"College Board's 101 Greatest Works of Literature"

[rowyn]

Meme, courtesy of prester_scott who got it from asqmh. Apparently, the College Board thinks that, I dunno, 80%? of the greatest works of literature were written in English. O.o

I did this mostly because I was curious how many of them I'd read. The ones in bold I've read, the ones underlined I have a half-way decent recollection of, and the ones italicized I've read multiple times and remember pretty well.

Turns out I've read 43, and have a
Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
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
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
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
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
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
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

It turns out that I've read 43 of these, and have a half-way decent recollection of 20.

Incidentally, among more traditional literary circles, I don't think "Romeo and Juliet" or "A Midsummer Night's Dream" reliably makes the top ten of Shakespeare's plays. But "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is easily my favorite Shakespeare, so I suppose I shouldn't quibble too much. ;) It is a nightmare trying to pick and choose among the huge collection of literature that's out there, in any case. Maybe some day, if I'm ever feeling that ambitious, I'll do my own top 100. ;)

Comments

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Just 19 in my case, but I'm half right on most. :)

Not The Stranger, but The Plague; not Tale of Two Cities but Great Expectations (dreadful novel IMHO); not A Farewell to Arms but The Old Man and the Sea; not Slaughterhouse-Five but Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions and Sirens of Titan and Galapagos and Harrison Bergeron and Player Piano... :) If you count authors, you still beat me by one: 42.

But ah, if you only count last names, I can substitute Philip Roth for Henry Roth, and TS Eliot for George Eliot, and squeak by on Portnoy's Complaint and The Wasteland! :)

[rowyn]

You'd still be out of luck, I'm afraid -- if we count authors I pick up another ... hmmm ... nine. ;)

But I'm sure if we did a top 100 postmodern novels, you'd kick my butt. :D

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Why do people keep associating the P-word with me? I've never even read anything by David Foster Wallace... or Roland Barthes... or John Barth... and I only got 3/4ths of the way through House of Leaves! I only read Jeff Noon for the drug humor, I swear! I... I'm not really helping my case here, am I. :)

Actually, my real strong suit is more like modernist and Japanese lit. Kafka and Gogol and Grass, oh my. That's the stuff I really love. Magical realists, too. And I got taught a lot of 1960's literature, like, the standard countercultural stuff like Kesey and Kerouac and Burroughs and Pynchon. You could probably call some of that postmodern-before-its-time, though I think the contemporary term for it would've just been "acid-soaked".

And wow, the Japanese were much more perverse than anything any mere American subculture could come up with, long before the Internet. During my "intimate relations" themed Japanese Lit class, we kept a running tally of fatalities, incests, and immolations on the blackboard. Would you believe the immolations got into the double digits before we even got to Yukio Mishima!? :)

[rowyn]

Why do people keep associating the P-word with me?

I dunno -- must just be something about you. Like the first part of your name, maybe, or your continual references to postfurry, postmodernism, and other leading-edge movements in your writing. ;)

In my one class on postmodernism, my professor considered Thomas Pynchon the definitional author of postmodern books. She adored him. Postmodernism was her chosen field, incidentally. I can't claim more than a passing familiarity with it, myself. I was really fond of the magical realist works that I read, however, like Borges and Allende. Mmm. Magical realism. Fun stuff. :)

I never really picked a focus for my study of literature, but I probably would've gone into late medieval/early Renaissance if I had.

[oceansedge.livejournal.com]

seems a bit biased toward early 20th century as well. I don't know, it's such a subjective thing I always have trouble with lists like this. But it looks like yeah about 45-50 of em for me as well.

Part of the problem is I love all books (movies and music too) too much to pick favourites.. even Shakespeare I'd have to say A Midsummer's Night Dream is my favourite comedy, and Hamlet my favourite tragedy, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the Scottish Play as well. And Faulkner.... gah, no way I could pick a favourite THERE, they were all such powerful (and occassionally disturbing) works.... I remember when I first read As I Lay Dying and just sitting there agape at it when I finished reading it.... took a long time to digest that tiny book. And The Sound and the Fury? I took it and threw it forcefully against a wall after the first chapter, furious, the man had NO right to go poking those dark and ugly corners of my soul, of prodding those hurt spots so nakedly, To this day it's still a very difficult read for me.

[rowyn]

My favorite Shakespearian tragedy is definitely "Othello". Iago was such a skillfully manipulative villain that I couldn't help admiring him. I should see Branagh's version, one of these days. :)

I never took much interest in Faulkner, I'm afraid. Read a few stories by him in high school, I think, but they left no impression. I probably ought to give him another shot. Maybe when I finish with my last Austen novel. :)

[oceansedge.livejournal.com]

Austen to Faulkner, that's definately a LEAP *grins*

Seriously, try As I Lay Dying, it's dark, it's disturbing, it's not pretty, but there's an honesty, and even some dark humour to it, a very startling read. And it's very short.... that way if you don't like it, you're not stuck with it for ages.

I loved Branagh's Othello, but then I generally speaking have liked his interpretations. His Hamlet was very good (if long), even if the movie going public masses didn't flock to it, and his Henry V was marvellous. Different from Olivier's but a strong version in it's own right.

[rowyn]

Of his Shakespeare, I've only seen Branagh's "Henry V" and "Much Ado About Nothing". (I utterly adore his "Much Ado". There are few films that I've watched more than once, and very few that I've seen more than twice. I've seen "Much Ado" 10+ times. I can still quote parts from memory: "O! If I were a man ... I would eat his heart in the marketplace!") I was not as impressed with "Henry V", but I've never cared as much for Shakespeare's histories. The St. Crispin's Day's speech was quite memorable, though. :)

[tkurogrym.livejournal.com]

Have to agree with the Faulkner recommendation. As I Lay Dying is the most palatable of the novels and actually a pretty amusing read, if you're into black humor. The psychoses running rampant in that family are fun to puzzle out...

Now, if you want a more thoroughly Faulknerian experience, jump straight into Absalom, Absalom! for confusion, feelings of inadequacy, and long, long, long sentences. I spent a semester during my Master's degree having most of Faulkner's novels forced down my throat by a passionate Faulkner scholar. It wasn't pretty. ;)

[oceansedge.livejournal.com]

Yep absolutely!
I have Absolom, Absolom Here somewhere. It came in a care package from my good friend Jack Burman, who was my english professor in college (english for Jet Jocks 101), he turned me on to Faulkner originally, with Light In August, a daunting read, but from there on in I was hooked. He sent me the care package, including Sartoris, Absolom,Absolom, The Hamlet, The Wild Palms, Sanctuary, and the collected short stories of William Faulkner, when he heard I was working on an essay on the female character in Faulkner's work,... using As I Lay Dying as the cornerstone of my arguement.

Still have a lot of reading to do, I've been downloading more off the net, along with some biographical information. Lots of notes to take and quotes to note. But I hope to finish the paper this year. (idea has been rattling around my brain for at least the last 18 months).

Doubt it'll ever be published, lord knows there's been more written about Faulkner, and trying to understand Faulkner, than he wrote himself! But I enjoy the mental exercise for it's own sake. For me that's what writing is about.

[minor-architect.livejournal.com]

Let's see, if we count up all the books on this list that I've read, that comes to...42. If you simply count authors, the total rises to...43. Heh, not much difference at all. ;-)

What I find interesting are which books I was made to read in school or college and which books I read on my own. Made to read: 32. Read on my own: 10. Those figures made me blink. I've had a better grounding in the "classics" by going through my various educational institutions than I had first thought.

[rowyn]

I've read 14 of these on my own. Oddly, some of the most "classic" ones were those I read on my own -- like "The Illiad" and "The Odessey". While the newer and more controversial books on the list -- like Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God are -- are ones I read for class. (I think I was assigned to read "Their Eyes" twice in college, in fact.) Both of those are good and highly readable novels, incidentally. :)

[minor-architect.livejournal.com]

Just as a fun exercise, the 10 books I read on my own were:

Pride and Prejudice
The Great Gatsby (twice!)
The Good Soldier
Lord of the Flies
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Bell Jar
The Catcher in the Rye
Treasure Island
The Color Purple
The Picture of Dorian Gray

After looking over these ten, I don't think I can say that they represent the most "classical" of all the books on the list. I've got a pretty eclectic bunch happenin' here. ;-)

[rowyn]

Lemme try picking mine out again:

Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales (I don't know if there's a particular volume of "Selected Tales" they have in mind, but I've read most of Poe's stories, so I decided to count this one.)
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide

There's certainly some "contemporary" stuff in there (Beloved, for example, which maybe only counts as half for "read on my own". My college encouraged the freshman class that year to read it, but it wasn't coursework, and there were no quizzes or tests or any other check to see if you did or not.) And most of it was fun to read. :) So I dunno that it'd be the more "classical" stuff, really. But I bet that there's stuff on the College Board list that'd be more likely to get cut from someone else's "top 101" list. ;)

[tkurogrym.livejournal.com]

English teacher incoming ... Out of the list, I've actually read 61 of the titles (being scrupulously honest and not including partial-reads and never-finished!). And there's only about 15 authors on there that I've never read *something* from... which might be vaguely impressive if I could remember my reading better than I do. ;)

Of course, what the College Board means by "100 Greatest Works of Literature" is really the 100 most-frequently-tested -on-the-AP-Exam works of literature by largely white, mostly male, inevitably western-centric, traditional authors with a few postmodernists thrown in to show how progressive we are these days. Bah humbug. ;)

Classics Schmassics

[krud42.livejournal.com]

16 of these I had to read in classes:
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden

Only one of them have I read on my own:
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe

I thought it interesting that neither "1984" nor "Fahrenheit 451" made the list. But then, I am quite the uncultured clod, judging from the list.