Next Ind Rdg Book

World Literature Independent Reading

AP English

For your next independent reading book, your assignment is to expose yourself to some great world literature—an area where you guys are lacking.  To do this, I’d like you to read something in translation.  The objectives:

• Read some of the greatest novels ever written
• Acknowledge the great literature that is neither American nor British
• Continue to read classics that well-read, educated audiences are assumed to have read—which may be alluded to in more recent writing
• Understand the impact that some of these old Russian, French, and German authors had on literature

The list below is not complete, nor is it exclusive.  If you would like to read a book not on the list, you may AS LONG AS:

• It is indeed great literature (not as determined by you, but widely accepted as outstanding writing)
• It was not originally written in English (a.k.a. it has been translated into English)

The Trial—Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis—Franz Kafka
Crime and Punishment—Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov—Dostoyevsky
Notes From the Underground—Dostoyevsky
The Idiot—Dostoyevsky
The Eumenides—Aeschylus
Medea—Euripides
Anna Karenina—Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace—Tolstoy
Madame Bovary—Flaubert
The Cherry Orchard—Chekov
Three Sisters—Chekov
Aeneid—Virgil
All Quiet on the Western Front—Remarque
Crime and Punishment—Dostoyevsky
Divine Comedy:  Inferno—Dante
Don Quixote—Cervantes
Faust—Goethe
Iliad—Homer
The Stranger—Camus
The Plague—Camus
The Prince—Machiavelli
Steppenwolf—Hermann Hesse
Love in the time of Cholera—Gabriel Garcie Marquez
Hedda Gabler—Henrik Ibsen
The Misanthrope—Moliere
Tartuffe—Moliere
The Flowers of Evil—Baudelaire
So Long a Letter—Mariama Ba


Choose a book, sign it up with me, and then begin reading.  You should read it critically, annotating the copy or taking extensive notes.