Last week, I wrote an article entitled “The Sad History of Freshman Reading,” which detailed recent summer readings at NC schools.
It turns out that summer reading hasn’t always had a sad history though. In response to my column, John Hubisz, a physics professor at NCSU, sent me his summer reading list from the day he was accepted to high school.
He explained:
With my acceptance letter to high school, I got a list of 100 books.? The implication (to me) was that they should be read that summer in preparation for high school.? This was in 1950…In truth, they were not really all books, but to an 8th grader they seemed to be.
I’d be surprised if most of today’s students have read even a quarter of this list by the end of college:
1. The Bible
2. U.S. Constitution, The
3. Federalist Papers
4. George Washington?s ?Rules of Civility?
5. The Belief of Catholics by Ronald A. Knox
6. The Histories by Herodotus
7. The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
8. ?Of the Nature of Things? by Lucretius
9. The City of God by St. Augustine
10. The Divine Comedy by Dante
11. The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
12. The Imitation of Christ by Thomas ? Kempis
13. Don Quixote by Cervantes
14. Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman
15. ?The Hound of Heaven? by Francis Thompson
16. The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton
17. A Bad Child?s Book of Beasts by Hilaire Belloc
18. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
19. The Christ of Faith by Karl Adam
20. The Way of the Cross by Romano Guardini
21. Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
22. Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
23. The Man without a Country by Edward Everett Hale
24. ANYTHING by Fulton J. Sheen
25. Theology and Sanity by Frank Sheed
26. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
27. ?If? by Rudyard Kipling
28. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
29. ?Self-Reliance? by Ralph Waldo Emerson
30. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
31. ?Daffodils? by William Wordsworth
32. “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
33. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
34. Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats
35. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (Class poet 7th grade)
36. ?Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening? by Robert Frost
37. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
38. ?The Song of Hiawatha? by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
39. ?Paul Revere?s Ride? by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
40. ?The Village Blacksmith? by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
41. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
42. ?The Raven? by Edgar Allan Poe
43. ?The Fall of the House of Usher? by Edgar Allan Poe
44. ?The Cask of Amontillado? by Edgar Allan Poe
45. The Complete Poems by Emily Dickinson
46. The Complete Poetical Works of ? by Oliver Wendell Holmes
47. One, Two, Three,?Infinity by George Gamow
48. Poems by John Greenleaf Whittier
49. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
50. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
51. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
52. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
53. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
54. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
55. ?The Red Pony? by John Steinbeck
56. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
57. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
58. ?Trees? by Joyce Kilmer
59. ?In Flanders Fields? by John McCrae
60. Native Son by Richard Wright
61. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O?Connor
62. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
63. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
64. The Autobiography of ? by Benjamin Franklin
65. Candide by Voltaire
66. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
67. Animal Farm by George Orwell
68. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
69. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
70. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
71. St. Benedict?s Rule
72. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
73. The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
74. Republic by Plato
75. The Prince by Machiavelli
76. “Othello” by Shakespeare
77. “The Merchant of Venice” by Shakespeare
78. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
79. Silas Marner by George Eliot
80. Gulliver?s Travels by Jonathan Swift
81. ?A Modest Proposal ?? by Jonathan Swift
82. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
83. Beowulf
84. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bront?
85. Wuthering Heights Emily Bront?
86. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
87. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
88. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
89. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
90. ?Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard? by Thomas Gray
91. Short Stories by O. Henry
92. “Endymion? by John Keats
93. “When I was One and Twenty” by A.E. Housman
94. ?Paradise Lost? by John Milton
95. Our Town by Thornton Wilder
96. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
97. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
98. Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead
99. Microbe Hunters by Paul De Kruif
100. The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand