Now that I am finished my course, I can read whatever I want again. One of the
words that came up regularly in the course was bildungsroman: a novel
of personal development. I was reading up on it while I was studying and
came across a list of books that falls under this category. There are
some real gems on the list; a few of which I've read, many authors and
books I've been curious about and more that are entirely new to me. It
could take a lifetime to read all these. Here they are:
Pre 1930
- the 13th century Hrafnkels saga
- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
- Jane Austen, Emma
- Leslie Barringer, Gerfalcon
- L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
- Charlotte Brontë, Villette
- Frances Burney, Evelina
- Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Netochka Nezvanova
- Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
- Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (novel)
- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
- Jeffrey Farnol, The Amateur Gentleman
- Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
- Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
- Maxim Gorky, In the World
- Maxim Gorky, My Universities
- Hermann Hesse, Demian
- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
- Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
- James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
- Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
- Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless
- Daniel Owen, Rhys Lewis
- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
- Leo Tolstoy, Childhood/Boyhood/Youth trilogy
- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter
- Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
- Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
Post 1930
- Sherman Alexie, Smoke Signals (film)
- Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
- Paul Auster, Moon Palace
- Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road
- Pío Baroja, El árbol de la ciencia (Tree of Knowledge)
- Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
- William Boyd, Any Human Heart
- Camilo Jose Cela, La familia de Pascual Duarte (The Family of Pascual Duarte)
- Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
- Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game
- Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
- Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One and Four Fires
- Abha Dawesar, Babyji
- Samuel R. Delany, The Tale of Gorgik, Empire Star, Phallos
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
- Janet Fitch, White Oleander
- John Fowles, Daniel Martin
- Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
- Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro
- Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song
- Shannon Hale, Princess Academy
- Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
- Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
- John Irving, The Cider House Rules
- John Knowles, A Separate Peace
- Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird
- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
- Doris Lessing, Children of Violence Series (Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, Landlocked, The Four-Gated City)
- Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men
- Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing
- Michael McClure, The Mad Cub
- Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
- Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
- Frank O'Connor, An Only Child
- Sylvia Plath, the Bell Jar
- Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City
- Terry Pratchett, Mort
- Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
- John Ringo and David Weber, Empire of Man series
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
- Zadie Smith, White Teeth
- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
- Jack Vance, Maske: Thaery
- Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons
- Richard Wright, Black Boy
- William Maxwell,The Folded Leaf
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