Books to Read Before You Die

Books to Read Before You Die List:

(in no particular order)

• The Odyssey
• The Canterbury Tales
• Greek and Roman Mythology
• Dante--the Inferno, if you only want to read one of the sections of the Comedy
• The Bible--the psalms, the pentateuch, the Gospels, Revelation
• Dickens--David Copperfield; A Christmas Carol; Great Expectations
  
• Stevenson--Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Jane--all, of course, but if I had to pick, either P&P or Persuasion
• Hugo--either of his major novels
• Poe's Short stories
• Bronte sisters: Wuthering Heights (emily), Villette (Charlotte). Not sure about Anne's novel b/c I haven't read it yet.
  
• Anna Karenina
• The Brothers K
• Wilde's poems, esp. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"; The Picture of Dorian Gray; the plays (esp. The Importance of Being Earnest; An Ideal Husband)
• Shakespeare: high points--Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Henry V
  
• Milton: Paradise Lost
• The Romantic Poets
• Mary W. Shelley: Frankenstein
• Stoker: Dracula
• L. Frank Baum: The "Oz" books
• Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" Series
• LM Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables
• Lois Lowry: The Giver; Number the Stars
• The Diary of Anne Frank
• Elie Wiesel: Night
• St Augustine: Confessions
• Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
• Woolf: To the Lighthouse; Night and Day; the Common Readers; Mrs. Dalloway; the Waves; The Years; essays/diaries (as you like)
• Lots of good poetry (which is up for debate)--Ozymandias, Kubla Kahn, The Highwayman, much Tennyson
• Frost, Dickenson (American poets, etc)
• Michael Cunningham, "The Hours"
  
• "Eugene Onegin" (either as the book or the opera, which is superb)
• O Henry "The Gift of the Magi" (short story)
• The Oedipus trilogy
• Wharton: The Age of Innocence, Summer, Ethan Frome, The Customs of the Country
• James: Washington Square; the Portrait of a Lady (the ending, alone, is worth the entire book); probably Wings of the Dove
  
• Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter (for early American writing); his short stories (which are wonderfully odd and scary)
• Alcott: Little Women
• Lewis: Narnia books; The Great Divorce; 'Till We Have Faces (novel); The Screwtape Letters
• Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series
  
• Albert Camus: either "The Stranger" or "The Plague"
• Probably Don Quioxte, even though I haven't read it yet.
• C. Marlowe, poetry, "Dr. Faustus"
• Hemingway, "The Sun Also Rises"
• Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, the Pearl
• FS Fitzgerald: Gatsby