101 Great Books from College Board

Looking for books to add to your reading list? Check out these 101 Great Books from the College Board to help boost your reading comprehension and verbal score/

Long ago, 101 great books from the College Board were mentioned and put on a list. We don’t know where that list is now on the College Board’s website, but the list–and the books–are great. The list was originally titled “101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers.” However, these books are great reads for age.

Why read 101 Great Books?

Before its current iteration, parts of the SAT were like a vocabulary test. It was assumed that if you read lots of books, you would have a good vocabulary. At the very least, you would be a strong reader with good reading comprehension. Although the SAT has changed, being a good reader is still important because good readers:

• Understand the reading passages in section 1
• Score higher in section 1
• Tend to be natural editors, which means they see the grammar and editing mistakes in writing section 2
• Score higher in section 2
• Understand the word problems in section 3 (even if they can’t do the math)
• Understand the words problems in section 4 (including those super long setups for simple graph questions)

Why 101? It’s just one of those popular numbers, like 101 dalmatians.

101 Great Books from College Board

The list is organized by author’s last name. Check below for the 5 books according to different categories.

1. Beowulf
2. Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
3. Agee, James – A Death in the Family
4. Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
5. Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
6. Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
7. Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
8. Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
9. Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights
10. Camus, Albert – The Stranger
11. Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
12. Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
13. Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
14. Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
15. Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
16. Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
17. Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
18. Dante – Inferno
19. de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
20. Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
21. Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
22. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
23. Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
24. Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
25. Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
26. Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
27. Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
28. Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
29. Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
30. Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
31. Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
32. Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
33. Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
34. Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
35. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
36. Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
37. Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
38. Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
39. Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
40. Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
41. Homer – The Iliad
42. Homer – The Odyssey
43. Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
44. Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
45. Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
46. Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
47. James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
48. James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
49. Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
50. Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
51. Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
52. Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
53. Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
54. London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
55. Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
56. Marquez, Gabriel García – One Hundred Years of Solitude
57. Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
58. Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
59. Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
60. Morrison, Toni – Beloved
61. O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
62. O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
63. Orwell, George – Animal Farm
64. Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
65. Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
66. Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales
67. Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
68. Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
69. Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
70. Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
71. Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
72. Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
73. Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
74. Macbeth
75. Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
76. Romeo and Juliet
77. Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
78. Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
79. Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
80. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
81. Sophocles – Antigone
82. Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
83. Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
84. Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
85. Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
86. Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
87. Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
88. Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
89. Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
90. Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
91. Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
92. Voltaire – Candide
93. Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse-Five
94. Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
95. Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
96. Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
97. Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
98. Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
99. Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
100. Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
101. Wright, Richard – Native Son

Here’s our disclaimer: These books are all classics, but some of them are pretty hardcore. Be sure to read the plot summary of the book before you start reading. Otherwise, your delicate sensibilities may be offended.

5 Easiest Books to Read

The Grapes of Wrath
Lord of the Flies
A Farewell to Arms
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Catcher in the Rye

5 “Modern” Books by Women Authors

The Awakening
The Bell Jar
The Woman Warrior
To the Lighthouse
A Good Man is Hard to Find

5 Books by African-American Authors

Go Tell It on the Mountain
Invisible Man
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Beloved
The Color Purple

Where to Find 101 Great Books from College Board in Dubai

If you love the feel of a book in your hand, try these places in Dubai for the 101 great books from the College Board:

• Your school library
• The Old Library (it’s only AED 200 to be a member for the year and most of these books are there)

Own a Kindle or don’t mind e-books?

Check out pdfdrive.com to search for many of the books that are in the public domain. If you have a Kindle, be sure to download the MOBI format so that the book renders properly on your device.

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