The Five Best Pieces of Literature I Read in High School

Luis Ruuska at the Huffington Post has an article on the five best pieces of literature he was forced to read in high school.


He chose:

Dante Alighieri's Inferno

J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

Elie Wiesel's Night

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment




How I hate required reading.  Of all the things we have to do of necessity in this world, being made to read something boring or awful is right up there on the BAD scale.

For myself I secretly appreciate being introduced to:

Evangeline: a tale of Acadie  by Longfellow which we not only read but acted out.

A Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank   I think it was the first book I read in diary form and the story it told was so compelling, and about someone my age.

A Midsummer Nights Dream  which we not only read through in class but had a trip to the Guthrie to see the play performed.  This experience and my college Shakespeare professor made me a huge fan of all things William.

Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck  which we also read aloud with everyone getting a chance to read a part.  I thought the story was terribly sad but very interesting.  I hated hated the Red Pony and The Pearl by Steinbeck, two others we read along the way.  Why why couldn't we have done the Grapes of Wrath or Travels with Charly?

The House of Seven Gables by Hawthorne.  We read it and saw a cheesy yet entertaining movie version.  Anytime class time included a diversion such as a movie or even a filmstrip, it was like a FREE DAY.

Have You Read More than 6 of these Books?

Via Erin Hart:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here...

Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt



1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



I was looking for the original article and found this one instead wherein people admitted to lying about having read certain classics.

This looks like the original list, from 2003 and the BBC's Big Read.

I've read all the ones I list. Peeked at a few. I always wanted to like Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier, but could never do much more than start it then put it down.

Lord of the Flies always sounded intriguing yet too mean so I haven't read that yet.

Why I have never read the Secret Garden I don't know. I think what little I do know is a let down from what I imagine a secret garden might be. Something with magic involved. Or more flowers.

I count that I have actually read 23. Better than 6.

Readable Classics: Timeless Tales

Here is my handy list of "Readable Classics" something I compiled awhile ago to meet the requests of people who wanted to read or were required to read a "classic". Everyone likes a personal recommendation, so this list has things I've liked and read and books recommended by customers of all ages as well. Yes, I do know "readable" is in the eye of the beholder, but we have to start somewhere.

Pride and Prejudice/Jane Austen
The Picture of Dorian Gray/Oscar Wilde
The Hunchback of Notre Dame/Victor Hugo
Alas, Babylon/Pat Frank
A Room with a View/ E. M. Forester
A Tale of Two Cities/Charles Dickens
Invisible Man/Ralph Ellison
Native Son/ Richard Wright
Catch 22/Joseph Heller
Brave New World/ Aldous Huxley
Lord of the Flies/William Golding
Dracula/Bram Stoker
Frankenstein/Mary Shelley
The Three Musketeers/Alexander Dumas
To Kill a Mockingbird/Harper Lee
One Hundred Years of Solitude/Gabriel Garcia Marquez
House of the Spirits/Isabel Allende
Count of Monte Cristo/Alexander Dumas
Farewell to arms/Ernest Hemingway
Jane Eyre/ Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights/ Emily Bronte
1984/George Orwell
The Red Badge of Courage/Stephen Crane
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the sea/Jules Verne
The Time Machine/H. G. Wells
Catcher in the Rye/J. D. Salinger
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn/Betty Smith
So Big/Edna Ferber
The Scarlet Pimpernel/Baroness Orczy
Fahrenheit 451/Ray Bradbury
On the beach/Nevil Shute
How Green was My Valley/ Richard Llewellen
My Antonia/Willa Cather
Gone with the Wind/Margaret Mitchell
Rebecca/Daphne Du Maurier
All Quiet on the Western Front/Erich Maria Remarque
Tarzan/Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Yearling/Marjorie Kinnen Rawlings
Little Women/Louisa May Alcott
Of Mice and Men/John Steinbeck