Great books you should read before college

Discover essential books to read before college with our curated list of must-read titles. Boost your knowledge, critical thinking, and preparation for higher education with these great reads.

Jane Eyre Cover
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Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Brontë

In early nineteenth-century England, an orphaned young woman accepts employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall, a country estate owned by the mysteriously remote Mr. Rochester.
Pride and Prejudice Cover
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Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s witty comedy of manners—one of the most popular novels of all time—that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. Renowned literary critic and historian George Saintsbury in 1894 declared it the “most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author’s works,” and Eudora Welty in the twentieth century described it as “irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be.”
Wuthering Heights Cover
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Wuthering Heights

by Emily Bronte

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, the year before the author's death at the age of thirty, endures today as perhaps the most powerful and intensely original novel in the English language. “Only Emily Brontë,” V.S. Pritchett said about the author and her contemporaries, “exposes her imagination to the dark spirit.” And Virginia Woolf wrote, “It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts, with few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.”
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Ethan Frome Cover
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Ethan Frome

 

No summary available.
One Hundred Years of Solitude Cover
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One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the BuendĂ­a family.
The Great Gatsby Cover
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The Great Gatsby

by Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Tells the tragic love story of Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.
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Johnny Got His Gun Cover
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Johnny Got His Gun

by Dalton Trumbo

A powerful narrative which exposes the brutalities and useless suffering caused by war.
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