There are certain books worth having on your belt notch. None of these are required reads at EMU, unless assigned in a specific class, but they’re books most of the best students have read. And books you shouldn’t be surprised to hear your professors mention. This is a shorted list of 100:

Novels and Short Stories

• Bellow, Saul - Seize the Day
• Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights
• Camus, Albert - The Stranger
• Cervatnes, Miguel de - Don Quixote
• Conrad, Joseph - Hearth of Darkness
• Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
• Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
• Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
• Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
• Hawthrone, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
• James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
• Kafka, Franz - The Trial
• Malamud, Bernard - The Assistant
• Morrison, Toni - Sula
• Olsen, Tillie - Tell Me a Riddle
• Paton, Alan - Cry, the Beloved Country
• Poe, Edgar Allen - Great Tales and Poems
• Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
• Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels
• Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Updike, John - Rabbit Run
• Welty, Eudora - Thirteen Stories

Drama

• Miller, Arthur - Death of a Salesman
• Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
• Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
• Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
• Wilder, Thornton - Our Town

Miscellaneous

• Bible
• Darwin, Charles - Origin of Species
• Hamilton, Edith - Mythology
• Machiavelli, Niccolo - The Prince
• Plato - Republic
• Thoreau, Henry David - Walden

Poetry

• A good anthology to check out: Allison, Alexander, Ed., - Norton Anthology of Poetry

Taken From: 100 Things Every College Freshman Ought to Know: An abridged college orientation catalog of definitions, customs, procedures, and plan old good advice about adjusting to the start of college (1995) by William Disbro.