Via e-mail, I recently received a list of books that the American Library Association believes every college-bound student should have read.  I will not reprint the list on this page, but I do encourage you to take a gander, as there may be one or two surprises.

It got me thinking that a list of this sort feels a bit arrogant, albeit interesting, and should be taken with a grain of salt.  To season my own skepticism, and flavor my own relish for book lists both snack-like and smorgasbordy (!?), I asked the title’s question to independent booksellers via the Amazon.com message boards.  Their answers are found below in list form.  It will probably be of interest to those who have already been through college, and of no interest to the college bound.  There is also a thread that discusses the movies that every teen should see before going to college.

A couple of notes before you continue on to the list:

• Where a person suggested any book written by a particular author, I put in two by that author.
• There were several places where people suggested titles, but no author.  Often, it was easy to glean the author’s name, but in a couple of instances, I found several common titles shared by many different books.  In those cases, I guessed.
• There appears to me to be a slight, but obvious political bend to this list.  Not surprising since all of the participants engage in a common activity.
• Please add to the list via the comment function.
• Please do not take the list seriously.
• My ten books are found in the picture links above.  I chose books that I felt were overlooked, so they do not duplicate titles below.
• Please feel free to point any duplicate entries.

The List:

1) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2) Silas Marner by George Eliot
3) Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
4) Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
5) To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
7) Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
8 ) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
9) Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
10) Pogo: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us by Walt Kelly
11) Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya
12) The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
13) The Trial by Franz Kafka
14) Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
15) Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford
16) Generation of Swine by Hunter S. Thompson
17) Anthem by Ayn Rand
18) Summer of the Red Wolf by Morris L. West
19) Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
20) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
21) Kama Sutra by Mallanaga Vatsyayana
22) How to Solve It by George Polya
23) Symbolic Logic by Charles Dodgson
24) The Federalist by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
25) Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings by Thomas Paine
26) Jefferson: Political Writings by Thomas Jefferson
27) The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
28) Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
29) Lolita by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
30) Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
31) Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
32) Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
33) Kalki by Gore Vidal
34) Live From Golgotha: the Gospel according to Gore Vidal by Gore Vidal
35) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
36) Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert Kennedy
37) Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
38) Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J. Dunbar
39) The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
40) The Book of Revelation by St. John the Divine
41) The Ninth Wave by Eugene Burdick
42) Demian by Hermann Hesse
43) Roughing It by Mark Twain
44) Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
45) The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon
46) Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
47) The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
48) On the Road by Jack Kerouac
49) A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50) Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
51) In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
52) Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
53) The World According to Garp by John Irving
54) Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
55) Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
56) A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
57) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence by Robert Pirsig
59) Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler (Manheim translation)
60) John Adams by David McCullough
61) The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
62) The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
63) Mathematics edited by Samuel Rapport and Helen Wright
64) The Laurel Poetry Series: Keats edited by Richard Wilbur
65) Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
66) Lord of the Flies by William Golding
67)Animal Farm by George Orwell
68) The Constitution of the United States of America by Gouverneur Morris et al.
69) The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
70) We the Living by Ayn Rand
71) Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman
72) The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
73) The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek
74) 1984 by George Orwell
75) The Art of War by Sun Tzu
76) The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
77) Pulling Through by Dean Ing
78) Watership Down by Richard Adams
79) Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney
80) Wine Spectator’s Ultimate Guide to Buying Wine, Eighth Edition by Wine Spectator Magazine
81) Junk English by Kevin Smith
82) Junk English 2 by Kevin Smith
83) The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
84) The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick
85) Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
86) Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
87) The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
88) Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
89) The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
90) I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Conde
91) Farwell to Manzanar by Jeanne and James Houston
92) The Child Buyer by John Hersey
93) Hiroshima by John Hersey
94) The Once and Future King by T. H. White
95) The Bible translation authorized by King James
96) Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch
97) The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton
98) Jesus Creed by Scot McKnight
99) Working Through Narcissism by Maria Carmen Gear
100) How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of your Doctor by Robert Mendelsohn
101) Raising a Vaccine Free Child by Wendy Lydall
102) Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
103) The Odyssey by Homer
104) Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
105) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
106) East of Eden by John Steinbeck
107) The Autobiography of Benjamin Fraknlin by Ben Franklin
108) Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
109) The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
110) Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
111) Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas
112) Night by Elie Wiesel
113) The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
114) All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
115) The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy
116) Maus by Art Spiegelman
117) My Antonia by Willa Cather
118) When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago
119) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
120) Haroun and the Sea Stories by Salman Rushdie
121) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
122) Survival In Auschwitz by Primo Levi
123) The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
124) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
125) Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
126) Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
127) The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
128) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
129) When Technology Fails by Matthew Stein
130) Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
131) Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana
132) Logic: An Introduction by Lionel Ruby
133) Buddenbooks by Thomas Mann
134) The Struggle for Europe by Chester Wilmot
135) Middlemarch by George Eliot
136) Wealth and Power by George Gilder
137) 10 Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives by Laura Schlessinger
138) The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
139) Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) by David Reuben
140) Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money by Robert Kiyosaki
141) Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing by Robert Kiyosaki
142) The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom by Suze Orman
143) The Road to Wealth by Suze Orman
144) Cooking for Dummies by Bryan Miller, Maria Rama, and Eve Adamson
145) Clutter’s Last Stand by Don Aslett
146) Household Hints for Dummies by Janet Sobesky
147) The Koran translated by N. J. Dawood
148) I Ching, or The Book of Changes translated by Richard Wilhelm
149) The Torah edited by Rabbi Rodney J. Mariner
150) The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
151) Where There’s a Will There’s an A: How to Get Better Grades in College by Claude Olney
160) SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas
161) The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slavomir Rawicz
162) The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
163) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
164) The Summing Up: Memoires by Somerset Maugham
165) The Citadel by A. J. Cronin
166) Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
167) Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck
168) Good War by Studs Terkel
169) Division Street: America by Studs Terkel
170) The Magus by John Fowles
171) The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
172) The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
173) The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker
174) Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
175) Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
176) The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner
177) The Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler
178) The Double Helix by James D. Watson
179) The Epic of Gilgamesh translated by Stephen Mitchell
180) The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
181) An Empire of Wealth by John Steele Gordon
182) History of the United States Mint and It’s Coinage by David W. Lange
183) None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen
184) The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by Edward Griffin
185) How to Solve It by George Polya
186) As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
187) Sackett’s Land by Louis L’Amour
188) Off the Mangrove Coast by Louis L’Amour
189) School Days by Robert B. Parker
190) Blue Screen by Robert B. Parker
191) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
192) Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffmann
193) The Year of the Great Crash, 1929 by William K. Klingman
194) Constitutional History of Secession by John Remington Graham
195) The Dred Scott Case: It’s Significance in American Law and Politics by Don E. Fehrenbacher

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