Reader's Digest List of Best Formative Reads

For those of you planning your summer reading, here are some books worth considering. Reader's Digest has compiled a list of books "that have helped define the national character." You probably have already read most of them so maybe a re-read is in order.

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
2. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
3. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
4. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
5. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
6. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
7. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
8. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
9. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
10. Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque by Edgar Allan Poe
11. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
12. Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
13. The Education of Henry James by Henry James
14. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
15. Poems by Emily Dickinson
16. The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

As I typed this list I realized that I read many of these books so long ago that I have a very dim memory of the details. A second reading always seems sweeter to me. That adage "Education is wasted on the young" comes to mind.