Extreme Reads
for the
Adult Summer Reading Program
[Each book read is worth an additional four raffle tickets!]
Classics:
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Middlemarch by George Eliot
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Modernist Masterpieces
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Ulysses by James Joyce
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Postmodern Puzzlers:
Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth
Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Challenging Nonfiction:
Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Six Not-So-Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
Das Kapital by Karl Marx
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Other great books:
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
HHhH by Laurent Binet
2666 by Robert Bolano
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Underworld by Don Delillo
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
The Illiad by Homer
The Remains of the Day Kazuo Iishiguro
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Native Son by Richard Wright
Have an idea for a good, challenging read but don’t see it on the list?
Tell a staff member that you’ve chosen your own off-list extreme read when you come in for your raffle tickets.