Who's Afraid of a Summer Reading List?

Reading lists are not meant to be a scare tactic by the professor to the student.  The teacher is merely interested in keeping the student focused and guiding their growth in literary culture.  A student should approach reading lists with a certain liberality and freedom.  Usually a teacher is clear about what books are actually required reading (the ones you absolutely must read and understand from cover to cover), and the books that are merely recommended.  Long reading lists without further comment usually fall into the "recommended" category.  So, use your freedom and decide which books interest you and will enrich your knowledge in an area that your curiosity draws you to discover.  A reading list like the one below is intended to be used haphazardly, liberally, by choosing a few bits from several categories, or something from each category—well, just about any way you wish, as long as you use it (just a little bit).  Have a great summer & bonne lecture!

Summer Reading for Students

First Year
American Lit
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.
Langston Hughes, Selected Poems or The Panther and the Lash.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye.
Flannery O'Conner, A Good Man is Hard to Find.
Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn.
Daniel Wallace, Big Fish.

British Lit
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.
E.M. Forster, Howard's End.
P.D. James, The Private Patient.
George Orwell, Animal Farm.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.


Second Year
American Lit
Emily Dickinson, Poems.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Poems or Selected Poems.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night.
Eugene O'Neill, All God's Chillun Got Wings.
Edgar Allen Poe, Tales.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
Richard Wright, Black Boy.

British Lit
Martin Amis, Lucky Jim.
W.H. Auden, Selected Poems.
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day.
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory.

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
James Joyce, Dubliners.
Keats, Selected Poems.
Harold Pinter, The Caretaker.
W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems.


Third Year
American Lit
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22.
Joyce Carol Oates, Them.
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove.
Robert Lowell, Imitations.
Ezra Pound, Selected Poems.
Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men.

British Lit
Martin Amis, London Fields.

T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral.
Geoffrey Hill, Selected Poems.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day.
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia.
V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River.
Zadie Smith, On Beauty.
Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat.

(NB:  this list borrows some works from an ICP list, but is not exactly the same as that list).