How can I be well-read? High schooler here

[BesideTheSea]

Hey everyone,

I go to a pretty crappy inner city high school. Unfortunately that means I don't have the opportunity to get a decent education from excellent teachers. I think of all my English teachers, only one hasn't been a total slacker. Anyway, I'm interested in literature and I want to read more. Any suggestions on how to start? Someone said I should read Shakespeare, so I'm reading Hamlet now (Clipnotes version), and though I have trouble understanding "early modern English" at times, I still enjoy it.


Thanks!!

[Charles Darnay]

Shakespeare is wonderful - but probably not the best place to start if you don't have a good grasp of the language. There are plenty of contemporary books that are great too, and easier in terms of language.

The first thing to realize is that "well-read" means (or should mean) nothing more than someone who reads a lot. You could be well-read and never have touched Shakespeare - and this is fine. But it seems like you are trying to supplement what you would probably be exposed to in high school. In that case, without knowing anything about you or your interests, I will begin throwing out these high school gems. Consider them if you haven't been exposed.

Brave New World
1984
Great Gatsby
Catcher in the Rye
Of Mice and Men

But if you post some of your interests, or what you have read or enjoyed - I or someone might be able to give you more specific recommendations.

[Charles Darnay]

Also, I went to what was considered a quality high school and I only had one English teacher who I respected/felt taught me anything. The perceived quality of school does not equal the quality of teachers.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Just read, read, read my friend. There are any number of lists one can find to educate oneself on "the classics" (the top 100 list on here isn't bad, in my opinion, since it comprise not only English novels, but books from many different cultures). And don't forget to your enjoy yourself. One doesn't need to like all the books they think they should like. I didn't start exploring "the classics" until I was in college.

[E.A Rumfield]

I'm only a little older than you. I started with Hemingway. For Whom The Bells Toll was the first book that moved me and, when I finished the last page and put the book down I knew I wanted to be a writer. From there I couldn't stop reading. I went to Faulkner, to Bukowski, to Hunter S to whatever poetry I could get my hands on then to the Russians. The books you are meant to read will find you. As for where to start I think Charles Bukowski is a great place for anyone to start. He took poetry and literature anyway from the academics and brought it right into the gutter.

[Charles Darnay]

Charles Bukowski is a great place for anyone to start. He took poetry and literature anyway from the academics and brought it right into the gutter.

You say that like it's a good thing. His writing is just garbage that people turn to simply to spite what they consider "academic writing," but there is nothing interesting/inspiring about his poetry. There are plenty of authors who do what he sought to do, but do it well - Hemingway comes to mind, since you already brought him up.

[E.A Rumfield]

You say that like it's a good thing. His writing is just garbage that people turn to simply to spite what they consider "academic writing," but there is nothing interesting/inspiring about his poetry. There are plenty of authors who do what he sought to do, but do it well - Hemingway comes to mind, since you already brought him up.

Lies I think Bukowski is one of the greatest writers. You talk like he was just some idiot. He was very well read. He wrote articles on people as varied as Rimbaud to Hemingway. He speaks of Dos Passos, Dostoevsky, D.H Lawerence, Sherwood Anderson, Tolstoy, Huxley.

Note To A Lady Who Expected Rupert Brooke

what, what did you expect? A school boy lisping donne? or
some more practical lover filling you with the stench of LIFE?
I'm a fool and no gentleman: I walked the Brooklyn Bridge
with Crane in pajamas, but suicide fails as you get older:
there is less and less to kill

so among the skin, the lampchops, the sick neckties of
other closets I scheme schemes as round as oranges
filled with the music of my crafty mumblings

Brooke? No. I am a monkey with an olive lost in the
circus sand of your laughter, circus apes, circus tigers
circus mandmen of finance screwing their secretaries before
the 5:15... and what did you expect?

a pink cheek dribbling Picasso colors on you dry brain?

so the room was blue with the smoke of my boiling, hell,
a senseless sea
and I fell fingers sotted to the last pinch of your juice,
fell through the throned vines cursing your name,
no gentleman
no gentleman
kissed off love like snake bite,
the veranda buzzed with flies, buzzed with flies
and lies, and your red mouth screamed,
your lamp screamed
breaking like overdue bills

DRUNK! DRUNK AGAIN!
O, YOU IDIOT!

so Yeats Keats teats.... nothing but an apricot

what what happened to Spain? my boy Lorca?
the revolution? must join the brigade!
lemme get outta here!



He wrote that for you. Forget what you think. And let the Elizabethans and all that dry dribble rot. Bukowski has, like no other, a way of punching you in the face with words.

The Weather Is Hot On The Back Of My Watch

the weather is hot on the back of my watch
which is down at Finkelstein's
who is gifted with 3 balls
but no heart, but you've got to understand
when the bull goes down
on the whore, the heart is laid aside for something else,
and let's not over-rate the obvious decency
for in a crap game you may be cutting down
some wobbly king of 6 kids
and a hemorrhoid butt on his last unemployment check,
and who is to say the rose is greater than the thorn?
not I, Henry,
and when your love gets flabby knees and prefers flat shoes,
maybe you should have stuck it into something else
like an oil well
or a herd of cows.
I'm too old to argue,
I've gone with the poem
and been k.o.'d with the old sucker-punch
round after round,
but sometimes I like to think of the Kaiser
or any other fool full of medals and nothing else,
or the first time we read Dos
or Eliot with his trousers rolled;
the weather is hot on the back of my watch
which is down at Finkelstein's,
but you know what they say: things are tough all over,
and I remember once on the bum in Texas
I watched a crow-blast, one hundred farmers with one hundred shotguns
jerking off the sky with a giant penis of hate
and the crows came down half-dead, half-living,
and they clubbed them to death to save their shells
but they ran out of shells before they ran out of crows
and the crows came back and walked around the pellets and
stuck out their tongues
and mourned their dead and elected new leaders
and then all at once flew home to **** to fill the gap.


you can only kill what shouldn't be there.
and Finkelstein should be there and my watch
and maybe myself, and I realize that if the poems are bad
they are supposed to be bad and if they are good
they are likewise supposed to be-although there is a minor
fight to be fought,
but still I am sad
because I was in this small town somewhere in the badlands,
way off course, not even wanting to be there,
two dollars in my wallet, and a farmer turned to me
and asked me what time it was
and I wouldn't tell him,
and later they gathered them up for burning
as if they were no better than dung with feathers,
feathers and a little gasoline,
and from the bottom of one pile
a not-quite-dead crow smiled at me.

[stlukesguild]

Read lots of good books. :hand:

Lies I think Bukowski is one of the greatest writers. You talk like he was just some idiot.

I don't know how much of an idiot he was... but he was a crappy writer.

Charles Bukowski is a great place for anyone to start. He took poetry and literature anyway from the academics and brought it right into the gutter.

You say that like it's a good thing. His writing is just garbage that people turn to simply to spite what they consider "academic writing," but there is nothing interesting/inspiring about his poetry. There are plenty of authors who do what he sought to do, but do it well - Hemingway comes to mind...

Not to mention Francois Villon, Rabelais, Rimbaud, Jean Genet, Bertolt Brecht, Daniel Defoe, Lord Wilmot, Jonathan Swift, Walt Whitman...

[Quintus Ennius]

I thought The Butcher Boy was surprisingly good and The Wayward Bus is fantastic, almost anything by Steinbeck is great. High schooler here too.

[zulu]

Hey everyone,

I go to a pretty crappy inner city high school. Unfortunately that means I don't have the opportunity to get a decent education from excellent teachers. I think of all my English teachers, only one hasn't been a total slacker. Anyway, I'm interested in literature and I want to read more. Any suggestions on how to start? Someone said I should read Shakespeare, so I'm reading Hamlet now (Clipnotes version), and though I have trouble understanding "early modern English" at times, I still enjoy it.


Thanks!!

I started to crave for English literature back in high school. however i could barely find someone who had ever read one of the top 100 works in English. I picked Dubliners from which i had hear a lot, but once i started reading it , i faced with absolutely unknown structures and vocabulary which i could hardly grasp.
I don't mean to say Dubliners aint easy to read but for someone like me who had only superficial understanding of english language, reading dubliners was the same as you reading Shakespeare. i put it aside and took Veracity which is a fictional novel and of course a bit poetry and litrary. i read it and believe it or not it altered my perception and awoke me from the obliviousnee i had been in for years. Set about readin easy ones

[TurquoiseSunset]

There are a few lists you can look at, like someone else here mentioned. Just Google something like 'top 100 books'. (check out the lists from Time Magazine, The Guardian, LitNet obviously, etc.). Then you can also Google something like 'high school reading list' or 'college reading list'. Don't be overwhelmed be the amout though. Just pick something that looks interesting and read it. The nice thing about classics published prior to 1923 is that they can legally be downloaded for free from, e.g. Project Gutenburg website, if you can't find them in the library.

[JBI]

People your age generally like Dostoevsky a lot, and existentialism in particular, but if you are trying to stick to English, I would recommend Hemmingway as a good place to start. The machismo becomes more endearing the more you read. Particularly I like In Our Time, but that is probably his least accessible work.

[Calidore]

And don't forget to your enjoy yourself. One doesn't need to like all the books they think they should like.

This is probably the best general advice you can get. There will always be people who tell you that you must read such-and-such or else you're not really well-read, but elitist crap smells just as bad as anyone else's. There are more books out there that you would like than you could possibly read in your lifetime, so there's no need to flog yourself just because someone hands you a whip and says it's good for you.

For literature, take the LitNet or other top books list, look it up on Amazon to see why people liked it or didn't (and you can ask here also), and if it looks worth a try, hit your library, Gutenberg, or wherever. And if the story puts you to sleep or the writing style bugs you, move on.

And don't forget that quality writers work everywhere. Give yourself a rest from Important Works and hit the genre shelves. There's lots of great stuff everywhere.

[TurquoiseSunset]

This is probably the best general advice you can get. There will always be people who tell you that you must read such-and-such or else you're not really well-read, but elitist crap smells just as bad as anyone else's. There are more books out there that you would like than you could possibly read in your lifetime, so there's no need to flog yourself just because someone hands you a whip and says it's good for you.

For literature, take the LitNet or other top books list, look it up on Amazon to see why people liked it or didn't (and you can ask here also), and if it looks worth a try, hit your library, Gutenberg, or wherever. And if the story puts you to sleep or the writing style bugs you, move on.

And don't forget that quality writers work everywhere. Give yourself a rest from Important Works and hit the genre shelves. There's lots of great stuff everywhere.

I absolutely agree with you and Mutatis on this. I wish someone told me this ten years ago.

[Shea]

I absolutely agree with you and Mutatis on this. I wish someone told me this ten years ago.

Yep, me too. :) I would also recommend that you read what you're interested in. If you like American Civil War history - read Twain or Margaret Mitchell.
French Revolution - Victor Hugo
Distopian science fiction - Kurt Vonnegut or George Orwell

I'm not saying that these authors are experts in their genre, but I've enjoyed reading them myself.

I also agree with Darnay that it doesn't really matter if your school isn't top notch. I went to a decent high school and early my freshman year was moved from regular English to honors. It would have been better to stay where I was. You could write an essay for the honors teacher and could have a bunch of garbage in the middle but as long as your your opening and closing paragraph were good, you'd get an A. Disgraceful. :nonod:

[TurquoiseSunset]

I also agree with Darnay that it doesn't really matter if your school isn't top notch. I went to a decent high school and early my freshman year was moved from regular English to honors. It would have been better to stay where I was. You could write an essay for the honors teacher and could have a bunch of garbage in the middle but as long as your your opening and closing paragraph were good, you'd get an A. Disgraceful. :nonod:

This too.

I'm not from America, but I had the same experience. I went to a good school, but my education in languages was far from what it should have been.

Also, my English teacher could care less. Her favourite pass time was photocopying notes for us to read instead of teaching us. I was also in the 'honors' class and I think I learnt less than the regular English students.



A little off topic but: I hate it when teachers make you read the book/play quietly in class. Shouldn't that have been homework? Shouldn't we now be discussing what we read yesterday?

[Shea]

A little off topic but: I hate it when teachers make you read the book/play quietly in class. Shouldn't that have been homework? Shouldn't we now be discussing what we read yesterday?

Having taught high school English, at least in the States, this is at times a necessary evil. We were required to have the "latest" in books. But I alone had about 140 students over 5 classes. Multiply that by about 7 other English teachers. Who can afford all that? So my students were only allow to take the books home if they were making up work. Most of the time we did the "round robin" reading in class, but I really wanted them to try to figure out a text on their own too without being influenced by the way someone else reads it. Then, trying to get everyone one the same page because some read faster than others, ugh! It was so frustrating!

[TurquoiseSunset]

Having taught high school English, at least in the States, this is at times a necessary evil. We were required to have the "latest" in books. But I alone had about 140 students over 5 classes. Multiply that by about 7 other English teachers. Who can afford all that? So my students were only allow to take the books home if they were making up work. Most of the time we did the "round robin" reading in class, but I really wanted them to try to figure out a text on their own too without being influenced by the way someone else reads it. Then, trying to get everyone one the same page because some read faster than others, ugh! It was so frustrating!

No, well, I understand that in your case it was necessary. It was also sometimes necessary when the teacher was asked to do something for the principal and had to do it during class, so we had to read to keep us busy. That I understand.

What I was referring to is a little different. Each year we read one Shakespeare play and at least one other classic, no 'latest' books (Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, The Hobbit, etc.). Each student was given his/her own book to keep until the end of the year. So why make us read it in class? What a waste.

By the way, since I read your "round robin" comment yesterday evening, that 'Rockin' Robin' song has been playing in my head non-stop. :lol:

[Shea]

By the way, since I read your "round robin" comment yesterday evening, that 'Rockin' Robin' song has been playing in my head non-stop. :lol:

:lol: I guess I'm desensitized to it because we have a Red Robin restaurant here. But I remember having that song running through my head all the time at first too. :D

But you're absolutely right about reading in class a book that you have access to all year. That's poor planning on the teacher's part.

[Lykren]

I've made a list of classic, well-known, highly regarded literature for myself that I have greatly profited by since starting out on. Here it is:

Tale of Genji
Moby Dick
Ulysses
War and Peace)
to read:
Pride and Prejudice/Emma
Lord Jim
Tess of the D'urbervilles
Middlemarch
Pygmalion
Brideshead Revisited
Waiting for Godot
Plays of Harold Pinter
Jane Eyre/Wuthering Heights
A Tale of Two Cities
The Good Soldier
Paradise Lost
The Importance of Being Earnest
Gulliver's Travels
The Aubrey Trilogy
To The Lighthouse/Orlando
Tom Jones
Tristram Shandy
The End of the Affair
The Way We Live Now
The Golden Notebook
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Of Human Bondage
A Passage to India
Ivanhoe
Complete Shakespeare
Oresteia
Theban Plays
Medea
Lysistrata
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
The Sea of Fertility
Snow Country
The Makioka Sisters
I Am A Cat
The Dream of the Red Chamber
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
The Water Margin
Journey to the West
A Madman's Diary
Blindness/The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
The devil to pay in the backlands
The book of disquiet
Don Quixote
Blood Wedding/Yerma/The House of Bernarda Alba
One Hundred Years of Solitude/Love in the Time of Cholera
The Aleph/Ficciones
Conversations in the Cathedral
Comedie Humaine
Madame Bovary
La Malade Imaginaire
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Phedre
A la Recherche de Temps*Perdue
The Three Musketeers
Journey to the End of the Night
La Princesse de Cleves
The Count of Monte Cristo
No Exit
The Red and the Black
Les Miserable
The Plague
Faust
Wallenstein Trilogy
The Tin Drum
The Trial/The Metamorphosis
The Magic Mountain
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Darkness at Noon
Hunger
The Red Room/Miss Julie
Hedda Gabbler
The Threepenny Opera
The Man Without Qualities
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Divine Comedy (Hollander?)
The Decameron
The Name of the Rose
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
I Promessi Sposi
Eugene Oenegin
Hadji Murad
Petersburg
Crime and Punishment
One Day in the Life Of Ivan Denisovich
The Nose
Chekhov: Complete Plays/Stories (Pevear/Volokhonsky)
Pale Fire
The Master and Margarita
Oblomov
Life and Fate
Catch-22
On The Road
Stories of John Cheever
Atonement
U.S.A. Trilogy
Franny and Zooey
Beloved
Gravity's Rainbow
The Age of Innocence
The Sun Also Rises/4 stories/For Whom the Bell Tolls
Portrait of A Lady/The Wings of the Dove/Turn of the Screw
The Scarlet Letter
Infinite Jest
The Corrections
Invisible Man
The Sound and the Fury/As I Lay Dying
The Naked and the Dead
My Antonia
Roughing It
Ask the Dust
Lon days Journey into Night
The Optimist's Daughter
The Red Badge of Courage
The Awakening
Glengarry Glen Ross
Tales of Poe
The Last of the Mohicans
The Bridge of San Luis Rey/Our Town
Rabbit Angstrom novels
The Handmaid's Tale
Blood Meridian
Underworld
Death of a Salesman
A Streetcar Named Desire/A Glass Menagerie
In Cold Blood
Stories of Raymond Carver
Tender is the Night/A Winter Dream
American Pastoral
Revolutionary Road
All The King's Men
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Aeneid
Metamorphoses
Hans Christian Andersen
The Brothers Grimm
One Thousand and One Nights
The Canterbury Tales
Iliad and Odyssey (Fagles)
Nibelunglied
Chanson de Roland
Ramayana
Mahbharata
Abhijñānaśākuntalam
Masnavi/diwan-e-kabir
Mabinogion
Beowulf
Njals Saga
Epic of Gilgamesh

I would begin with writers such as Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Evelyn Waugh. Some of these are more difficult than others, such as Ulysses. And don't be afraid to have a dictionary by your side while you read!

(Sorry about the length)

[mal4mac]

Someone said I should read Shakespeare, so I'm reading Hamlet now (Clipnotes version), and though I have trouble understanding "early modern English" at times, I still enjoy it.

Thanks!!

That's a great start! Persevere with it. What's the Clipnotes version? The key is to find a version that explains the "early modern English" in a way that suits you. There are hundreds of versions of Hamlet, some without notes, some with basic notes for schoolkids, others with vast amounts of notes for experts. If you find yourself getting stuck with your current version, try others - I like the RSC version. Any library should have several versions - experiment, see which one you like.

Why not try the whole hog? "The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works" [Hardcover] William Shakespeare (Author), Professor Jonathan Bate (Editor), Eric Rasmussen (Editor) Supplement with:

Dickens
Hardy
Austen
Tolstoy
... for starters

[tinybore]

Read lots of good books. :hand:

Lies I think Bukowski is one of the greatest writers. You talk like he was just some idiot.

I don't know how much of an idiot he was... but he was a crappy writer.

Charles Bukowski is a great place for anyone to start. He took poetry and literature anyway from the academics and brought it right into the gutter.

You say that like it's a good thing. His writing is just garbage that people turn to simply to spite what they consider "academic writing," but there is nothing interesting/inspiring about his poetry. There are plenty of authors who do what he sought to do, but do it well - Hemingway comes to mind...

Not to mention Francois Villon, Rabelais, Rimbaud, Jean Genet, Bertolt Brecht, Daniel Defoe, Lord Wilmot, Jonathan Swift, Walt Whitman...

How was he a crappy writer?

So many people are affected of his works. Including me; when I finally found Bukowski, it felt like he was talking to me personally, it really felt inside me.
If that makes one a crappy writer, then I like crappy writers :)

Guess it's all about how one defines what is what, but isn't it more a matter of own opinion?

Sorry for going off-topic, couldn't resist this :)

[aliengirl]

Hey everyone,

I go to a pretty crappy inner city high school. Unfortunately that means I don't have the opportunity to get a decent education from excellent teachers. I think of all my English teachers, only one hasn't been a total slacker. Anyway, I'm interested in literature and I want to read more. Any suggestions on how to start? Someone said I should read Shakespeare, so I'm reading Hamlet now (Clipnotes version), and though I have trouble understanding "early modern English" at times, I still enjoy it.


Thanks!!

Follow the advice given by other members. I just want to tell you that your school does not matter much. English is not my first language and I had my entire education in another language up to the age of fourteen. There was just one paper of English in my school and I always found it insufficient. I began reading on my own and looking back I think I've come a long way. So go ahead, keep reading and enjoy it!

[crusoe]

Start with "The Count of Monte Christo", by Dumas (the elder),
then "Germinal" by Emile Zola. After that "Bleak House"
by Charles Dickens.

[E.A Rumfield]

Jack Kerouac. Or William S Borroughs.

[Voivod30]

I don't have a lot to add that hasn't already been written. However; I'm a Bukowski fan (and you should ignore any one who makes empirical statements regarding subjective view points) at least from the few novels I've read, I must admit I've never read any of his poetry. They've been mentioned I'm sure but Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea is short, yet awesome), Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Poe, Lovecraft etc. are all writers I'd consider not all that difficult to read yet are generally still considered classic authors. It's quite easy to feel overwhelmed, but like others have said don't think of reading as a competition. If you start something and don't enjoy it I find that it's usually best to move on. One can never even come close to making a dent in all the literature available. When reading Shakespeare I generally read an act and then find an overview on the internet concerning the act you've already read. This helps a lot to iron out any details you may have missed. That's also the best way to use cliffnotes, read the original writing first and then peruse a decent summary.

[TurquoiseSunset]

When reading Shakespeare I generally read an act and then find an overview on the internet concerning the act you've already read. This helps a lot to iron out any details you may have missed. That's also the best way to use cliffnotes, read the original writing first and then peruse a decent summary.

This is good advice. Read a chapter, act or canto (in the Divine Comedy's case) and then read the notes you have on them. Apart from giving you a deeper understanding of the text it also helps you remember more details in the long run.

When I'm reading something like Inferno, for example, I always read one or two cantos a day and then spend the rest of my reading time with an easier read, something entertaining. Sometimes if you try to canon ball the whole thing it can get a bit heavy and start to feel like work.

[Voivod30]

This is good advice. Read a chapter, act or canto (in the Divine Comedy's case) and then read the notes you have on them. Apart from giving you a deeper understanding of the text it also helps you remember more details in the long run.

When I'm reading something like Inferno, for example, I always read one or two cantos a day and then spend the rest of my reading time with an easier read, something entertaining. Sometimes if you try to canon ball the whole thing it can get a bit heavy and start to feel like work.

Absolutely, I'm currently reading Middlemarch by George Eliot, the basic plot isn't that difficult but I'm finding myself having some difficulty with the details and even with some of the more minor characters. I just finished chapter ten which describes a sort of gathering or party and many of the characters seem to be some what unapproachable with what I've already read. Also though my edition has footnotes for the more obscure references many of the other supposedly well known similes and metaphors are quite beyond my scope of knowledge. In my younger days I probably would have stopped reading the novel out of frustration by now. However; I'm slowly learning that it doesn't really matter if I don't understand every sentence. I'm also using a few different websites as overviews.

[AlysonofBathe]

Hey there,

Well you've got a list of reading to last you years now!

I'd recommend watching some excellent lectures online to supplement your reading. A lot of universities offer this, but the best I've encountered is Open Yale courses. Here's a link to ENG300, an excellent literary theory course, completely free for your viewing pleasure: http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300

Happy reading!

[maxphisher]

While plenty of argument could be made for and against all of these works, this is a pretty common reading list to prepare undergrads for the GRE subject test. It should give you plenty of things to consider and a lot of nice choices for quite a while.

Old English Literature
□ Beowulf
□ Cædmon’s Hymn
□ The Wanderer
□ The Seafarer
□ The Dream of the Rood
□ The Battle of Maldon
□ Ælfred’s Preface to the Pastoral Care of St. Gregory
□ Sermo Lupi ad Anglos
Middle English Literature
□ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

□ Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
• The General Prologue
• The Miller’s Prologue and Tale
• The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
• The Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale

□ The Second Shepherds’ Play
□ Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur
□ Everyman
□ The Book of Margery Kempe

□ Middle English Lyrics:
• “Sumer Is Icomen In “
• “Western Wind”
• “My Lif is Faren in Londe “
• “I Sing of a Maiden”
• “Now Goeth Sun Under Wode”

□ Ancrene Wisse, books I & VIII
□ The Pearl
□ Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
□ William Langland, Piers Plowman (the B Version): The Prologue and Passus V
□ Julian of Norwich, selections from The Showings
□ The York Play of the Crucifixion
□ The Chester Play of Noah
Renaissance/17th Century

□ Marlowe
• “The Passionate Shepherd”
• Doctor Faustus

□ Shakespeare
• 2 tragedies – Hamlet + one other
• 2 comedies –A Midsummer Night’s Dream + one
• 2 histories – Henry IV-Part I + one other
• The Tempest
• Selected sonnets

□ Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Books I and II
□ Marlowe, Hero and Leander
□ More, Utopia
□ Skelton, Wyatt, and Surrey: Any selection of 15 poems
□ Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, An Apology for Poetry
□ Fox, Acts and Monuments: Death of Ridley and Latimer
□ Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Preface and Book I
□ Hoby, The Courtier: “Concerning Courtly Grace,” “Bembo’s Discourse”

□ Spenser
• Epithalamion
• The Shepheardes Calendar, April and October Eclogues

□ Donne, Holy Sonnets, selected Meditations on Divergent Occasions, “Good Friday,” “The Flea,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”
□ Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” “Upon Appleton House,” “The Garden,” “The Mower,” “Against Gardens,” “The Definition of Love” or
□ Herrick, “Prayer to Ben Jonson,” “His Grange, or Private Wealth,” “Upon Julia's Clothes,” “The Country Life”
□ Jonson, “To Penshurst,” Volpone
□ Milton, Paradise Lost – Books 1 and 2
□ Bacon, “Of Marriage and Single Life,” “Of Friendship,” “Of Travel,” “Of Studies,” “Of Truth”
□ Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: Democritus Junior to the Reader; The Causes of Melancholy, Sect. 2, Part I (“Love of Learning, or Overmuch Study”)
□ Browne, Hydriotaphia: Chapters 1-5
□ Walton, Life of John Donne
□ Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached Before the King’s Majesty” (Whitehall sermon)
□ Denham, “Cooper’s Hill”
□ Taylor, Holy Dying: Sections 1-3
Restoration and Eighteenth Century
□ Aphra Behn, Oronooko
□ John Dryden, Marriage a-la-Mode, Absalom and Achitophel
□ Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, Essay on Man
□ Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, “A Modest Proposal,” “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”
□ Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, Preface to The Dictionary, Rambler #4, “Preface to Shakespeare”
□ One 18th c novel by Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, or Samuel Richardson
□ Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard,”
□ Either Wycherley, The Country Wife or Congreve, The Way of the World
□ Mary Astell, “Reflections upon Marriage”
□ Rochester, “A Satyr Against Mankind,” “The Maim’d Debauchee,” “The Imperfect Enjoyment”
□ Etherege, The Man of Mode
□ Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, The Deserted Village
□ Addison and Steele, The Tatler and The Spectator
□ Richard Sheridan, The School for Scandal
□ Thomas Sprat, from The History of the Royal Society
□ Samuel Pepys, selections from The Diary
□ Fanny Burney, Evelina
□ Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
□ Haywood, selections from The Female Spectator, any novel
□ David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
□ Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France, and from The Sublime

19th Century British
The Romantics
□ William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience - at least five from each
□ William Wordsworth, various from Lyrical Ballads; "Tintern Abbey," "Intimations Ode," various sonnets, the "Lucy poems"
□ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan”
□ John Keats, “Ode to Autumn,” “Ode to Melancholy,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” selections from the letters
□ Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
□ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
The Victorians
□ Alfred Lord Tennyson, Selected works
□ Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
□ Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
□ Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
□ Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess," two other dramatic monologues
□ Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
The Romantics
□ Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
□ Percy Shelley, "Mutability," "To Wordsworth," "Mont Blanc," "Ozymandias," “Ode to the West Wind," selections from Prometheus Unbound
□ Byron, selections from Don Juan, "She Walks in Beauty Like the Night"
The Victorians
□ Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
□ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
□ Dickens, Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield
□ George Eliot, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch
□ Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
□ Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Grey
20th-century British
□ W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”
□ James Joyce, Dubliners (selections), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
□ W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems
□ D. H. Lawrence, selected short fiction
□ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Mrs. Dalloway
□ T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
□ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
□ Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
□ G.B. Shaw, Major Barbara
□ E. M. Forster, Howards End
□ John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
□ Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
□ Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
□ Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth
□ Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
□ George Orwell, 1984
□ Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
□ Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
□ A. S. Byatt, Possession

Colonial
□ Anne Bradstreet, selected poems
□ Jonathan Edwards “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
□ Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, Part II
□ Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa”
□ Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mary Rowlandson
□ Edward Taylor, “Huswifery”
□ Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration of Independence”
□ Thomas Paine,“The Crisis, No.1,” “Common Sense”
□ Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself.
19th Century
□ Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle”
□ Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue”
□ Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” “The American Scholar,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Poet”
□ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
□ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and “Young Goodman Brown”
□ Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Moby Dick
□ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
□ Emily Dickinson, at least fifteen poems
□ Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
□ Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
□ Henry James, one short story and one novel
□ Crane, Red Badge of Courage
□ Kate Chopin, The Awakening
□ Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper”
□ William Cullen Bryant, “Thanatopsis,” “To a Waterfowl”
□ James Fenimore Cooper The Last of the Mohicans
□ Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
□ Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
□ Henry Longfellow, “A Psalm of Life”
□ Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The Birthmark,” “Rappacinni’s Daughter”
□ Booker T Washington Up from Slavery
□ W. E. B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk
□ Frank Norris, McTeague
20th Century
□ Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
□ Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
□ Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
□ William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
□ Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
□ Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood, “A
□ Jack London, The Call of the Wild
□ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
□ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
□ Jack Kerouac, On the Road
□ Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
□ August Wilson, Fences
□ Sam Shepherd, True West

Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,”
□ Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
□ Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
□ Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
□ T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
□ Robert Frost, at least ten poems
□ Wallace Stevens, at least ten poems
□ Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “The Weary Blues,” “Harlem”
□ Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Ariel,” “Morning Song”
□ Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”
□ Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, Beloved
□ Ezra Pound, The Cantos
□ Marianne Moore, at least five poems
□ E. A. Robinson, “Richard Cory,” “Miniver Cheevy,” “Luke Havergal”
□ e. e. cummings, at least five poems
□ Elizabeth Bishop, at least five poems
□ Eudora Welty, several stories, including “Why I Live at the P.O.”
□ James Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain
□ Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
□ W. C. Williams, “Portrait of a Lady,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “To Elsie,” “This is Just to Say,” “Spring and All,” “Queen Anne’s Lace”
□ Roethke, “I Knew a Woman,” “The Far Field,” “My Papa’s Waltz”
□ John Updike, several stories
□ Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Bean Eaters,” “The Lovers of the Poor,” “The Mother”
□ Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra”
□ Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, ” “Next Day,” “The Woman at the Washington Zoo”

WORLD LITERATURE
Western
□ Homer, Odyssey
□ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
□ Virgil, Aeneid
□ The Bible, Selections from the Old and New Testaments
□ Ovid, Metamorphoses
□ Dante,Inferno
□ Either Petrarch, various sonnets, or Montaigne, Essays (selections), or Cervantes - Don Quixote (at least Book I)
□ Either Moliere,Tartuffe or Racine, Phaedre
□ Augustine, selections from The Confessions
□ Selections from The Táin Bó Cualainge
□ Aeschylus, Agamemnon
□ Euripides, Medea
□ The Song of Roland
□ Marie de France, Lanval and Yonec
□ El Cid
□ Selections from The Prose Edda and Njal’s Saga
□ Marco Polo, from Travels
□ Christine de Pizan, from The City

[Anymodal]

To start:
-The catcher in the rye, J.D. Salinger
-The old man and the sea, E. Hemingway
-On the road, Jack Kerouac
-A confederacy of dunces, John Kennedy Toole
-Demian Herman Hesse,
-The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (It's a best seller not a classic)
-Any book of short stories of Edgar Allan Poe

I think you should read what is fun for you. Start with easy-catchy books like Mark Haddon's novel so that you develope the habit of reading. Don't push your readings too much to the point that you don't enjoy them. You will naturaly go escalating in difficulty and learn how to enjoy heavier books. The classics will come alone.

[Shevek]

Regarding authors who wrote after the 18th century, read their short stories too. That's how I segued from genre fiction to classics in my early teens. Short stories give you a taste of an author's prose without reading an entire novel, but keep in mind that some fiction writers are better at writing novels than short stories and vice versa. When you find an author you enjoy, seek out their novels.