I have books lists for varying purposes but I need another one. I've been seeing lists all over the internet that tell me what I
should or
must read before I die, but I don't want to read someone else's list, so I've decided to make my own. I will read many more books than are on the list of course, these are just the ones I feel particularly guilty about not reading. Some days that's more important to me than others. I have days when I wonder why I don't just read easy books at this point in my life; other days I have more energy and want to exercise my brain. If I get to the end of the list, the brain wins.
Some of these are books I read a long time ago but don't remember much about. Some are movies I've seen so I'm familiar with the stories and feel like I've read the book, but I know I haven't. Some I've been wanting to read for years. Some of them I'm not much looking forward to reading but I want to have read them; at least then I'll recognize references to them in other writings, and I can stop feeling guilty about not reading them. So here it is...
The Guilt List Completed Guilt List post here.
1. The Handmaid's Tale/Margaret Atwood 8/10
2. The Plague/Albert Camus 6/19
3. Death Comes For The Archbishop/Willa Cather 10/12
4. One Of Ours/Willa Cather 04/14
5. O Pioneers/Willa Cather 02/16
6. Song Of The Lark/Willa Cather 03/11
7. The Innocent Wayfaring/Marcel Chute 11/21
8. Moll Flanders/Daniel Defoe 04/14
9. The Hollow Men/T.S.Elliot 11/21
10. Wasteland/T.S. Elliot 12/12
11. The Sound And The Fury/William Faulkner 10/15
12. The Woodlanders/Thomas Hardy 08/18
13. Jude The Obscure/Thomas Hardy 02/11
14. The Mayor Of Casterbridge/Thomas Hardy 01/16
15. The Blithedale Romance/Nathaniel Hawthorne 11/19
16. The House of Seven Gables/Nathaniel Hawthorne 05/13
17. A Farewell To Arms/Ernest Hemmingway 06/19
18. The Pilgrim's Regress/C.S. Lewis 10/13
19. For Whom The Bell Tolls/Ernest Hemmingway 01/17
20. Islands In The Stream/Ernest Hemmingway 07/17
21. Hedda Gabler/Henrick Ibsen 06/13
22. A Doll's House/Henrick Ibsen 01/16
23. Ulysses/James Joyce 6/11 dnf
24. Dubliners/James Joyce 2/13
25. A Wrinkle In Time/Madeleine L'Engle 11/12
26. Who Has Seen The Wind/W.O.Mitchell 10/11
27. Missing Mom/Joyce Carrol Oates 07/12
28. The Catcher In The Rye/J.D. Salinger 09/12
29. Anna Karenina/Leonard Tolstoy 10/10
30. The Brothers Karmazov/Fyodor Dostoevsky 07/18
31. Ethan Frome/Edith Wharton 05/12
32. The Age Of Innocence/Edith Wharton 3/17
33. Look Homeward Angel/Thomas Wolfe 2/17 dnf
34. Mrs. Dalloway/Virginia Woolf 5/14
35. The Stone Diaries/Carol Shields 6/11
36. The Iliad/Homer 9/21
37. The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer/Mark Twain 3/16
38. Huckleberry Finn/Mark Twain 5/16
39. The Moonstone/Wilke Collins 2/11
40. The Woman In White/Wilke Collins 8/10
41. A Tale Of Two Cities/Charles Dickens 6/15
42. The Old Curiosity Shop/Charles Dickens 5/19
43. Rebecca/Daphne DuMaurier 10/10
44. Silas Marner/George Eliot 08/14
45. The Turn Of The Screw/Henry James 2/13
46. Of Human Bondage/Somerset Maugham 11/10
47. War And Peace/Leo Tolstoy 10/11
48. Cry, The Beloved Country/Alan Paton 6/11
49. The Pearl/John Steinbeck 4/14
50. The Odyssey/Homer 4/21
51. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn/Betty Smith 11/10, 7/15
52. East of Eden/John Steinbeck 08/21
53. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull/Richard Bach 7/10
54. Watership Down/Richard Adams 4/15
55. Middlemarch/George Elliot 1/13
56. Bleak House/Charles Dickens 6/18
57. The Kite Runner/Khaled Hosseini 1/13
58. Memoirs of a Geisha/Arthur Golden 10/19
59. A Prayer for Owen Meaney/John Irving 9/13
60. The Grapes of Wrath/John Steinbeck dnf
61. Slaughter House Five/Kurt Vonnegut 09/21
62. Vanity Fair/William Makepeace Thackeray 11/18
63. A Confederacy of Dunces/John Kennedy Toole dnf
64. The Canterbury Tales/Chaucer 10/11
65. Tom Jones/Henry Fielding 08/16
66. The Portrait Of A Lady/Henry James 02/16
67. A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man/James Joyce 02/17
68. The Trial/Franz Kafka 10/21
69. Northanger Abby/Jane Austen 8/10
70. Remembrance Of Things Past (at least volume 1)/Marcel Proust dnf
71. The Great Gatsby/F. Scott Fitzgerald 05/13
72. Breakfast At Tiffany's/Truman Capote 10/11
73. The Count of Monte Cristo/Alexander Dumas 08/19
74. Moby Dick/Herman Melville 01/22
75. Atonement/Ian McEwan 09/14
76. A Christmas Carol/Charles Dickens 12/11
77. Winnie The Pooh/A. A. Milne 04/17
78. The Poisonwood Bible/Barbara Kingsolver 7/12
79. One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch/Alexander Solzenhitsyn 10/18
80. Go Tell It On The Mountain/James Baldwin 08/18
81. The World According To Garp/John Irving 03/17 finished 01/22
82. A Room With A View/E. M. Forster 01/12
83. Atlas Shrugged/Ayn Rand 06/21
84. Howard's End/E. M. Forster 09/16
85. Madame Bovary/Gustave Flaubert 06/14
86. One Hundred Years of Solitude/Gabriel Garcia Marquez 5/21dnf
87. The Quiet American/Graham Greene 04/16
88. 1984/George Orwell 03/12
89. The Bridge At San Luis Rey/Thornton Wilder 06/13
90. Washington Square/Henry James 01/15
91. The Metamorphosis/Franz Kafka 5/13
92. The Stone Angel/Margaret Laurence 06/11
93. The Professor's House/Willa Cather 06/12
94. Persuasion/Jane Austen 06/15
95. Three Men In A Boat/Jerome K. Jerome 8/10
96. Animal Farm/George Orwell 01/13
97. The Wind in the Willows/Kenneth Grahame 01/13
98. The Bell Jar/Sylvia Plath 03/15
99. Crime and Punishment/Fyodor Dostoevsky 03/15
100. The Remains of the Day/Kazuo Ishiguro 10/16
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