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100 Books Every Student Should Read Before Graduating High School

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Updated September 2026

100 Books to Read Before High School Graduation: The Short Answer

The 100 books every student should read before graduating high school run from Homer's Iliad to All the Light We Cannot See, with Shakespeare, Austen, Twain, Orwell and To Kill a Mockingbird along the way. They're numbered and grouped by era below, each with an author, a date and a one-line reason it earned its spot. It's a checklist, not a syllabus.

Twenty-five books a year gets a student through all 100 by graduation. That sounds like a lot until you remember that a dozen of them are plays or short works you can finish in an afternoon. The list breaks down like this:

  • 1–10: Ancient and medieval foundations
  • 11–20: Shakespeare and the 1600s–1700s
  • 21–35: 19th-century British
  • 36–45: 19th-century American
  • 46–58: World literature
  • 59–71: 20th-century British
  • 72–86: 20th-century American
  • 87–95: Memoir, history and nonfiction
  • 96–100: Modern classics for teens

In this guide:

The Checklist, Part One: Homer to 1900

Ancient and medieval foundations

  1. The Iliad, Homer (c. 700s BC) — war, pride and grief; the story everything else answers.
  2. The Odyssey, Homer (c. 700s BC) — the original adventure story and the easier Homer to start with.
  3. Antigone, Sophocles (c. 441 BC) — conscience against the state, in about an hour of reading.
  4. Oedipus Rex, Sophocles (c. 429 BC) — the model tragedy Aristotle held up.
  5. Apology, Plato (after 399 BC) — Socrates defends a life of questioning at his trial.
  6. The Aeneid, Virgil (19 BC) — Rome's founding epic, and Dante's guide.
  7. Beowulf, anonymous (Old English, c. 700–1000) — monsters, loyalty and a hero growing old.
  8. Inferno, Dante Alighieri (c. 1320) — a guided tour of sin and justice.
  9. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1387–1400) — read the General Prologue and a few tales.
  10. Le Morte d'Arthur, Thomas Malory (1485) — the source of most King Arthur stories.

Shakespeare and the 1600s–1700s

  1. Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare (c. 1595) — the usual first Shakespeare.
  2. A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare (c. 1595) — the funniest way in.
  3. Julius Caesar, Shakespeare (1599) — rhetoric and politics; pairs with Roman history.
  4. Hamlet, Shakespeare (c. 1600) — the play most quoted without people knowing it.
  5. Macbeth, Shakespeare (c. 1606) — short, fast and dark.
  6. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes (1605, 1615) — often called the first modern novel.
  7. Paradise Lost, John Milton (1667) — at least Books 1, 2 and 9.
  8. The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan (1678) — the allegory English readers grew up on.
  9. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe (1719) — survival, providence and self-reliance.
  10. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift (1726) — satire that still bites.

19th-century British

  1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813) — the sharpest comedy of manners in English.
  2. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818) — science, responsibility and what we owe what we make.
  3. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (1843) — the gentlest Dickens; a good first one.
  4. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (1847) — integrity under pressure.
  5. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë (1847) — obsession and revenge; save for older teens.
  6. A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens (1859) — the French Revolution and a famous sacrifice.
  7. Great Expectations, Dickens (1861) — ambition, snobbery and repentance.
  8. Silas Marner, George Eliot (1861) — short, moving and underrated.
  9. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (1865) — logic games disguised as nonsense.
  10. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (1883) — the pirate story all others borrow from.
  11. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson (1886) — a one-sitting read on the divided self.
  12. The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde (1895) — pure wit.
  13. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells (1895) — where science fiction starts.
  14. Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897) — told in letters and diaries.
  15. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle (1902) — the best Sherlock Holmes novel.

19th-century American

  1. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass (1845) — slavery in the words of a man who escaped it.
  2. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850) — sin, shame and hypocrisy in Puritan Boston.
  3. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (1851) — obsession on a whaling ship; skim the cetology chapters if you must.
  4. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852) — the novel that moved a nation toward war.
  5. Walden, Henry David Thoreau (1854) — read "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" at minimum.
  6. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (1868–69) — family, work and growing up.
  7. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain (1876) — the easier Twain.
  8. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain (1884) — a boy's conscience against his whole society.
  9. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane (1895) — fear and courage in the Civil War.
  10. Poems, Emily Dickinson (1890, posthumous) — short poems that repay rereading.

World literature

  1. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (1844–46) — the great revenge story.
  2. Les Misérables, Victor Hugo (1862) — grace versus law.
  3. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866) — guilt from the inside.
  4. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Jules Verne (1870) — adventure with a scientist's eye.
  5. A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen (1879) — a marriage examined; a quick read.
  6. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy (1886) — the best short introduction to Tolstoy.
  7. Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand (1897) — courage, wit and unspoken love.
  8. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka (1915) — strange, short and discussable.
  9. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque (1929) — World War I from a German private.
  10. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943) — reads differently at 17 than at 7.
  11. Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton (1948) — forgiveness in South Africa.
  12. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (1958) — colonialism from the Igbo side.
  13. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1962) — one day in a Soviet labor camp.

The Checklist, Part Two: 1900 to Today

20th-century British

  1. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1899) — short but dense; save for 11th or 12th grade.
  2. Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw (1913) — class and speech; the source of My Fair Lady.
  3. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932) — a comfortable dystopia.
  4. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien (1937) — even great readers should not skip it.
  5. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (1938) — suspense done perfectly.
  6. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie (1939) — the best-plotted mystery on the list.
  7. The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis (1942) — temptation explained by a senior devil.
  8. Animal Farm, George Orwell (1945) — how revolutions go wrong.
  9. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell (1949) — surveillance and the corruption of language.
  10. The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien (1954–55) — count it as three books of reading time.
  11. Lord of the Flies, William Golding (1954) — what boys become without rules.
  12. Watership Down, Richard Adams (1972) — an epic about rabbits that isn't childish.
  13. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) — a butler looks back; won the Booker Prize.

20th-century American

  1. The Call of the Wild, Jack London (1903) — a short, fierce survival story.
  2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) — the American Dream, examined.
  3. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston (1937) — voice and independence.
  4. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (1937) — friendship during the Depression; very short.
  5. Our Town, Thornton Wilder (1938) — the ordinary days that matter.
  6. The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck (1939) — the Dust Bowl migration.
  7. Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller (1949) — success and self-deception.
  8. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (1951) — adolescent alienation; see content notes.
  9. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1952) — endurance, told in a short novella.
  10. The Crucible, Miller (1953) — the Salem trials as a mirror for McCarthyism.
  11. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1953) — a world that burns books.
  12. A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry (1959) — one family's dream on Chicago's South Side.
  13. A Separate Peace, John Knowles (1959) — envy and friendship at a boarding school.
  14. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1960) — justice seen by a child.
  15. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes (1966) — intelligence, dignity and loss.

Memoir, history and nonfiction

  1. Common Sense, Thomas Paine (1776) — the pamphlet that argued for independence.
  2. The Federalist Papers, Hamilton, Madison and Jay (1787–88) — read Nos. 10 and 51 at least.
  3. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin (1791) — self-improvement, American style.
  4. Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington (1901) — work, education and character.
  5. Hiroshima, John Hersey (1946) — six survivors of the bomb.
  6. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank (1947) — the Holocaust through a teenager's eyes.
  7. Night, Elie Wiesel (1960 in English) — a short, devastating Holocaust memoir.
  8. The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom (1971) — faith and forgiveness in Ravensbrück.
  9. Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. (1963) — a model of persuasive writing.

Modern classics for teens

  1. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card (1985) — strategy, ethics and child soldiers.
  2. The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993) — the gateway dystopia.
  3. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak (2005) — Nazi Germany, narrated by Death.
  4. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins (2008) — spectacle, power and survival.
  5. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (2014) — World War II; won the Pulitzer.

How to Pace 100 Books Across Four Years

About 25 books a year works out to one every two weeks. Count the giants as two slots each: Les Misérables and The Count of Monte Cristo both run well over 1,000 pages unabridged, and The Lord of the Rings is three volumes. Balance them against short plays like Antigone or A Doll's House.

Here's a pacing plan that lines up with a typical homeschool English sequence:

  • 9th grade: Books 1–10 (ancient and medieval), plus friendlier picks like #11, #12, #62, #64, #72, #82, #96–99. Pair the Greeks with a world history year.
  • 10th grade: World literature (#46–58), 20th-century British (#59–71), and #92–93.
  • 11th grade: American literature (#36–45, #72–86) with the founding documents (#87–89) alongside U.S. history.
  • 12th grade: Shakespeare, Milton and the British novel (#13–35), finishing with #100 and anything left over.

Not every book needs a paper. A good rule is to study about half closely, with discussion and writing, and let the other half be free reading that simply gets checked off. For a full course plan with week-by-week pacing, see our American literature reading list and British literature reading list.

Content Notes Parents Ask About

Every book here is a real classic, and several are not gentle. The ones parents most often want warning about:

  • Racial slurs: Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men. Read them with discussion, not alone.
  • Sexual content: Brave New World (casual sex and drug use are central to the plot), Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Catcher in the Rye. Best for 11th–12th grade.
  • Violence and atrocity: Night, Lord of the Flies, All Quiet on the Western Front, Inferno. Handled with purpose, but disturbing.
  • Profanity: The Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men have the most.
  • Suicide: Romeo and Juliet and Death of a Salesman both end in one; Of Mice and Men ends in a mercy killing.

If a book is a bad fit for your student this year, move it later rather than dropping it. Most of these read better at 17 than at 14 anyway.

What We Left Off, and Why

Any 100-book list leaves out good books. A few that other lists include and we don't:

  • The Kite Runner and The Road: strong books, but the content (a child's sexual assault in one, cannibalism in the other) makes them a family decision rather than a checklist item.
  • Beloved and The Color Purple: major American novels better suited to college or a parent-led senior seminar.
  • Anna Karenina and War and Peace: worth it, but Ivan Ilyich gives a teenager Tolstoy in a weekend.

We also kept middle-grade favorites like Narnia and A Wrinkle in Time off, on the assumption they were read earlier. If they weren't, read them now.

Getting More Out of Each Book

  • Pick translations on purpose. For Homer, Emily Wilson's Odyssey (2017) and Iliad (2023) are clear and fast. Seamus Heaney's Beowulf (1999) is the one most teachers hand out.
  • Watch the play. Shakespeare, Wilde, Miller and Wilder were written to be performed. Read a scene, then watch it.
  • Keep a reading log. Title, date finished and three sentences. By graduation it doubles as a transcript record and a college-essay source.
  • Keep a commonplace book. Copy one passage from every book. It's the cheapest writing lesson there is.
  • Pair fiction with history. A Tale of Two Cities with the French Revolution, The Grapes of Wrath with the Depression, Night with World War II.

Filling the Shelf Secondhand

Nearly everything on this list is decades or centuries old, which means used copies are plentiful and the cheapest way to own all 100. Start with our classical literature collection for the older titles and the young adult shelves for #96–100. Search a title before you buy new — orders over $15 ship free, which usually means three or four paperbacks.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many books should a high schooler read per year?

About 25 a year gets through this list of 100 by graduation. Many homeschool families assign 10 to 12 for close study and count the rest as free reading.

What books are commonly read in 9th grade?

The Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies are among the most common 9th-grade titles.

Do audiobooks count?

Yes, for enjoyment and exposure. For books a student will write about, pair the audio with a print copy so they can mark passages and quote accurately.

Which books on the list are best for reluctant readers?

Start with the short ones: The Call of the Wild, Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, The Old Man and the Sea, A Christmas Carol and And Then There Were None. The Hunger Games and Ender's Game also pull reluctant readers in.

Is this list appropriate for Christian homeschool families?

Most of it, yes, and titles like The Pilgrim's Progress, The Screwtape Letters and The Hiding Place are there on purpose. A handful carry mature content, so check our content notes before assigning Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four or The Catcher in the Rye.

Should students read abridged versions?

For a checklist like this, read the full text of anything under about 400 pages. For the giants, such as Les Misérables or Don Quixote, a good abridgment is better than never reading the book at all.

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