Via supergee, the College Boards list of the 100 most important books. The ones I've read all the way through are bold. The ones I've read parts of are italic.

I hate "canonical" lists like this. I think they are cultural imperialism.


Beowulf (Portions of an abridged translation)
Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart (Never heard of it.)
Agee, James: A Death in the Family (Never heard of it.)
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice (I love Jane Austen)
Baldwin, James: Go Tell It on the Mountain (Never heard of it. I thought "Go Tell It on the Mountain" was a folk song.)
Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot (Read it and saw it performed at my high school. I'm glad I have experienced it, but now I'm old enough to admit that I really don't like it at all.)
Bellow, Saul: The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre (One of my favorite books of all time.)
Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights (Yes, oddly enough, I have never read this)
Camus, Albert: The Stranger (I can't remember if I read this. So I guess I'll count that as "not.")
Cather, Willa: Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales
Camus, Albert: The Stranger What's this doing on here twice?
Chekhov, Anton: The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness (Eh.)
Cooper, James Fenimore: The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen: The Red Badge of Courage
Dante: Inferno (In translation)
de Cervantes, Miguel: Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe (As a kid)
Dickens, Charles: A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment (In translation. Ptui ptui ptui.)
Douglass, Frederick: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore: An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre: The Three Musketeers (In translation)
Eliot, George: The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Selected Essays
Faulkner, William: As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby (Eh.)
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Faust (In translation)
Golding, William: Lord of the Flies (I really liked this one.)
Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Nope, only saw the movie.)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph: Catch 22 (Didn't do anything for me)
Hemingway, Ernest: A Farewell to Arms
Homer: The Iliad (In a couple of different translations. I love it. I have no idea why.)
Homer: The Odyssey (In a couple of different translations. I don't like it nearly as much as The Iliad. I have no idea why.)
Hugo, Victor: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World (Marvelous)
Ibsen, Henrik: A Doll's House
James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady (Eh.)
James, Henry The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Not my favorite of his works, but good.)
Kafka, Franz: "The Metamorphosis" (Wonderful)
Kingston, Maxine Hong: The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair: Babbitt
London, Jack: The Call of the Wild (I love it, but I don't see what it's doing on a "greatest books" list. It's furry fantasy!)
Mann, Thomas: The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman: Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman: Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur: The Crucible (Blech)
Morrison, Toni: Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery: A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene: Long Day's Journey into Night (There are few more claustrophobic works. It's excellent, but...euw.)
Orwell, George: Animal Farm (Four legs good! Two legs better!)
Pasternak, Boris: Doctor Zhivago (Only saw the movie)
Plath, Sylvia: The Bell Jar (Really tried to like it, but in the end, not impressed at all.)
Poe, Edgar Allan: Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel: Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas: The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria: All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond: Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry: Call It Sleep (Never heard of it)
Salinger, J.D.: The Catcher in the Rye (Blech)
Shakespeare, William: Hamlet
Shakespeare, William: Macbeth
Shakespeare, William: A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William: Romeo and Juliet (Hey! Where's King Lear?!?)
Shaw, George Bernard: Pygmalion (Wonderful, and not just because I got an A on my "expressionist" recreation of the 4th act)
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein (I wanted to like it, but I didn't care for her writing style)
Silko, Leslie Marmon: Ceremony (Never heard of it)
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles: Antigone
Sophocles: Oedipus Rex (In translation)
Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath (Only saw the movie)
Stevenson, Robert Louis: Treasure Island (My dad read it to me)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver's Travels (Eh)
Thackeray, William: Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David: Walden
Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace (Only saw the movie)
Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Wonderful)
Voltaire: Candide (In translation. Eh.)
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.: Slaughterhouse-Five (I loved it when I first read it. I recently re-read it, and hated it because of the horrible sexism and sizism.)
Walker, Alice: The Color Purple (Eh.)
Wharton, Edith: The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora: Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass (Good in small doses)
Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray (Eh.)
Williams, Tennessee: The Glass Menagerie (Ooooooh.)
Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse (Interesting, but I didn't really get it at the time. I should probably re-read it.)
Wright, Richard: Native Son