Next Year I'm starting my education to become an English major, and I want to prepare myself by reading a few of the books ahead of time. Could someone reccomend a few interesting books? Thanks.
2007-03-03 16:24:42 · 5 answers · asked by Anonymous in Education & Reference ➔ Higher Education (University +)
the top 100 books recommended by Montana State University are listed below. Select some books that pique your interest.
Good Luck
MSU’s Top 100 Books
1. The Collected Works of Shakespeare
2. The Bible
3. Don Quixote-Cervantes
4. Homer's Iliad/Odyssey
5. Ovid's Metamorphoses
6. Finnegans Wake-James Joyce
7. Oresteia of Aeschylus
8. Tao Te Ching-Lao Tzu
9. The Brothers Karamazov--Dostoevsky
10. Alice in Wonderland-Lewis Carroll
11. To the Lighthouse-Virginia Woolf
12. 100 Years of Solitude----Garcia Marquez
13. Pale Fire--Nabokov
14. Divine Comedy--Dante
15. Poems of Wallace Stevens
16. Arabian Nights
17. War and Peace--Tolstoy
18. Beloved-Toni Morrison
19. Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges
20 Heart of Darkness--Conrad
21. Anecdotes of Destiny-Isak Dinesen
22. Oedipus Trilogy--Sophocles
23. Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony-Roberto Calasso
24. Katasaratsagura (Oceans of Story) Somadeva
25. Chekhov's Short Stories
26. Bhagavad Gita
27. Ulysses James Joyce
28. Grimm's Fairy Tales
29. Invisible Man Ralph Ellison
30. Absalom Absalom Wm Faulkner
31 Women in Love DH Lawrence
32. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
33. Plato: Dialogues
34. Remembrance of Things Past Marcel Proust
35. The Tin Drum- Gunter Grass
36. Flannery O'Connor: Short Stories
37. Great Expectations-Charles Dickens
38. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable Samuel Beckett
39. Interpretation of Dreams- Freud
40. Canterbury Tales-Chaucer
41. Four Quartets-TS Eliot
42. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
43. Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie
44. Tristram Shandy Lawrence Sterne
45. Yeats: Collected Poems
46. Golden Bough James Frazer
47. Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
48. Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
49. The Black Prince Iris Murdoch
50. Manuscript found at Saragossa Jan Potaki
51. Bacchae Euripides
52. Vanity Fair Wm Thackery
53. Metamorphosis: Kafka
54. Aeneid-Virgil
55. Tristan & Iseult
56. Collected Poems of William Blake
57. Golden *** of Apuleius
58. Waiting for Godot/Endgame Samuel Beckett
59. Collected Poems of Emily Dickenson
60. Moby Dick Herman Melville
61. Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov
62. Phaedre- Jean Racine
63. Poetics of Aristotle
64. Fathers and Sons Ivan Turgenev
65. Lysistrata (Aristophanes)
66. A Doll's House Henrik Ibsen
67. Importance of Being Earnest- Oscar Wilde
68. Farewell to Arms-Ernest Hemingway
69. Charlotte's Web EB White
70. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
71. Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman
72. If On a Winter's Night Italo Calvino
73. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
74. Storyteller Maria Vargos Llosa
75. Heraclitus-Fragments
76. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
77. Epic of Gilgamesh
78. The Idiot of Dostoevsky
79. Tess of the Durbervilles Thomas Hardy
80. Tale of Genji--Lady Murisaki
81. Montaigne's Essays
82. Walden Henry David Thoreau
83. Native Son- Richard Wright
84. On Nature-Emerson
85. Dr. Faustus Christopher Marlowe
86. To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
87. Gargantua and Pantagruel Rabelais
88. Paradise Lost John Milton
89. Tom Jones Henry Fielding
90. Native Son, Richard Wright
91. The Art of Memory-Frances Yates
92. Middlemarch-George Eliot
93. At Play in the Fields of the Lord- Peter Matthiessen
94. All the Pretty Horses Cormac McCarthy
95. Candide-Voltaire
96. Genealogy of Morals- Fredrich Nietzsche
97. Passage to India-EM Forster
98. The Sea the Sea-iris Murdoch
99. Tristes Tropiques-Claude Levi-Strauss
100. Their Eyes were Watching God---Zora Neale Hurston
2007-03-03 16:36:28 · answer #1 · answered by outandabout 4 · 2⤊ 1⤋
There are a lot of different kinds of "English" majors - are you mainly interested in writing, in English Literature, American literature, poetry, technical writing, early/medieval English, linguistics, etc...
The list of books includes lots of interesting books that certainly wouldnt hurt you to read, but many of them are translations - they werent written in English and are not part of an English major's curriculum. Some things you would definitely read as an English major are the novels of the great writers from Austen to Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, James, Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, etc.... maybe in high school you read one or two of these, but each of these authors wrote multiple books, so you could deepen your experience of them by reading other books that they wrote.
One thing is for sure, when you get to college you are going to be reading piles of books, so everything you can do to increase your vocabulary, reading speed and reading comprehension will be a big plus.
2007-03-04 09:37:47 · answer #2 · answered by matt 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Most people have a focus within their English Major (early American lit, British lit, pre-rev Russian lit...). You may want to check with the college and talk to the department head or other members of the department, they will not mind helping.
Once you find a focus that is where you'd like to being your search... I have minored in English and have only taken courses in Non-Western literature (vague, i know). However, once I decided on that focus for my minor I spoke with the professors and they gave me the basics so I could read them over breaks and have a bit of a head start.
The above list is actually really good... I have had to read well over half of these in college... but that is through the entire spectrum of courses... not just my English courses
2007-03-04 01:42:00 · answer #3 · answered by College_guy 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I had a lot of people that were English Majors in my Linguistics Class (I had to take it for Speech Language Pathology) it was a hard class for them.
I've heard them focusing a lot on the classics... but I think you can go to your universities website, look at the English Dept and find syllabi online noting the literature for their courses. This would be a good start for you...
2007-03-04 00:36:54 · answer #4 · answered by joy 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
In University, I had to read Homer's Odyssey, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (hated it), but there you go. Good luck!
2007-03-04 00:34:51 · answer #5 · answered by curlyk2002 2 · 0⤊ 2⤋