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Cross Creek Book Club

  • November 2024
  • Cross Creek

Greetings,
“The 100 Essential Books You Should Have Read in College.” Another list of books which are important to have read. How many have you read? In college, I mainly took math and science courses, so I read none of these in college. However, since college, I have read many because I enjoyed reading. How many have you read, even if it wasn’t in college?
Enjoy.
Pam

THE 100 ESSENTIAL BOOKS YOU SHOULD HAVE READ IN COLLEGE

July 30, 2009 by Staff Writers
For many, college is a place to explore great literature and some of the most important writing that has shaped the way society thinks and functions. Of course, many students simply don’t have time to read all the great things they’d like to or should, especially while working or trying to take all of their required courses. Whether you’re in college now and are looking for some quality reading material or have already graduated and want to keep learning, these books offer a chance to be entertained, educated and emerge a much more well-read individual.

ANCIENT

These texts are old to be sure, but still have a lot to offer the modern reader.

  1. Beowulf
  2. The Iliad, Homer
  3. The Odyssey, Homer
  4. The Republic, Plato
  5. Oresteia, Aeschylus
  6. Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
  7. The Aeneid, Virgil

CLASSICS

These classic books are part of must-read lists the world over and offer students not only the chance to gain hours of enjoyment through the tales they tell, but gain greater understanding of human nature, periods in history, and even satirical social criticism.

  1. 1984, George Orwell
  2. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
  3. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
  4. Candide, Voltaire
  5. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  6. Don Quixote, Miguel de CervantesThe Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
  7. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
  8. Catch 22, Joseph Heller
  9. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley that inspired it all
  10. Bartleby, the Scrivener, Herman Melville
  11. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  12. In the Penal Colony, Franz Kafka
  13. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
  14. A Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  15. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  16. Lolita, Vladamir Nobokov
  17. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  18. Cannery Row, John Steinbeck

FICTION BASED ON HISTORY

These novels are fictional but are based around real historical events or pressing social issues, letting the reader not only read the story but learn about the past as well.

  1. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  2. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
  3. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
  4. The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore CooperAll Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
  5. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  6. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
  7. The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

BEYOND THE STANDARDS

If you’re looking to read something published more recently or off the beaten track, these novels are quality literature that can be a big part of creating a well-rounded foundation of knowledge.

  1. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
  2. Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
  3. Watership Down, Richard Adams
  4. Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
  5. I Served the King of England, Bohumil Hrabal
  6. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein
  7. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
  8. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
  9. On Beauty, Zadie Smith
  10. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  11. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

NONWESTERN, MINORITY AND FEMALE AUTHORS

Unfortunately, the bulk of what is considered great literature still comes from white, European or American males. These books show that great work comes from people of all genders, races and origins and is essential to those wanting to broaden their horizons.

  1. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
  2. Beloved, Toni Morrison
  3. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  4. The Color Purple, Alice WalkerNative Son, Richard Wright
  5. My Antonia, Willa Cather
  6. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
  7. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

BIOGRAPHY, HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

Check out these books to learn about the lives of important figures, understand the basis for major social shifts, and get a deeper appreciation for the thinkers who shaped our modern world.

  1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
  2. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin FranklinThe Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
  3. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
  4. The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
  5. The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine
  6. The Social Contract, JeanJacques Rousseau
  7. Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

No matter what you believe, these works will help you better understand the role religion, philosophy and mythology have played in world culture.

  1. The Stranger, Albert Camus
  2. The Bible
  3. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, Edith Hamilton
  4. Confessions, Saint Augustine
  5. Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
  6. Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
  7. Thus Spoke Zarathustra
  8. Being and Nothingness, JeanPaul Sartre
  9. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
  10. The Art of Happiness, The Dalai Lama
  11. The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
  12. The Golden Bough, James George Frazer

DRAMA AND POETRY
These works of poetry and drama are well worth a read for their innovation, impact and all around quality.

  1. Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
  2. The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekov
  3. The Divine Comedy, Dante
  4. The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
  5. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
  6. Paradise Lost, John Milton
  7. The Misanthrope, Moliere
  8. Faust, Johann von Goethe
  9. A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen
  10. Mother Courage and Her Children, Bertolt Brecht
  11. A River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins
  12. The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
  13. Principia Mathematica, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell

ART

If you want to learn more about the history of painting, photography, drama and writing give these works a read.

  1. Illuminations, Walter Benjamin
  2. The Lives of the Artists, Vasari
  3. On Painting, Alberti
  4. Poetics, Aristotle
  5. Art and Illusion, Ernest H. Gombrich

MISCELLANEOUS

Check out these great books to learn about a wide variety of subjects from war to living a simple life.

  1. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
  2. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
  3. The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
  4. The Art of War, Sun Tzu
  5. Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud

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