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