add to this list

[burntpunk]

I'm frothing off to university in just under 12 months, and there's a good few authors I want to dig my teeth into before I set off. Below is a list of authors who are academically approved. I know this is no verification of a novel's validity but I'm not looking for some criteria or formula or anything, or the intrications that seem to go hand-in-hand with these threads. Geezers, I'll take my hat off to you if you can lend me some suggestions for what's gonna prepare me for university.

Chinua Achebe
Jane Austen
Samuel Beckett
Judy Blume
Charles Bukowski
William S Burroughs
Anthony Burgess
Ray Bradbury
Emily Bronte
Raymond Carver
Geoffrey Chaucer
Anton Checkov
Joseph Conrad
Paulo Coelho
Phillip K. Dick
Charles Dickens
Dostoevsky
Ralph Ellison
George Eliot
T.S Eliot
William Faulkner
Scott F. Fitzgerald
Allen Ginsberg
William Golding
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Thomas Hardy
Frank Herbert
Ernest Hemingway
Joseph Heller
Victor Hugo
Aldous Huxley
John Irving
Harper Lee
Jack London
HP Lovecraft
Henry James
Jack Kerouac
Ken Kesey
James Joyce
Franz Kafka
Gabriel Marquez
Cormac McCarthy
John Milton
David Mitchell
Ian McEwen
Hermann Melville
Toni Morrison
Vladimir Nabokov
Flann O’Brien
George Orwell
Edgar Allan Poe
Proust
Thomas Pynchon
Salmon Rushdie
Henry Roth
Phillip Roth
J.D Salinger
William Shakespeare
John Steinbeck
Jonathan Swift
Bram Stoker
Leo Tolstoy
Twain
Kurt Vonnegut
John Updike
H.G Wells
Nathanael West
Oscar Wilde
Virginia Woolf
Emile Zola

[JBI]

Well, in a few months (2?) you've got more than enough cut out for you, unless you can read 5 books a day. I think you'd probably be better off weeding half of them out, but hey, add Giacomo Leopardi to the list.

[islandclimber]

ohhh.. take Paulo Coelho off that list!!! :p

add some Latin American writers on there, like Cortazar and Borges, maybe Llosa too...

and then Italo Calvino, Fernando Pessoa...

and I see a couple poets there, so add Neruda and Whitman.. haha..

and good luck this summer.. a couple months until school and you've got 100s of books to read from your list ;)

[kiki1982]

My personal favorite and Nobel Prize-winner: Jose Saramago.

But good luck, I wouldn't be able to plough through all those in such a short time...

[mayneverhave]

I'd prioritize as well. The authors on your list, while mostly reputable, can certainly be put in different tiers. Certain authors are more important as a groundwork to literary study at the university level than others.

For example, Faulkner is one of my favorite writers, but my knowledge of Faulkner is far less valuable to me in college than is my knowledge of Shakespeare or Milton. Given that more contemporary authors, like Faulkner, build off of earlier ones, like Shakespeare, it certainly does not hurt to read the earlier one first.

[Desolation]

I was planning a similar excursion before college...Albeit with far less authors involved. Now, with college a mere 35 days away, I've completed most of my list.

Here are some of my favorites not on the list:
Friedrich Nietzsche
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Paul Sartre
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Knut Hamsun

Best of luck.

[tbarnes]

If you are looking for something that will prepare you for college there is really no need to plunge into this many works. Typically it is all going to depend which lit classes you end up taking.

In my 4 years of college these are the authors from your list that i encountered...

Charles Bukowski
William S Burroughs
Geoffrey Chaucer
Charles Dickens
William Faulkner
Allen Ginsberg
Ernest Hemingway
Jack Kerouac
James Joyce
Franz Kafka
John Milton
Hermann Melville
Toni Morrison
Vladimir Nabokov
Phillip Roth
J.D Salinger
William Shakespeare
Twain
John Updike

Like I said it all depends on your courses. You are more than likely going to have to take a class with Shakespeare and Milton so be prepared for that. Aside from that I took classes such as American authors where i read Faulkner, Whitman, Nobokav, Cather, and Henry James. Also, a British authors class where you'll most likely encounter Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton...etc.

My favorite courses were ones I was not required to fulfill such as the short novel, or the adolescent in literature. The short novel class had us reading things like Saul Bellow, Tobias Wolfe, Phillip Roth and much more, I really enjoyed it. The adolescent class was extremely varied and we read Hemingway short stories, Dubliners by Joyce, and even things like the Virgin Suicides by Eugenides. So like I said it all depends on your course, choose wisely. You can expect in a Victorian literature course you will read Dickens, Charlotte Bronte and the likes. Also, in a women writers course you will more than likely encounter the likes of Wharton, Hurston, Morrison, and Cather. Of course it really all depends on who your professor is and which authors they choose to teach.

Be prepared to have at least one or two professors have you read Their Eyes Were Watching God. I came upon this novel more than any other in my four years of college.

hope this helped...

[kelby_lake]

Scratch Harper Lee off right away. She wrote one book which is always used at GCSE to cater to the undemanding students.

You need to think about what actually interests you. Don't spout some opinion on something you read once and thought was a bit rubbish.

Shakespeare is a must-read. Not his entire ouevre but a broad selection (i.e. not just Romeo and Juliet). You pretty much have to read Hamlet though and maybe a problem play (i.e. the ones that aren't a comedy, history or romance- like Measure for Measure)

A lot of the ones you've listed are very commercial so only pick if they're of genuine interest to you.

[stlukesguild]

Get rid of Charles Bukowski, William S Burroughs, Paulo Coelho, Allen Ginsberg (read Howl later... there are far far better poets), Harper Lee, Jack Kerouac
Ken Kesey for starters. Seriously there are far better writers than many of the remaining writers on this list... but most of them are not bad for a start. Now to this the most glaring omissions are Dante, the Bible, Homer and any of the Greeks: Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Plato especially, Virgil, Ovid and Horace, Petrarch, John Donne, Keats, Wordsworth, William Blake, Goethe, Cervantes, the Arabian Nights, Rousseau, Baudelaire, J.L. Borges, Rilke, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and perhaps you might do good to branch out into non-Western literature with the Qu'ran, Shanameh by Firdowsi, Lao-tsu Tao-te-ching and an anthology of Japanese and/or Chinese poetry (Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Buson) and Indian epics The Mahabharata and the Ramayana.