| These lists are reproduced from I Hear America Reading, a collection of letters about reading, compiled by Jim Burke, an English teacher at Burlingame High School in California. Most of the lists have ten titles. Look them up, by title or author, in your local library catalog to find out whether they are available for you check out. |
| The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll
Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut Catch-22, Joseph Heller Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (and other books in the trilogy), Douglass Adams One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie Scoop, Evelyn Waugh V, Thomas Pynchon |
| Hatchet, Gary Paulsen
Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer The Mosquito Coast, Paul Theroux The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe Seven Summits, Dick Bass and Frank Wells Shooting the Boh: A Woman's Voyage down the Wildest River in Borneo, Tracy Johnston Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback, Robyn Davidson Travelers' Tales: The Best of Travelers' Tales, Larry Habegger (ed.) Treasure, Clive Cussler |
| Baseball and Summer Squash, Don Graves
Dispatches, Michael Herr The Education of Little Tree, Forrest Carter Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder Rising Tide, Jahn Barry A Summer Life, Gary Soto |
| A Child's Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas
Fairy Tales (Pantheon series) Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder Polar Express, Chris Van Allsburg The Stinky Cheese Man, John Scieszka Taxi Dog, Debra Barracca The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein |
| American Dreams, Studs Terkel
Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon Citizen Soldiers, Stephen Ambrose A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Ron Takaki Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee The Jungle, Upton Sinclair Lies My Teacher Told Me, Gerald Eskelin Revising America, Frances Fitzgerald Saturday Night in America, Susan Orlean The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trip, Stephanie Coontz |
| Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, Anne Fadiman
Genesis: As It Was Written, David Rosen berg The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age, Sven Birkerts Great Books, David Denby A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel How Reading Changed My Life, Anna Quindlen Imagining Characters, A.S. Byatt and Iris Sordre The Most Wonderful Books: Writers on Discovering the Pleasures of Reading, Michael Dorris and Emile Buchwald The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, Mitchell Stephens Ruined by Reading, Lynne Schwartz |
| The Book Group Book, Ellen Slezak
Books for a Small Planet: A Multicultural-Intercultural Bibliography for Young English Learners, Dorothy S. Brown 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader's Guide, Erica Bauermeister, et al. Great Books for Girls: More than 600 Books to Inspire Today's Girls and Tomorrow's Women, Kathleen Odean A Lifetime Reading Plan, Clifton Fadiman New York Public Library's Books of the Century, E. Diefendorf, ed. The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today, Martin Seymour-Smith The Reading Group Book: The Complete Guide to Starting and Sustaining a Reading Group, Davis Laskin and Holly Hughes Strong Souls Singing: African American Books for Our Daughters and Our Sisters, Archie Givens, ed. Spirited Minds: African American Books for Our Sons and Our Brothers, Archie Givens, ed. The Western Canon, Harold Bloom |
| Always Running, Luis Rodriguez
Dogsong, Gary Paulsen Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card Lord of the Rings Trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien Makes Me Want to Holler, Nathan McCall A River Runs through It, Norman Maclean Rule of the Bone, Russell Banks The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff Way Past Cool, Jess Mowry |
| The BFG, Roald Dahl
The Box Car Children, Gertrude Chandler Warner Charlotte's Web, E.B. White Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss Indian in the Cupboard, Lynne Reid Banks The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle |
| Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, Robert Kaplan
From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas L. Friedman Genesis (Memory of Fire Trilogy, Part 1), Eduardo H. Galeano The Gift of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, Thomas A. Cahill How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, Thomas A. Cahill India: A Million Mutinies Now, V.S. Naipaul My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience, Rian Milan Pictures from the Water Trade: Adventures of a Westerner in Japan, John David Morley Tales of the City (Series), Armistead Maupin A Turn in the South, V.S. Naipaul |
| The Annotated Alice, Lewis Carroll
Collected Works of Shakespeare The Divine Comedy (Pinsky translation), Dante Alighieri Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce The Histories, Herodotus King James Bible The Odyssey (Fagles translation), Homer Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett Walden, Henry David Thoreau Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabar-Zinn |
| American Education, Lawrence A. Cremin
Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, Martha Nussbaum The End of Education, Neil Postman Horace's Hope: What Works for the American High School, Theodore Sizer Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Richard Rodriguez The Paideia Proposal, Mortimer Adler Releasing the Imagination, Maxine Greene Savage Inequalities, Jonathon Kozol School Girls: Young Girls, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap, Peggy Orenstein The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, E.D. Hirsch |
| The African Queen (1951) C.S. Forester
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) Erich Maria Remarque Apocalypse Now (1979) from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness Ben Hur (1959) Lew Ayres Blade Runner (1982) from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Pierre Boulle The Color Purple (1984) Alice Walker Cry, the Beloved Country (1995) Alan Paton The Dead (1986) James Joyce The English Patient (1996) Michael Ondaatje From Here to Eternity (1953) James Jones Gone with the Wind (1939) Margaret Mitchell Last of the Mohicans (1920, James Fenimore Cooper Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) Ken Kesey The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) Walter Van Tilburg Clark A Passage to India (1984) E.M. Forster A River Runs Through It (1992) Norman Maclean A Room with a View (1986) E.M. Forster Schindler's List (1993) Thomas Keneally The Shawshank Redemption (1994) Stephen King The Silence of the Lambs (1991) Thomas Harris To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) Harper Lee |
| Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley Children of Men, P.D. James The Earthsea Triology, Ursula K. Le Guin The Giver, Lois Lowry Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood Kindred, Octavia Butler Left Behind, Rim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, and Your Life, Faith Popcorn Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson |
| Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery
Anywhere But Here, Mona Simpson Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison Betsey Brown, Ntozake Shange Black Ice, Lorene Cary The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison Bridge to Terabitha, Katherine Paterson Coffee Will Make You Black, April Sinclair Dharma Girl, Chelsea Cain Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons Forever, Judy Blume Girl Interrupted, Suzanne Kaysen How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Julie Alvarez Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith When I Was Puerto Rican, Emeralda Santiago |