Some prefatory comments:

  • First and foremost, a warm welcome to our returning teachers: Homer, C.S. Lewis, Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Orwell, J.R.R. Tolkien, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Jack London, Lois Lowry, Susanna Clarke, Sophocles, and all the rest. 

  • Second, please know that the tutors do not conceive of this booklist as being a “Great Books” list, although many great books are present (along with plays, fables, stories, poems, myths, and other works of imaginative literature). To commandeer some words by the poet Wendell Berry, this particular list “...is not the only or the easiest way to come to the truth. It is one way.” 

  • The marrow in the bones of this particular list is story, myth, fiction, imagination.

  • If you like one of these, you will likely find more that you enjoy by looking up other books by that author. For example, if you enjoyed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Twain, you might also enjoy The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Or if you were moved Homer’s The Odyssey, you might also find delight in his other epic poem, TheIliad. Follow your curiosity. Read by whim.

 

the Booklist

  1. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens 

  2. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

  3. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

  4. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain  

  5. The Georgics by Virgil 

  6. The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo

  7. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol 

  8. An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen (adapted by Arthur Miller)

  9. Animal Farm by George Orwell

  10. Antigone by Sophocles 

  11. Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

  12. Arthurian Romances by Chretien de Troyes

  13. Beowulf (author unknown)

  14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

  15. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky 

  16. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

  17. Candide by Voltaire

  18. Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling

  19. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

  20. The Clouds by Aristophanes 

  21. The Cosmic Trilogy by CS Lewis 

  22. The Death of Ivan Illich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy 

  23. Dracula by Bram Stoker

  24. The Epic of Gilgamesh (author unknown)

  25. Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor 

  26. The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  27. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

  28. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson 

  29. The Giver by Lois Lowry

  30. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck 

  31. Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhem Grimm 

  32. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

  33. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen

  34. Henry and the Great Society by H. L. Roush

  35. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

  36. Howard’s End by E. M. Forster

  37. Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson

  38. Inferno by Dante 

  39. Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

  40. Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

  41. King Lear by William Shakespeare

  42. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper 

  43. Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory

  44. Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans by Plutarch

  45. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

  46. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

  47. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

  48. Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge

  49. The Mabinogion (authors unknown)

  50. The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton

  51. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

  52. Metamorphoses by Ovid 

  53. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka 

  54. Moby Dick by Herman Melville 

  55. My Side of the Mountain by Jean George

  56. The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon

  57. The Odyssey by Homer 

  58. The Oresteia by Aeschylus  

  59. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

  60. Paradise Lost by John Milton

  61. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

  62. Piers the Ploughman (author unknown)

  63. Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan 

  64. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

  65. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

  66. The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald

  67. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran 

  68. Republic by Plato 

  69. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

  70. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

  71. Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry by M.D. Taylor

  72. The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki (author unknown)

  73. Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emma Orczy 

  74. Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  75. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (author unknown)

  76. Son of Laughter by Frederick Buechner 

  77. The Song of Roland (author unknown)

  78. The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White

  79. Theogony by Hesiod

  80. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

  81. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

  82. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedich Nietzsche 

  83. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

  84. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

  85. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

  86. True Grit by Charles Portis

  87. Watership Down by Richard Adams

  88. Waverly by Sir Walter Scott

  89. Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

  90. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls