Most of this high school reading list is from Ivy Global’s recommendation for SAT readiness. I like it as a sample to see what “other” high school students might be reading and get an idea of how my son’s books compare- not as a recipe of what my boys need to learn. As a HS4CC note: if your teen gets through any measurable quantity of these, they are also ready for CLEP Analyzing and Interpreting Literature, CLEP American Literature, and CLEP English literature exams!!
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Piers Anthony, Split Infinity
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Francis Bok, Escape from Slavery
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
James F. Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
David Copperfield
Great Expectations
Hard Times
Oliver Twist
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
George Eliot, Silas Marner
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
John Knowles, A Separate Peace
William Goldman, The Princess Bride
John H. Griffen, Black Like Me
John Hersey, Hiroshima
S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
John Krakauer, Into the Wild
Into Thin Air
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Lois Lowry, The Giver
Yann Martell, The Life of Pi
Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
Arthur Miller, The Crucible
George Orwell, Animal Farm
1984
Reginald Rose, Twelve Angry Men
Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
The Merchant of Venice
Romeo and Juliet
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Twelfth Night
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
John Steinbeck, The Pearl
Bram Stoker, Dracula
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper
Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
John Wyndham, The Chrysalids
Paul Zindel, The Pigman
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Mark Bowden, Blackhawk Down
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Dante, Inferno
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
The Sound and the Fury
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Hendry James, The Portrait of a Lady
The Wings of the Dove
Sebastian Junger, A Perfect Storm
Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead
Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Nation
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
Discourses on Livy
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Ayn Rand, Anthem
The Fountainhead
Erich M. Ramarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
King Lear
Macbeth
John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
The Grapes of Wrath
Of Mice and Men
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Richard Wright, Black Boy
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
