Reading List

One of the best ways to learn the character of a school is to examine its reading list. After all, these books and texts will form the vast majority of what students engage with everyday. At LCA, we take great pride in our reading list; it is a carefully crafted selection that introduces students to a remarkable number of the greatest books ever written and prepares them for a life-long love of learning.

The reading list is not exhaustive, nor permanent: each year the faculty works with the administration to make small improvements, and at rare times, the faculty will supplement this curriculum with other approved works. However, alterations and additions to the list will always be few, and this list is the most specific and accurate answer to the question, “What do LCA students read?” The books are listed in the usual order in which they are read, which is often–but not always–chronological.

This list does not include textbooks, which are often used in mathematics, science, and elementary history classes. We, of course, think that textbooks are important, but since they are read simply to obtain information and not for the quality of their writing, we do not list them here. All of our curricula are always accessible to both the public and our current families, so if you would like to learn which textbooks and supplementary materials we use in class, please contact us.

We have a strong preference for reading entire books, as evidenced by the requirement in 10th grade to read the entire 14,233 verses of Dante’s Divine Comedy. However, there are natural limits to this approach, and we are often obligated to teach only a selection of the text. Such selected books are marked with asterisks to indicate that the students do not complete the book.

Beginning in 8th grade, the Humanities class surveys a specific time period and forms the bulk (but not the entirety) of what students read that year. Those time periods are indicated next to the grade level.

1st Grade:

  • The Little House, Virginia Lee Burton

  • Frog and Toad Are Friends, Arnold Lobel

  • Sarah, Plain and Tall, Patricia MacLachlan

  • Amelia Bedelia, Peggy Parish

  • Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie, Connie Roop

  • Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

2nd Grade:

  • The Hundred Dresses, Eleanor Estes

  • The Boxcar Children, Gertrude Chandler Warner

  • Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder

  • Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Richard and Florence Atwater

  • The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White

3rd Grade:

  • Fables, Aesop*

  • Greek Myths, Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire

  • The Borrowers, Mary Norton

  • The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

  • The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis

  • The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

4th Grade:

  • Parallel Lives, Plutarch*

  • The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum

  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

  • The Call of The Wild, Jack London

  • The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

5th Grade:

  • The Declaration of Independence

  • The US Constitution

  • The Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln

  • The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis

  • The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling*

  • A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

  • Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson

6th Grade:

  • Genesis

  • Crito and Apology, Plato

  • The Gospel of Mark

  • Twenty Thousands Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne

  • The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

  • Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs

  • The Time Machine, H.G. Wells

7th Grade:

  • Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and The Tempest, Shakespeare

  • The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

  • The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

  • 1984, George Orwell

8th Grade (Ancient Civilizations):

  • Elements, Euclid*

  • Exodus

  • Judges

  • Samuel

  • Kings

  • Job

  • Ecclesiastes

  • Psalms*

  • The Gospel of Matthew

  • The Gospel of John

  • Romans and Corinthians, Paul

  • Confessions, Augustine

  • Annalects, Confucius

  • Zhuangzi, Zhuang Zhou

  • Bhagavad Gita, Veda Vyasa

9th Grade (The United States):

  • “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards

  • The Declaration of Independence

  • The Articles of Confederacy

  • The Constitution

  • The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay*

  • Democracy in America, Alexis de Toqueville*

  • Supreme Court cases: Marbury v. Madison, Dred Scott v. Sanford, Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Miranda v. Arizona, McCulloch v. Maryland, Brandenburg v. Ohio, Citizens’ United v. Federal Election Commission, District of Columbia v. Heller, Trump v. United States* (all are selections of the complete text)

  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”, and “West India Emancipation,” Frederick Douglass

  • Walden, Henry David Thoreau

  • “Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and “Billy Budd,” Herman Melville

  • First and Second Inaugural Addresses and The Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln

  • Poems, Emily Dickenson*

  • Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

  • “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner

  • “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” Jane Addams

  • “The Story of an Hour,” Kate Chopin

  • “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” Flannery O’Connor

  • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

  • “Sunday Morning” and “Idea of Order at Key West,” Wallace Stevens

  • “Letters from Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream,” Martin Luther King Jr.

  • On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin*

10th Grade (Medieval and Renaissance Europe):

  • Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas*

  • The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri

  • Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich

  • The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer*

  • The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli

  • In Praise of Folly and “The Art of Learning,” Desiderius Erasmus

  • Essays, Michel de Montaigne*

  • The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon*

  • Hamlet and King Lear, William Shakespeare

11th Grade (Enlightenment and Industrial Europe):

  • Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes*

  • Meditations on First Philosophy, Renee Descartes

  • Two Treatises on Government, John Locke

  • Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo Galilei*

  • The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  • The Mathematical Principles of Natural Science, Isaac Newton*

  • A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume*

  • An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith*

  • Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant

  • Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

  • The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

  • Beyond Good and Evil, Frederick Nietzsche*

  • Stories, Franz Kafka*

  • “The Dead,” James Joyce

  • “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin

  • “The Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger

  • To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

12th Grade (Ancient Greece):

  • The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer

  • Histories, Herodotus*

  • Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus

  • Oedipus The Tyrant, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles

  • The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides*

  • Phaedrus, Meno, and Republic, Plato

  • Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, and Politics, Aristotle

  • Almagest, Ptolemy*

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