100 Books Every High School Student Should Read

By Kimberly Wilson

When preparing for college, one of the smartest moves a high schooler can make is to read, read, read. This is especially true of literary classics. Many of the books covered on this list also surface in university literature classes, so high school students can facilitate their college workloads by knowing the classics before they become required reading. Students should also keep in mind that classics are classics for a reason: they are good books about the nature of the human condition. They reveal something magical about the workings of the world. They are invaluable to the person attempting to become an academic. The following books encompass nearly every genre: the lighthearted tales of Johnathan Swift's Gulliver's Travles to the dark fate of George Orwell's 1984. Read one or read them all, but either way, enjoy and prepare to be enlightened.

1. Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien: WH Auden thought this tale of fantastic creatures looking for lost jewellery was a "masterpiece".
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: A child's-eye view of racial prejudice and weird neighbours in Thirties Alabama.
3. The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore: A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears.
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don't panic.
5. One Thousand and One Nights Anon: A Persian king's new bride tells tales to stall post-coital execution.
6. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe : Werther loves Charlotte, but she's already engaged. Woe is he!
7. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie: The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth.
8. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre: Nursery rhyme provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.
9. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons : Hilarious satire on doom-laden rural romances. "Something nasty" has been observed in the woodshed.
10. The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki: The life and loves of an emperor's son. And possibly the world's first novel?
11. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch: A feckless writer has dealings with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
12. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: Lessing considers communism and women's liberation in what Margaret Drabble calls "inner space fiction."
13. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin: Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love.
14. On the Road by Jack Kerouac: Beat generation boys aim to "burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles."
15. Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac: A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration realism. The anti-hero "Rastingnac" became a byword for ruthless social climbing.
16. The Red and the Black by Stendhal: Plebian hero struggles against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his "force diame."
17. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas: "One for all and all for one:" the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady.
18. Germinal by Emile Zola: Written to "germinate" social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of French miners.
19. The Stranger by Albert Camus: Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and accepts "the gentle indifference of the world."
20. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastry.
21. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey: An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest he can't move a glass church 400km.
22. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys: Prequel to Jane Eyre giving moving, human voice to the mad woman in the attic.
23. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: Carroll's ludic logic makes it possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
24. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: Yossarian feels a homicidal impulse to machine gun total strangers. Isn’t that crazy?
25. The Trial by Franz Kafka: K proclaims he’s innocent when unexpectedly arrested. But "innocent of what?"
26. Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee: Protagonist's "first long secret drink of golden fire" is under a hay wagon.
27. Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan: Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist.
28. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque: The horror of the Great War as seen by a teenage soldier.
29. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler: Three siblings are differently affected by their parents' unexplained separation.
30. The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin: Profound and panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.
31. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: Garibaldi's Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the "jackals" ousting the nobility, or "leopards."
32. If On a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino: International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.
33. Crash by JG Ballard: Former TV scientist preaches "a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology."
34. A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul: East African Indian Salim travels to the heart of Africa and finds "The world is what it is."
35. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia, redemption.
36. Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak: Romantic young doctor's idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
37. The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz: Follows three generations of Cairenes from the First World War to the coup of 1952.
38. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: This famous novella has been adapted for movies, opera and plays.
39. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift: Swift's scribulous satire on travellers' tall tales (the Lilliputian Court is really George I's).
40. My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk: A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
41. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.
42. London Fields by Martin Amis: A failed novelist steals a woman's trashed diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.
43. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaoo: Gang of South American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
44. The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse: Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules.
45. The Tin Drum by Gnter Grass: Madhouse memories of the Second World War. Key text of European magic realism.
46. Austerlitz by WG Sebald: Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.
47. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: Scholar's sexual obsession with a prepubescent "nymphet" is complicated by her mother's passion for him.
48. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood: After nuclear war has rendered most sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding.
49. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger: Expelled from a "phony" prep school, adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult phase.
50. Underworld by Don DeLillo: From baseball to nuclear waste, all late-20th-century American life is here.
51. Beloved by Toni Morrison: Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery.
52. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: "Okies" set out from the Depression dustbowl seeking decent wages and dignity.
53. Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin: Explores the role of the Christian Church in Harlem's African-American community.
54. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera: A doctor's infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, it can't matter.
55. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark: A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun.
56. The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet: Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the beach? If so, who heard?
57. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre: A historian becomes increasingly sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on.
58. The Rabbit books by John Updike: A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.
59. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum "sivilisation."
60. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle: A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.
61. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue.
62. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe: A Nigerian yam farmer's local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionary's arrival.
63. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: A mysterious millionaire's love for a woman with "a voice full of money" gets him in trouble.
64. The Warden by Anthony Trollope: "Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money," said WH Auden.
65. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: An ex-convict struggles to become a force for good, but it ends badly.
66. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis: An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl.
67. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler: "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts" in this hardboiled crime noir.
68. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson: Epistolary adventure whose heroine’s bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.
69. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell: Twelve-book saga whose most celebrated character wears "the wrong kind of overcoat."
70. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky: Published 60 years after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life in Nazi-occupied France.
71. Atonement by Ian McEwan: Puts the "c" word in the classic English country house novel.
72. Life: a User's Manual by Georges Perec: The jigsaw puzzle of lives in a Parisian apartment block. Plus empty rooms.
73. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding : Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sewing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.
74. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: Human endeavours "to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" have tragic consequences.
75. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell: Northern villagers turn their bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.
76. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins: Hailed by TS Eliot as "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels."
77. Ulysses by James Joyce: Modernist masterpiece reworking of Homer with humour. Contains one of the longest "sentences" in English literature: 4,391 words.
78. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: Buying the lies of romance novels leads a provincial doctor's wife to an agonising end.
79. A Passage to India by EM Forster: A false accusation exposes the racist oppression of British rule in India.
80. 1984 by George Orwell: In which Big Brother is even more sinister than the TV series it inspired.
81. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: Samuel Johnson thought Sterne's bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!
82. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells: Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles.
83. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh: Waugh based the hapless junior reporter in this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.
84. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy : Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy.
85. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene: A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greene's novel.
86. The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse: A scrape-prone toff and pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman's gentleman.
87. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s "souls." Then he leaves.
88. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: Debt and deception in Dickens's semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital fellows.
89. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: A slave trader is shipwrecked but finds God, and a native to convert, on a desert island.
90. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Every proud posh boy deserves a bratty, prejudiced girl.
91. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills.
92. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: Septimus's suicide doesn't spoil our heroine's stream-of-consciousness party.
93. Disgrace by JM Coetzee: An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
94. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr. Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.
95. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust: Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring literature's most celebrated lemony cake.
96. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: "The conquest of the earth," said Conrad, "is not a pretty thing."
97. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James: An American heiress in Europe "affronts her destiny" by marrying an adulterous egoist.
98. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: Tolstoy's doomed adulteress grew from a daydream of "a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow."
99. Moby Dick by Herman Melville: Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale that ate his leg.
100. Middlemarch by George Eliot: "One of the few English novels written for grown-up people," said Virginia Woolf.

100 Great Google Docs Tips for Students & Educators

For students and teachers, the Google Docs collection provides a streamlined, collaborative solution to writing papers, organizing presentations and putting together spreadsheets and reports. But besides the basic features, there are lots of little tricks and hacks you can use to make your Google Docs experience even more productive. Here are 100 great tips for using the documents, presentations and spreadsheets in Google Docs.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Navigate your documents and screen a lot faster when you use these keyboard shortcuts for formatting and more.

1. Ctrl+Home: Get back to the top of your doc.
2. Ctrl+B: Bold.
3. Ctrl+E: Center alignment
4. Ctrl+L: Back to left alignment.
5. Ctrl+M: Insert comment.
6. Ctrl+H: Replace.
7. Ctrl+End: Go to last cell in data region.
8. Ctrl+Home: Go to first cell in data region.
9. Shift+spacebar: Select entire row.
10. Ctrl+Z: Undo.
11. Ctrl+Y: Redo.
12. Ctrl+spacebar: Select entire column.
13. Ctrl+J: Full justify.
14. Ctrl+Shift+L: Bulleted list.
15. Ctrl+Shift+Space: Insert non-breaking space.
16. Page Down: Move down one screen.
17. Ctrl+K: Inset link.
18. Ctrl+Shift+F: Full screen.
19. Page Up: Move up one screen.
20. Ctrl+Space: Remove formatting.
21. Ctrl+: Heading style 1. Change the "1" to any number 1-6 and get the corresponding header.

Productivity Hacks

These hacks will make your Google Docs experience even more efficient and streamlined.

22. Templates: Use Docs' 300 templates to get started on different types of documents.
23. Work offline: View and edit documents even when you don't have access to an Internet connection.
24. Create shortcuts: Create shortcuts and bookmarks for new documents, Google Docs home and more frequently visited pages.
25. Save as different file types: Instead of converting docs to different file types, you can simply change it to HTML, RTF, PDG, ODT and more whenever you save it.

Features and Tools

Make use of features and tools like Docs Translation or CSS Editing to customize your docs and make them work for you.

26. Polyline: Draw shapes and lines in Google docs to make graphs, images and examples.
27. Docs Translation: Find the docs translator under Tools.
28. Snap to Guides: With this Edit feature, you can line up shapes in your doc automatically.
29. Reference tools: Google docs comes with access to a dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia that you can use within the document.
30. CSS Editing: Change the display of your doc by manually plugging in your CSS text.
31. HTML tags: Docs supports, or partially supports, some HTML tags, shown here.

Collaboration

One of the best things about Google Docs is that you get to share and collaborate on projects with others. Learn how to make the most of these features here.

32. Shared foldersCreate shared folders and drag-and-drop items from other folders.
33. Privacy: You can choose to have documents published publicly or privately.
34. Share, don't email: Instead of emailing docs back and forth, type in email addresses of people you'd like to share your Google document with, and they'll be sent an editable, web copy.
35. Make changes at the same time: You and your classmates can log into the same document at the same time to make edits.
36. Share a folder: Share entire groups of documents saved in a single file with coworkers and students.
37. Invite mailing lists as collaborators: You can share a document with all members of your email mailing lists with this function.
38. Make a presentation in real-time: Invite others to view a presentation you've made as you see it too.
39. Data validation: Make sure everyone is entering data into the spreadsheet the same way by controlling data validation settings.
40. Allow people to edit without signing in: This means anyone, even if they don't have a Google account, can sign in and edit your piece.
41. Remove collaborators: If you want to take someone off a project, click None next to the name of the person you want to remove.
42. Forum: If you get stuck with a docs problem, you can head over to the forums and find help from other users.
43. Change ownership: Switch ownership of Google docs as project leaders change.

Files, Folders and Filters

Find out how to use files, folders and filters for optimum organization and a clearer display.

44. View and unviewed: You can mark new shared documents as viewed or unviewed, like an inbox.
45. Create subfolders: Make subfolders for better organization. Create, then choose to move it wherever you want.
46. Drag-and-drop folders: Drag-and-drop folders and docs to spreadsheets, documents and presentations.
47. Tag: Tag items with certain keywords instead of going to the trouble of moving them to a folder.
48. Star: You can also star documents, like you would in Gmail.
49. Upload multiple files: Click "select more files" to upload multiple files in Google Docs.

Organization

These hacks are designed to organize your Google Docs, from starting a new assignment to sharing and publishing.

50. Color code folders: Color-code the names of folders.
51. Insert bookmarks: Insert a link to another part of your document, like in a table of contents.
52. Zip archive: Export Google docs, spreadsheets and presentations in a single ZIP archive.
53. Block quote: Use this setting to automatically indent and set aside a long quote in your document.
54. Minimize: Star only the docs you want to see at one time, and minimize everything in the left pane for a minimized view.
55. Annotate with footnotes: Insert annotations as footnotes to your document easily.
56. Preview templates: Preview a template before committing to it.

Edits

With these editing tools, you'll track comments, save editing history and more.

57. Color-code comments: You can color-code live comments in Google Docs.
58. Revision pruning: When you have too many revisions, they'll automatically collapse, or prune, but can still be viewed in revision history.
59. Track edits and changes: In Google Docs you can go back and forth between edits that you or collaborators made.
60. Revision history: View older versions of your document, and choose to "revert to this one" if you choose.
61. Find and replace: This version of find and replace lets you match cases, match whole words, find previous words, and more.

Synchronization

Make your Google Docs work with other tools too.

62. Preview docs in Gmail: You can preview Google docs attachments in Gmail.
63. Google Finance: Enter information from Google Finance into spreadsheets with this formula Syntax: =GoogleFinance("symbol"; "attribute").
64. Sync with Office Documents: With Syncplicity, you can sync Google Docs with Microsoft Office.
65. Sync with your server: To work offline, your documents will have to be synced to your server.
66. Google Mobile: Use Google Mobile to access docs on your phone.

Search

Google Docs uses Google search to find documents and more.

67. Search PDFs: There's a search box in the upper right corner of your PDF document.
68. Search for docs using keywords: If you don't remember the title of a doc, type in keywords from the document instead.
69. Advanced search: Find documents by selecting who you've shared with, keyword, title, and more.
70. Search the web: Highlight a word and search the web for matching websites and images.
71. Search operators: Search operators will help you find starred, hidden and other documents quickly. Example: [is:starred]

Presentations

Learn how to make and present projects with videos, images and more.

72. Embed a presentation in a website: Add your class presentations to your website or blog by publishing and pasting the HTML code that is revealed.
73. Insert tables: You can insert tables into Google Presentations, too.
74. Sequentially reveal objects on a slide: Bullets and text boxes will be revealed one at a time if you select this option.
75. Custom colors: You can choose custom colors to add to your presentation.
76. Hide the gray bar: In presentation view, click on the icon in the upper-right corner of the gray bar at the bottom of your screen to make it disappear.
77. Chat: Chat with your audience in view presentation mode. You'll need Adobe Flash Player 8 or above.
78. Insert videos: You can add videos to your presentation, minimize and maximize it, and move it around your screen.
79. Hide chat: Keep everyone quiet during your presentation by clicking the left side of the chat module.
80. Organize slides: You can reorder slides, make duplicate slides, and insert new slides wherever you want.
81. Replace image and video placeholders: Depending on your presentation's template, you can replace placeholders with an actual image or video.

Spreadsheets

With spreadsheets, you can create forms, reports, invoices, portfolios, and other docs that solve problems, save email addresses and more.

82. Google search inside your spreadsheet: Highlight a word, right click, and select Search the web.
83. Print as PDF: Choose to print your spreadsheet as a PDF if you want all formatting to stay intact.
84. Live lookup: Use the following formula in a cell to ask Google to look up quantitative information: Syntax: =GoogleLookup("entity"; "attribute").
85. Roman function: Have numbers displayed as Roman numerals with this formula =ROMAN(number, form).
86. Create forms: Google Spreadsheets has various templates for forms you can create and have people fill out.
87. Edit forms: Add section headers to make it easier to divide up forms and make them easier to fill out.
88. List view: Select list view to load spreadsheets faster, view from your mobile phone and access basic editing features.
89. Protect sheet: Select Protect sheet to prevent certain collaborators from editing it.
90. Automatically add email addresses: If you have Google Apps, the email addresses of the people who fill out the form will automatically be saved.
91. Scientific notation: Adjust spreadsheets so that cells display in scientific notation.
92. Solve: Maximize and minimize values when you solve problems in your cells.
93. Add and delete comments: You can add, delete and edit comments in spreadsheets too.
94. Freeze columns and rows: Freeze rows and columns to stop editing.

Tasks

These tasks, from printing to tracking tournaments, are examples of other ways you can use Google Docs.

95. Print as a webpage: You can print your doc so that it displays as a web page.
96. Insert mathematical equations: Insert Equation makes an equation editor dialog box appear to add an equation to your doc.
97. GoogleTournament: Create brackets, and let Google automatically update data according to the Men’s and Women’s NCAA Division I Basketball Championship.
98. Enable offline access: You can install offline access for Google Docs to edit existing documents anywhere.
99. Track analytics: Track visits to published documents.
100. Update posts: You can republish posts that are already on your web page if you want to make edits and support an updated version.