hudson: Green Mansions
James: The Turn of the Screw
Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kipling: Jungle Books
C.S. Lewis: Out of the Silent Planet
Marquand: The Late George Apley
Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
Plato: Dialogues
Plutarch’s Lives
Reade: The Cloister and the Hearth
Sandburg: Lincoln
Scott: Ivanhoe
Shaw: Androcles and the Lion
Stevenson: Treasure Island
Strachey: Eminent Victorians
Strachey: Queen Victoria
Twain: Life on the Mississippi
Undset: Kristin Lavransdatter
E.B. White: One Man’s Meat