Books for the College Bound

Paula by Isabel Allende
A book about a mother's love and the torment of losing a child to a fatal disease.






In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
A book about three brave sisters who defied a dictator and were brutally murdered.






T. Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez
A book about the cause of the mass extinction of every first grader's favorite dinosaur.







Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen E. Ambrose
A very good account of the Lewis and Clark expedition that reads like a novel.






Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
A book about a little boy coming of age in his native New Mexico.








I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
A painfully poetic book about Maya Angelou's girlhood and early teens in the segregated south, Saint Louis and San Francisco.







Art Attack: A Short Cultural History of the Avant-Garde by Marc Aronson





Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood









Growing Up by Russell Baker









Waiting for Godot: A tragicomedy in two acts by Samuel Beckett








West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein









Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler









Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card









Silent Spring by Rachel Louise Carson








The Mousetrap and Other Plays by Agatha Christie









House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros









Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky









Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass









Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam by Bernard Edelman








Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison








The Bride Price by Buchi Emecheta









The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank









Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier









Master Harold and the Boys by Athol Fugard









A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines









Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons









The Rattle Bag by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, editors









Catch-22 by Joseph Heller









Hiroshima by John Hersey









Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse









Brave New World by Aldous Huxley








Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco









Say It Loud! The Story of Rap Music by K. Maurice Jones




The Story of My Life by Helen Keller









The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin









To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee









In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason








Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa by Mark Mathabane












Shizuko's Daughter by Kyoko Mori









Beloved by Toni Morrison









The Chosen by Chaim Potok









Native Son by Richard Wright