{"id":128,"date":"2026-06-06T00:00:36","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T04:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/?p=128"},"modified":"2026-05-31T10:32:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T14:32:33","slug":"looking-for-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/?p=128","title":{"rendered":"100 Books Worth Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

If you’re looking for a book to challenge yourself with this summer (on top of summer reading), peruse this list. \u00a0Each of these works is very meaty, deep in meaning, ambiguous enough for interpretation, yet forceful enough to have had a lasting impression on Western culture. \u00a0Some are old; some are new. \u00a0There are writers of all nationalities included here, and the books’ years of publication range from the 16th century to today. \u00a0They have nothing in common other than the fact that they’re all legit literature. \u00a0Look a few up on Wikipedia; read the first chapter\/scene: get a feel for the work. \u00a0If you find one that grabs you, read it in a scholarly way<\/a>. \u00a0You’ll enjoy it more anyway if you grab onto some big theme early on. \u00a0Plus, you’ll remember it all the better. \u00a0I’ve intentionally avoided listing books that are already a part of SPHS’s assigned reading, so this is a deeper cut of works. \u00a0(A note of caution to sensitive minds: Some of these stories do include some sketchy content, so read at your own peril.)<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Invisible Man\u00a0<\/em>by Ralph Ellison (not\u00a0the sci-fi story by H. G. Wells)<\/span><\/em><\/li>\n
  2. Wuthering Heights<\/em> by Emily Bront\u00eb<\/li>\n
  3. Crime and Punishment<\/em> by Fyodor Dostoevski<\/li>\n
  4. Moby-Dick<\/em> by Herman Melville<\/li>\n
  5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/em> by Mark Twain<\/li>\n
  6. King Lear<\/em> by William Shakespeare<\/li>\n
  7. Billy Budd<\/em> by Herman Melville<\/li>\n
  8. Catch-22<\/em> by Joseph Heller<\/li>\n
  9. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man<\/em> by James Joyce<\/li>\n
  10. The Awakening<\/em> by Kate Chopin<\/li>\n
  11. Ceremony<\/em> by Leslie Marmon Silko<\/li>\n
  12. Light in August<\/em> by William Faulkner<\/li>\n
  13. As I Lay Dying<\/em> by William Faulkner<\/li>\n
  14. Song of Solomon<\/em> by Toni Morrison<\/li>\n
  15. Anna Karenina<\/em> by Leo Tolstoy<\/li>\n
  16. Antigone<\/em> by Sophocles<\/li>\n
  17. Bless Me, Ultima<\/em> by Rudolfo Anaya<\/li>\n
  18. Candide<\/em> by Voltaire<\/li>\n
  19. The Color Purple<\/em> by Alice Walker<\/li>\n
  20. The Glass Menagerie<\/em> by Tennessee Williams<\/li>\n
  21. Native Son<\/em> by Richard Wright<\/li>\n
  22. A Streetcar Named Desire<\/em> by Tennessee Williams<\/li>\n
  23. The Crucible<\/em> by Arthur Miller<\/li>\n
  24. Cry, The Beloved Country<\/em> by Alan Paton<\/li>\n
  25. Jude the Obscure<\/em> by Thomas Hardy<\/li>\n
  26. Lord Jim<\/em> by Joseph Conrad<\/li>\n
  27. Madame Bovary<\/em> by Gustave Flaubert<\/li>\n
  28. A Passage to India<\/em> by E. M. Forster<\/li>\n
  29. A Raisin in the Sun<\/em> by Lorraine Hansberry<\/li>\n
  30. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead<\/em> by Tom Stoppard<\/li>\n
  31. Sula<\/em> by Toni Morrison<\/li>\n
  32. All the King’s Men<\/em> by Robert Penn Warren<\/li>\n
  33. All the Pretty Horses<\/em> by Cormac McCarthy<\/li>\n
  34. A Doll’s House<\/em> by Henrik Ibsen<\/li>\n
  35. An Enemy of the People<\/em> by Henrik Ibsen<\/li>\n
  36. Equus<\/em> by Peter Shaffer<\/li>\n
  37. Gulliver’s Travels<\/em> by Jonathan Swift<\/li>\n
  38. Hedda Gabler<\/em> by Henrik Ibsen<\/li>\n
  39. The Mayor of Casterbridge<\/em> by Thomas Hardy<\/li>\n
  40. Moll Flanders<\/em> by Daniel Defoe<\/li>\n
  41. Obasan<\/em> by Joy Kogawa<\/li>\n
  42. Portrait of a Lady<\/em> by Henry James<\/li>\n
  43. The Sound and the Fury<\/em> by William Faulkner<\/li>\n
  44. Sula<\/em> by Toni Morrison<\/li>\n
  45. The Sun Also Rises<\/em> by Ernest Hemingway<\/li>\n
  46. The Tempest<\/em> by William Shakespeare<\/li>\n
  47. The Turn of the Screw<\/em> by Henry James<\/li>\n
  48. Bleak House<\/em> by Charles Dickens<\/li>\n
  49. The Cherry Orchard<\/em> by Anton Chekhov<\/li>\n
  50. Go Tell It on the Mountain<\/em> by James Baldwin<\/li>\n
  51. Macbeth<\/em> by William Shakespeare<\/li>\n
  52. Medea<\/em> by Euripides<\/li>\n
  53. The Merchant of Venice<\/em> by William Shakespeare<\/li>\n
  54. Mrs. Dalloway<\/em> by Virginia Woolf<\/li>\n
  55. Mrs. Warren’s Profession<\/em> by George Bernard Shaw<\/li>\n
  56. Murder in the Cathedral<\/em> by T. S. Eliot<\/li>\n
  57. The Piano Lesson<\/em> by August Wilson<\/li>\n
  58. Pride and Prejudice<\/em> by Jane Austen<\/li>\n
  59. Sister Carrie<\/em> by Theodore Dreiser<\/li>\n
  60. Tess of the D’Urbervilles<\/em> by Thomas Hardy<\/li>\n
  61. 1984<\/em>\u00a0by George Orwell<\/li>\n
  62. The Road<\/em> by\u00a0Cormac McCarthy<\/li>\n
  63. One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/em> by\u00a0Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez<\/li>\n
  64. Water Music<\/em> by T. Coraghessan Boyle<\/li>\n
  65. The French Lieutenant’s Woman<\/em> by\u00a0John Fowles<\/li>\n
  66. Hotel du Lac<\/em> by Anita Brookner<\/li>\n
  67. Alice in Wonderland<\/em> by Lewis Carroll<\/li>\n
  68. The Bloody Chamber<\/em> by Angela Carter<\/li>\n
  69. The Remorseful Day<\/em> by Dexter Colin<\/li>\n
  70. The Old Curiosity Shop<\/em>\u00a0by Charles Dickens<\/li>\n
  71. Justine<\/em> by Lawrence Durrell<\/li>\n
  72. Absalom! Absalom!<\/em>\u00a0by William Faulkner<\/li>\n
  73. Tom Jones<\/em> by Henry Fielding<\/li>\n
  74. The Good Soldier<\/em> by Henry Madox Ford<\/li>\n
  75. A Room with a View<\/em>\u00a0by E. M. Forster<\/li>\n
  76. The Magus<\/em>\u00a0by\u00a0John Fowles<\/li>\n
  77. Loving<\/em> by Henry Green<\/li>\n
  78. The God of Small Things<\/em> by Arundhati Roy<\/li>\n
  79. The Plague<\/i> by Albert Camus<\/li>\n
  80. When the Emperor Was Divine<\/em> by Julie Otsuka<\/li>\n
  81. The House of the Seven Gables<\/em> by Nathaniel Hawthorne<\/li>\n
  82. A Farewell to Arms<\/em>\u00a0by Ernest Hemingway<\/li>\n
  83. The Trial<\/em> by Franz Kafka<\/li>\n
  84. The Poisonwood Bible<\/em> by Barbara Kingsolver<\/li>\n
  85. Grapes of Wrath<\/i> by\u00a0John Steinbeck<\/li>\n
  86. Much Ado About Nothing<\/em>\u00a0by William Shakespeare<\/li>\n
  87. Lady Chatterley’s Lover<\/em> by D. H. Lawrence<\/li>\n
  88. Lolita<\/em> by Vladimir Nabokov<\/li>\n
  89. Going After Cacciato<\/em> by Tim O’Brien<\/li>\n
  90. The Crying of Lot 49<\/em> by Thomas Pynchon<\/li>\n
  91. The Far Field<\/em> by Theodore Roethke<\/li>\n
  92. Paradise Lost<\/em>\u00a0by John Milton<\/li>\n
  93. The Catcher in the Rye<\/em> by J. D. Salinger<\/li>\n
  94. The Faerie Queen<\/em> by Sir Edmund Spencer<\/li>\n
  95. Never Let Me Go<\/em> by Kazuo Ishiguro<\/li>\n
  96. Dracula<\/em> by Bram Stoker<\/li>\n
  97. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant<\/em> by Anne Tyler<\/li>\n
  98. Omeros<\/em> by Derek Walcott<\/li>\n
  99. The Hearts and Lives of Men<\/em> by Fay Weldon<\/li>\n
  100. To the Lighthouse<\/em> by Virginia Woolf<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    If you’re looking for a book to challenge yourself with this summer (on top of summer reading), peruse this list. \u00a0Each of these works is very meaty, deep in meaning, ambiguous enough for interpretation, yet forceful enough to have had … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":960,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-instructive","tag-recommended-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7448,"href":"https:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions\/7448"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bentonenglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}