The Beauty of Reading

Hey guys! Have you ever wondered what a reading list at university would look like? Today I decided to put together books I have read so far for my English courses at Uni. I have to admit that as I was going through all of them, I was mostly surprised about the reading list from the first semester at the Uni. I absolutely don't remember reading Thomas More's Utopia or Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner!Shame on me! I also highlighted some of my favourite books which, in my opinion, are definitely worth of reading. Have you read any of the books listed below? Do you think you would like to study English literature at a university? Let me know. xx

1st Year                                                First Semester = Reading Writing:

               Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

        Thomas More, Utopia

Maria Tatar, ed. The Classic Fairy Tales

Paul Keegan, ed. The Penguin Book of English Verse

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Second Semester = Controversial Classics:

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness

Seamus Heaney, North

Henrik Ibsen, The Doll's House

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

Arthur Miller, The Crucible

                                                                    Toni Morrison, Beloved

                                                                   Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

                                                                     Art Spiegelman, Maus

                                                     J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World

2nd Year                              First Semester = Encounters with Shakespeare:

Twelfth Night

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Henry V

Julius Caesar

Hamlet

Troilus & Cressida

Taming of the Shrew

Macbeth

Tempest

 Second Semester = The Tragedy of Knowledge:

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 

Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus

Milton, John, Paradise Lost

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein

Henryson, Robert, The Testament of Cresseid 

Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe

Shepherd, Nan, The Quarry Wood

Larsen, Nella, Quicksand & Passing

Carter, Angela, The Bloody Chamber

3rd Year                                                First Semester = Art and   Atrocity:

Kertész, Imre. Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Speigelman, Art. Maus

Folman, Ori. Waltz with Bashir

Sebald, W.G. Austerlitz

Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Fragments

Sacco, Joe. Footnotes in Gaza

Ryan, Lesleyanne, Braco

Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers

Beigbeder, Frederic. Windows on the World

Armitage, Simon. Out of the Blue

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

= American Innovation:

Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Henry James, Daisy Miller and An International Episode

Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson: Everyman's Poetry

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Willa Cather, My Antonia

Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned

William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

Second Semester:

I'm going abroad with Erasmus which is the reason why I have to do so much reading in the first semester.