Texas 9–12 Reading List
Texas Public School’s required high school reading list as free audiobooks. Thirteen of the twenty books on the list are in the public domain and available as free on HearCandy. You can hear the remaining seven with a free Audible account from Amazon. Follow the links below to get started.
Available Free on HearCandy
The Odyssey
Odysseus spends ten years trying to get home from Troy. Homer’s epic invented the hero’s journey, the loyal wife, the scheming suitor, and the idea that home is what matters most.
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Antigone
Creon decrees the traitor Polynices must remain unburied. His niece buries him anyway. Written c. 441 BC, still the sharpest argument ever staged between law and conscience.
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Beowulf
A warrior crosses the sea to slay a monster, then its mother, then faces a dragon fifty years later. The oldest major work in the English language — every fantasy novel ever written starts here.
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The Divine Comedy
Dante descends through Hell, climbs Purgatory, and rises through Paradise. Written 1308–1320, it is the most architecturally ambitious poem in Western literature and a window into the entire medieval world.
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Hamlet
The Prince of Denmark is told by his father’s ghost that his uncle is the murderer. What happens next is four hundred years of readers arguing about what Hamlet was really thinking.
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Julius Caesar
Roman senators assassinate their ruler to save the republic. Shakespeare wrote this around 1599 and understood better than most moderns that political idealism and political violence are often the same thing.
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Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr. Darcy and they immediately dislike each other. Austen’s 1813 novel is a comedy of manners, a marriage plot, and a precise instrument for dismantling social pretension.
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Frankenstein
A scientist creates life and refuses to take responsibility for it. Shelley’s 1818 novel invented science fiction and asked — who is the real monster — before the genre was even named.
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The Scarlet Letter
Puritan New England, sin, and shame. Hawthorne’s 1850 novel invented the American tradition of moral ambiguity — a community that believes in righteousness and practices cruelty.
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Walden
Thoreau spent two years in a cabin he built beside Walden Pond. His 1854 account is part nature writing, part philosophy, part provocation — still the founding document of American individualism.
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Great Expectations
Pip is a poor blacksmith’s apprentice with a mysterious benefactor and ideas above his station. Dickens’s 1861 novel is his most controlled exploration of class, guilt, and what it costs to become who you want to be.
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Up from Slavery
Washington’s 1901 autobiography traces his journey from slavery to founding the Tuskegee Institute — a document about education, self-reliance, and the pragmatism required to survive in a hostile society.
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The Great Gatsby
The American Dream, the green light, the parties that mask emptiness. Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel is the most taught, most quoted, most argued-about book in American literature.
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Also on the List — Not Yet Available as Free Audio
Of Mice and Men
Two migrant workers dream of owning a small farm. A masterclass in foreshadowing and the cruelty of hope — everything Steinbeck sets up, he pays off.
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Animal Farm
Farm animals overthrow the farmer and establish their own society. Orwell’s fable charts exactly how revolutions fail — not through defeat but through the slow corruption of their own leaders.
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The Crucible
The Salem witch trials retold as an allegory for McCarthyism. A study in mass hysteria, accusation, and how innocent people get destroyed when fear replaces evidence.
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Fahrenheit 451
In a future America, firemen burn books instead of putting out fires. Bradbury imagines what happens to a society that trades depth for comfort — and what it costs a man to wake up.
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Night
Wiesel’s memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager. One of the most important first-person accounts of the Holocaust ever written.
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A Separate Peace
Two boys at a New England boarding school, 1942, and the jealousy that destroys a friendship. Quiet, precise, and brutal in its psychological honesty.
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The Alchemist
A Spanish shepherd travels to Egypt following a dream about treasure. Coelho’s fable about following your destiny has sold 65 million copies and is still one of the most read books in the world.
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