What are some books to read that will look good on a college app?

Question

My dad owns almost every classic under the sun... I might as well take advantage. What are some good reads that will look good on my transcript?

Answer 1

mattyboy you are totally wrong!

i am applying to columbia university, and on their application it asks what books you read in the past year.

try les miserables by Hugo. it's a really really great book. i loved it. :)  

Answer 2

Umm...college applications don't ask you what books you have read.  Such a thing really has no bearing on your admission status.

Not that being well read won't help you in college.

Answer 3

colleges don't care what books you read, but read as many as you can, you can use them as reference in papers and such.

Answer 4

If they ask you...I would do some classics, but also some books that are really more literary--that only really well-educated people will have read, and less-educated people might not have heard of.

I would suggest looking in to:

--Something by one of the big Russian writers: Anna Karenina (Tolstoy); War and Peace (Tolstoy); Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak); Lolita (Nabokov); Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky); The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky); Pale Fire (Nabokov)

--The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe...he can be seen as a more 'commercial' writer, but this book is actually about a very serious topic

--A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (if you're interested in science, this is a must-read)

--American Pastoral by Philip Roth

--The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (one of the most controversial books of the century)

--Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

--Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell

--Something by one of the Existentalists...like Waiting for Godot (Beckett) (one of my personal favorites), Metamorphosis (Kafka), The Stranger (Kafka), Nausea (Sartre)

--The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

Now, for those more abstruse books:

--Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

--The Wife Sargasso Sea byyy...I forget, sorry!

--Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

--The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

--Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

--The Master by Colin Toibin

--Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence

--Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

And for the true classics:

--Something by William Faulkner...I liked The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying

--Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

--Something by Charles Dickens (Great Expectations is the most popular one, though David Copperfield is very good)

--Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

--Walden by Henry Thoreau (you probably won't be able to muddle through the whole thing...he gets a bit repetitive...so just read some of it)

--Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

--Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

--Candide by Voltaire