The UCL English Department already has on its website a reading list of books for first-year undergraduates which might be helpful to those applying to university to read English. This is quite short, however, concentrates on the classics, and may look forbidding to some younger readers. We have now tried asking students, graduates and staff which books they loved reading in their teens. From many enthusiastic responses we have compiled the following unwieldy and heterogeneous list, arranged in age sections, which we hope may be of use to some readers.

This list has been edited a bit. Of course many books were suggested over and over again. Some, such as Matilda and Harry Potter, seemed, however delightful, rather elementary for fourteen-year-olds. Others, such as Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings, seemed a bit obvious. Opinions varied a lot about the age at which someone might want to read a book, and therefore the age sections need not be taken too seriously. The number of books listed by each author has been limited; probably most people understand that if you like a book it is worth trying other works by the same writer.

Most of the books suggested are fiction, but if you are seriously thinking about reading English Literature at university you should also experiment with poetry, history, literary history and literary criticism. A useful starting point is a fat, chronologically arranged poetry anthology, such as The Norton Anthology of Poetry or The New Oxford Book of English Verse. Illuminating history books include Linda Colley, Britons and Roy Porter, Enlightenment. Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature offers explorers a useful map of the territory. It is difficult to recommend the perfect introduction to the excitements of literary criticism; suggestions include Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading, Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory and William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity.

Sometimes people can have their lives changed by the oddest books. I was given J. A. Cuddon's Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms for my fourteenth birthday, and I found it a rich source of inspiration and entertainment for many years. It is hard to predict which books will be loved: these are books which some of us have loved.

Charlotte Mitchell

Books for 14-year-olds

Adams, Douglas, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women
Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey
Blake, William, Songs of Innocence and Experience
Bradbury, Ray, Fahrenheit 451
Buchan, John, The Thirty-Nine Steps Card, Orson Scott, Ender's Game
Collins, Wilkie, The Woman in White
Cope, Wendy, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
Dickens, Charles, David Copperfield
du Maurier, Daphne, Rebecca
Dumas, Alexandre, The Count of Monte Cristo
Durrell, Gerald, My Family and Other Animals
Faulks, Sebastian, Birdsong
Gaarder, Jostein, Sophie's World
Gibbons, Stella, Cold Comfort Farm
Ginsberg, Allen, Howl!
Golding, William, Lord of the Flies
Holm, Ann, I Am David
Hornby, Nick, Fever Pitch
Household, Geoffrey, A Rough Shoot
Joyce, James, Dubliners
Kipling, Rudyard, Kim
Lee, Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird
Maugham, W. Somerset, Stories
Maupassant, Guy de, Stories
McCullers, Carson, The Ballad of the Sad Café
Mitchell, Margaret, Gone With the Wind
Mitford, Nancy, The Pursuit of Love
O'Connor, Flannery, Everything That Rises Must Converge
Orwell, George, Animal Farm
Plath, Sylvia, The Bell Jar
Rhinehart, Luke, The Dice Man
Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye
Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Roads to Freedom
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Sheldon, Sidney, Rage of Angels
Shields, Carol, Mary Swann
Smith, Dodie, I Capture the Castle
Stevenson, Robert Louis, Kidnapped
Twain, Mark, Huckleberry Finn
Tyler, Anne, The Accidental Tourist
Waugh, Evelyn, Scoop
White, T. H., The Once and Future King
Wodehouse, P. G., The Inimitable Jeeves
Wyndham, John, The Day of the Triffids

Books for 14-16-year-olds

Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart
Amis, Kingsley, Lucky Jim
Arnim, Elizabeth von, The Enchanted April
Asimov, Isaac, The Foundation Trilogy
Banks, Lynne Reid, The L Shaped Room
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 'Sonnets from the Portuguese'
Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths
Bradbury, Malcolm, Eating People is Wrong
Brittain, Vera, Testament of Youth
Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights
Burgess, Anthony, A Clockwork Orange
Butler, Samuel, The Way of All Flesh
Byatt, A. S., Possession
Camus, Albert, The Outsider
Coelho, Pablo, The Alchemist
Corso, Gregory, Marriage
de Bernières, Louis, The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts
Defoe, Daniel, Moll Flanders
Drabble, Margaret, The Millstone
Eliot, T. S., Prufrock and Other Observations
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby
Forster, E.M, Howards End
Fry, Stephen, The Hippopotamus
Gaskell, Elizabeth, Wives and Daughters
Gunn, Thom, Collected Poems
Hardy, Thomas, Far From the Madding Crowd
Hartley, L.P., The Go-Between
Heaney, Seamus, tr., Beowulf
Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun also Rises
Hoban, Russell, Kleinzeit
Hughes, Ted, Birthday Letters
Hugo, Victor, Les Miserables
James, Henry, Washington Square
Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz, The Trial
Lawrence, D. H., Sons and Lovers
Le Carré, John, The Honourable Schoolboy
Lehmann, Rosamund, The Weather in the Streets
Lewis, C.S., The Screwtape Letters
Lodge, David, Nice Work
Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice
McPhee, John, Pieces of the Frame
Michener, James, The Source
Moliere, Le Misanthrope
Morrison, Toni, Beloved
Neruda, Pablo, The Captain's Verses
Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Owen, Wilfred, Poems
Pasternak, Boris, Dr Zhivago
Peake, Mervyn, Gormenghast
Plath, Sylvia, Ariel
Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49
Sassoon, Siegfried, Memoirs of A Foxhunting Man
Scott, Paul, The Raj Quartet
Selzer, Richard, Notes on the Art of Surgery
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein
Soyinka, Wole, The Trial of Brother Jero
St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul
Stoker, Bram, Dracula
Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver's Travels
Thomas, Dylan, Poems
Trollope, Anthony, Ayala's Angel
Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse-five
Wells, H.G., The Invisible Man
West, Rebecca, The Fountain Overflows
White, Gilbert, The Natural History of Selborne
Winterson, Jeannette, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Wolfe, Tom, The Bonfire of the Vanities
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own
Wynd, Oswald, The Ginger Tree

Books for 16-18-year-olds

Albee, Edward, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Amis, Martin, The Rachel Papers
Asena, Duygu, The Woman Has No Name
Atwood, Margaret, The Blind Assassin
Austen, Jane, Emma
Barker, Pat, Regeneration
Barnes, Djuna, Nightwood
Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
Bellow, Saul, Herzog
Bennett, Arnold, The Old Wives' Tale
Browning, Robert, Men and Women
Camus, Albert, La Chute
Carver, Raymond, Elephant
Castaneda, Carlos, The Teachings of Don Juan
Cather, Willa, My Antonía
Cheever, John, Collected Stories
Conrad, Joseph, Nostromo
Davies, Robertson, The Deptford Trilogy
Dormandy, Thomas, The White Death
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment
Duffy, Carol Ann, Standing Female Nude
Eliot, George, Middlemarch
Ellis, Bret Easton, American Psycho
Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones
García Márquez, Gabriel, Love in the Time of Cholera
Grass, Gunter, The Tin Drum,
Greene, Graham, A Burnt-Out Case
Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter
Hesse, Hermann, Steppenwolf
Hogg, James, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, Poems
Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World
Kafka, Franz, The Castle
Keats, John, Odes
Kerouac, Jack, On the Road
Kundera, Milan, Life is Elsewhere
Laclos, Choderlos de, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Lampedusa, Tommaso di, The Leopard
Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity
McEwan, Ian, Atonement
Melville, Herman, Moby Dick
Milton, John, Paradise Lost
Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita
Narayan, R. K., The English Teacher
O'Brien, Flann, At-Swim-Two-Birds
Pinker, Steven, The Language Instinct
Pound, Ezra, ed., Confucius to Cummings
Rabelais, François, Gargantua
Rhys, Jean, Good Morning Midnight
Richardson, Samuel, Pamela
Rimbaud, Arthur, Poems
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Nausea
Scott, Walter, Redgauntlet
Sei Shonagon, The Pillow-Book
Shakespeare, Macbeth
Sophocles, Oedipus
St. Aubin de Teran, Lisa, The Slow Train to Milan
Steinbeck, John, East of Eden
Tennyson, Alfred, Poems
Thackeray, W. M., Vanity Fair
Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace
Vergil, Aeneid
Voltaire, Candide
Waugh, Evelyn, Decline and Fall
Welsh, Irvine, Trainspotting
Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth
Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse
Wordsworth, William, The Prelude
Zamyatin, Yevgeny, We

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