So, I was having a conversation about revision and exams with my colleagues at work the other day, and we somehow managed to get onto the topic of our university experiences. One of my colleagues, having studied English Literature too, then brought up the discussion of the books that we studied to see whether our degrees overlapped in content in any way, out of general interest (answer: some, but not much.)

If you’ve seen my Gilmore Girls reading list post, you’ll know that I made a little confession about how I didn’t read a single book throughout my time at university. I ended up bringing this up in the conversation yesterday, and it made me consider that perhaps I need to explain it a little bit more (so you don’t think I was a slacker, because I absolutely was not.)

Personally, a book only counts as being ‘read’ to me if I read it entirely from cover to cover –– reading every single page, without skipping any chapters until I get to the end.

When I say that I didn’t read a single book at university, I didn’t read a single book cover to cover (because when you have 56 books a semester to read and you’re not the fastest reader in the world, this is quite a substantial feat to try and attempt… I mean, even last year I only managed to read 100 books and that was in twelve months! There’s no chance I would have been able to do half of that in twelve weeks, even now!) My reading at university consisted of: skim reading and scanning, Cliffnotes study guides, only reading specific chapters, and lots and lots of background research for context.

It does vary by course a lot, but for my degree specifically, most of my texts were quite dense and heavy in content – in the sense that the majority of them were full novellas and novels, spanning anywhere from 200 to 500+ pages!

Back then, I had no motivation to read these books cover to cover because a lot of them were books that I didn’t like, or had no interest in actually reading. I am very much a mood and genre reader, and in my case, a lot of my texts were from the Renaissance or Enlightenment periods… all of which were texts that I wouldn’t purposefully pick up if I had a choice. (It sounds bad, but I am very much a modern/contemporary book kind of gal. I don’t even gravitate towards historical fiction, except in rare cases where the books combine both modern and historical features (such as Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness.)

But interestingly, now that I am no longer at university I somehow have grown a strong desire to actually read them all! Perhaps this is because I don’t have to write 2000-5000 word essays on them all, or perhaps because I can finally enjoy the act of reading purely for what it is.

Either way, I bring you another reading list of all the books that were included in my course at university! (Okay, no need to roll your eyes…). I think I’ve forgotten a couple so I shall be updating the list regularly, as well as updating my progress as I read them; and of course, they’re all posted here in case you’d like to read them too… or, if you’ve read some of these already, let me know what you thought of them! Are there any of these on your own book lists?

Books that I DNF are marked with a 🚫.

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
• A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Angels in America by Tony Kushner
• Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
• Beauty by Robin McKinley
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Carol by Patricia Highsmith
• Chimerica by Lucy Kirkwood
• Citizen: An American Lyric by
• Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
• Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
• Dubliners by James Joyce
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Flood by Stephen Baxter
• Fun Home: A Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
• Generation Dead by Daniel Waters
• Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
• Howards End by E. M .Forster
• I Have Crossed an Ocean by Grace Nichols
• I’m Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti
• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
• Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk by Nikolai Leskov
• Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair
• Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson by Mary White Rowlandson
• Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
• Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
• Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• Mrs McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie
• My Swordhand is Singing by Marcus Sedgwick
• News from Nowhere; or An Epoch of Rest by
• Nineteen Eight-Four by George Orwell
• Notes on a Scandal by Zoe
• Ode to Autumn by John Keats
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
• Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• Othello by William Shakespeare
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• Passing by Nella Larsen
• Pegasus by Robin McKinley
• Rules for Living by Sam Holcroft
• Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
• Selected Poems by E E Cummings
• Selected Poems by Toni Morrison
• Silence of the Grave by Arnaldur Indrioason
• Small Island by Andrea Levy
• Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson
• The Children of Men by P.D. James
• The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black
• The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield by Katherine Mansfield
• The Dark Horse by Marcus Sedgwick
• The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
• The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Ice People by Maggie Gee
• The Iliad by Homer
• The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
• The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells
• The Lady of Shallott by Lord Alfred Tennyson
• The Laramie Project by Moises Kauffman
• The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
• The Murders in Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Odyssey by Homer
• The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
• The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertoly Brecht
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Shining by Stephen King
• The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
• The Submission by Amy Waldman
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchanan
• The Time Machine by H G Wells
• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
• The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
• The Whistun Weddings by Philip Larkin
• The Winters Tale by William Shakespeare
• Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
• Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
• Utopia by Thomas More
• Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion
• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• We the Animals by Justin Torres
• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee