Books for My Daughter
Recently my older daughter was home for college break and asked me to put together a list of literary classics for her; an acting major, she was concerned that she would miss important books in the normal course of things. Touched and flattered, I came up with the following list.
I aimed for the list to be both as compact and as comprehensive as possible; that was why, for example, I put The Odyssey but not The Iliad, though I’m second-guessing that decision now. There were some books I left out because I knew she had read them already (The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, and Frederick Douglass’s autobiography); there are some on the list it turns out she’s read already; and there are others missing because I didn’t think of them in time (Theodore Dreiser’s novels).
What else would you include?
IMPORTANT AND RELATIVELY EASY READS
CLASSICAL
Homer: Odyssey
Virgil: Aeneid
Plato: Republic
Sun Tzu: Art of War (short)
Sophocles: Theban Plays
Marcus Aurelius: Meditations (short and amazing)
13th – 18th CENTURIES
Dante: Inferno
Machiavelli: The Prince
Cervantes: Don Quixote (this is long but very funny)
Milton: Paradise Lost
Edward Gibbon: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Goethe: Faust, Part 1
19th CENTURY
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen: Emma
Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Charles Dickens: anything, really, but crucially: A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Great
Expectations
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Victor Hugo: Les Misérables (very long, exciting – one you’re past Chapter One – and sad)
Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Henry James: Washington Square
Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady
Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Notes from Underground
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
20th CENTURY
Charles W. Chesnutt (black, though you couldn’t tell by looking): The House Behind the Cedars
Willa Cather: O Pioneers! (better than it sounds)
Willa Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop
Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth
Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
W. Somerset Maugham (pronounced “Mawm”): Of Human Bondage
W. Somerset Maugham: The Razor’s Edge
Rudoph Fisher (Harlem Renaissance writer): The Walls of Jericho
Zora Neale Hurston (Harlem Renaissance writer): Their Eyes Were Watching God
James Weldon Johnson (Harlem Renaissance writer): The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
(novel)
E. M. Forster: Howards End
Carson McCullers: The Ballad of the Sad Café
Carson McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Richard Wright: Native Son
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son (essays)
Graham Greene: The Quiet American
Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory
Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation (essays)
John Updike: Rabbit, Run
Saul Bellow: Herzog
Norman Mailer: Armies of the Night (nonfiction)
Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus
Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint (hilarious, though some think gross)
Philip Roth: American Pastoral
Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon
Gabriel Gárcia Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Gárcia Márquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
Alice Walker: The Color Purple
Gloria Naylor: Mama Day
IMPORTANT THOUGH LONG AND/OR DIFFICULT
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick (less difficult than slow in stretches)
James Joyce: Ulysses (reading it along with Cliff Notes helps)
Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past, aka In Search of Lost Time (multivolume work,
more long than difficult, and very, very beautiful)
Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities
Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937): Gravity’s Rainbow (good luck with this one—so far I’ve started it
twice)
27 Responses to “Books for My Daughter”
Started it twice. A third time is in order or M&D, the 18th century diction of which some are not enamored with but not really as dense imho.
Ohhhhhh, here’s the comment area. Cloud Atlas, future classic.
I would include Richard Yate’s Revolutionary Road and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle. She might like Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays or Margaret Attwood;s Surfacing or Handmaiden’s Tale. I could never get through Middlemarch, I really found it tedious! Also D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterly’s Lover.
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Master & Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov,
Becky — Damn, you’re right on all counts. Thanks.
Thanks, Marcia, Albert, and Phil. I really left Kerouac off, huh? I think she already knows about On the Road (she may even have picked it up), but still.
Great list! Here are some suggestions. First, Antigone. (She was a teenager, after all.) And Poe, if she’s not yet done it.
Why so little poetry? You could add Donne (Songs and Sonets), Wheatley, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, L. Hughes, H.D., and Marianne Moore. They’re all great nutrition for a growing mind. Rita Dove or Jorie Graham, too, if you want to add a great contemporary poet.
In addition, the current holder of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the country’s current Poet Laureate, and the most recent winner of the National Book Award for Poetry are all African American women. So you might consider Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, and Nikki Finney.
Of course, the Inferno is essential, but the Vita Nuova of Dante is a beautiful tribute to love, one that is all the more poignant because the love is unrequited.
To the novels I’d add Daphnis and Chloe by Longus; Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (again! if she’s read it already, because it’s different when you’re grown), and Pudd’nhead Wilson; Cane, by Jean Toomer, Dr. Zhivago, Plum Bun, by Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nightwood, Miss Lonelyhearts, and perhaps Lucy, by jamaica Kincaid.
Finally, you have nothing here by the greatest writer in the history of the English language. Perhaps she’s overfamiliar with that work, given her studies, but one can’t assume; however, I won’t presume.
Geoff — a thousand thanks. And, okay, I’ll bite: WHO is the greatest writer in the history of the English language?
Also, in answer to the question about poetry, see my post “Confessions of a Poetry Dunce.”
Cliff-This is a great list.
I suggest the following
Faulkner’s “Light In August”, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” , “Coming of Age in Mississippi” by Anne Moody and a book in the “slave narrative” genre”The Life of Olaudah Equiano”.
There should be some Truman Capote on there. Also…Confederacy of Dunces just for fun…
Great list – here are a few random suggestions:
Shakespeare, Chekov.
Add Infinite Jest. It took me 4 starts to get through it, but so worth it. Also, you have left out most of the classics from the non-European-American world . . . How about Seven Chapters of a Floating Life? and a little contemporary fiction from around the world . . . Haruki Murakami – oh, and Michael Ondaadje, you can’t leave him out!
Ah, what a glorious task. Thank your daughter for us all!
Surely you should at least plant the seed by listing James’ The Ambassadors. Although the book deals with middle age and the “disappointments” of life (which turn out to be anything but,) it should be firmly established on a young reader’s horizon from an early age, so that it looms increasingly large as she approaches…
Mari — Capote’s a good addition. I actually tried once to interest her in Dunces, which I found hilarious, but it didn’t take; I think she just found it gross. Georges — I did include some James on the list, but I didn’t feel I could include The Ambassadors, since I never made it through that one myself. (I know, that didn’t stop me from including Gravity’s Rainbow. So I’m inconsistent — sue me.)
Thanks to all for some wonderful suggestions! I have a lifetime of reading ahead of me, and that is a beautiful thing.
Georges — I should add that you’ve increased my resolve to make it through The Ambassadors at some point.
Gloria, you’re right about non-Western-centered works; I realize I could have included, for example, V.S. Naipaul’s “A House for Mr. Biswas” or “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie. As for Shakespeare, my daughter’s an actor — she already knows Shakespeare better than I do!
This is, in the end, a list for Cliff D. Thompson.
The greatest writer in the history of the English language? The guy who wrote King Lear (or, if you prefer, Hamlet, or The Tempest, or the one about the out-of-control 13 year old [who Lauren Ambrose did a wonderful job playing one year in Central Park] & the bad boyfriend), of course!
Geoff — I realize I misread your earlier comment, thinking that the “she” you referred to was the greatest writer in the history of the English language. And yes — as I already wrote in response to someone else, I didn’t feel the need to include Shakespeare, because she already knows his work better than I do at this point.
Geoff — I realize now that I misread your earlier comment, thinking that the “she” you referred to was the greatest writer in the history of the English language! (That led to some interesting guesses about who you could mean: Emily Dickinson?) Anyway, as I wrote in response to another comment, I didn’t include old Bill because my daugther knows his work better than I do at this point.
And Amy — there’s a reason the blog is called “tell Cliff” . . .
Wow, I forgot the Bronte sisters.
Nice list, Cliff, and nice additions in the comments. I have nothing to add on the novel front. For plays, at that age, I really liked and got a lot out of The Cherry Orchard, Rhinoceros, Long Day’s Journey, and some of Fugard’s plays, plus Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist. For poetry, Eliot, Larkin, Heaney.
Now, what is your younger daughter reading?
Oh, I will add one favorite from 19th century Russia, actually two, both from Gogol: The first part of Dead Souls, and his short stories, particularly The Nose.
Thanks, Josh. The plays are pertinent, since my daughter is an actor. My 14-year-old is more interested in TV than books right now, but that could change.
Thanks. I was hoping your 14-year old might help blaze a literary path for our 13 y o. Oh, well.
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