March 30, 2013
Must Read Books Before You Go to USNA
Photo credit: Public domain
The Naval Academy covets well-rounded individuals, someone who’s as physical as they are intellectual, able to communicate and defend their nation with equal aptitude. About a year ago, I posted a list of books to be on the
reading list of any high school student with aspirations of attending any of the military academies. Keep that list in mind as you read this list, put together by authors. You’ll find many similarities.
TOP TEN WORKS OF THE 20TH CENTURY
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- Ulysses* by James Joyce
- Dubliners* by James Joyce
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- The complete stories of Flannery O’Connor
- Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
TOP TEN WORKS OF THE 19th CENTURY
- Anna Karenina* by Leo Tolstoy
- Madame Bovary* by Gustave Flaubert
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The stories of Anton Chekhov
- Middlemarch* by George Eliot
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- Great Expectations* by Charles Dickens
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Emma* by Jane Austen
TOP TEN AUTHORS BY NUMBER OF BOOKS SELECTED
- William Shakespeare — 11
- William Faulkner — 6
- Henry James — 6
- Jane Austen — 5
- Charles Dickens — 5
- Fyodor Dostoevsky — 5
- Ernest Hemingway — 5
- Franz Kafka — 5
- (tie) James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf — 4
Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is webmaster for six blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a tech columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for ISTE’s Journal for Computing Teachers, Cisco guest blogger, and IMS tech expert. Currently, she’s editing a thriller for her agent that should be out to publishers this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office, WordDreams, with questions.
