top of page

Advanced Placement Reading List

Most Popular Titles on AP Literature Exams

29x Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

22x Great Expectations by Charles Dickens                              

21x Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

19x Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

19x King Lear by William Shakespeare

17x Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevski

16x Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

16x Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

15x The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

15xMoby Dick by Herman Melville

14x The Awakening by Kate Chopin

14x The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

14x The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

13x Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

13x Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

12x Billy Budd by Herman Melville

12x Beloved by Toni Morrison

11x Antigone by Sophocles

11x Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

11x Light in August by William Faulkner

11x Native Son by Richard Wright

11x Othello by William Shakespeare

10x As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

10x Candide by Voltaire

10x The Color Purple by Alice Walker

10x Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

10x The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

10x Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

10x A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

10x A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

10x A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry                          

9x The Crucible by Arthur Miller                                                

9x Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

9x The Tempest by William Shakespeare                                  

8x All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy                          

8x Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

8x Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

8x The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

8x Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

8x The Jungle by Upton Sinclair                                                 

8x Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert                                   

8x Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

8x The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

8x The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

8x Sula by Toni Morrison

8x Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

8x Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

8x Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

7x All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

7x Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton

7x Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

7x Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

7x The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

7x Medea by Euripides

7x The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

7x Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

7x Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

7x Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

6x Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

6x A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen

6x An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen

6x Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

6x Equus by Peter Shaffer

7x Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

6x Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

6x Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

6x Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw

6x Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

6x Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

6x Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot

6x Obasan by Joy Kogawa

6x Odyssey by Homer

6x The Piano Lesson by August Wilson

6x To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

6x The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

5x Bleak House by Charles Dickens

5x The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

5x The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

5x Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

5x Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

5x Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

5x Hamlet by William Shakespeare

5x Macbeth by William Shakespeare

5x Mrs. Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw

5x My Antonia by Willa Cather\

5x Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

5x A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

5x Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

5x Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

Recommended Reading

Social Issues

The New Jim Crow by Michele Alexander
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
Evicted by Matthew Desmond
Between the World and Me by Te-Nehisi Coates
The Coddling of the American Mind by Lukianoff & Haidt
Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
The Blood of Emmitt Till by Timothy B. Tyson

Social Science, Personal Development, and Leadership

Start With Why by Simon Sinek
The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin
Grit by Angela Duckworth
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Mindset by Carol Dweck
Drive by Daniel Pink
Range by David Epstein
Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Quiet by Susan Cain

Spiritual Reading

Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Who Is This Man? by John Ortberg
The Circle Maker by Mark Batterson
The Reason for God by Tim Keller
The Prodigal God by Tim Keller
A Million Miles in a Million Years by Donald Miller
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Everybody Always by Bob Goff
Love Does by Bob Goff

bottom of page