I’ve always been an avid reader in all sorts of genres. I even went through a Louis L’amour Western kick when I was in my early 20s. While I’ve read many of these at some point, now feels like a good time for a reading challenge to read (or reread in several cases) the books. I don’t plan to write any sort of review or synopsis of the books but I’ll update the list here as I start and complete them.
I’ve started today (Jan 1, 2021) and while there are likely as many lists as there are books on lists, I’ve decided to work my way through this one as it looks like they’ve already done much of the work of comparing lists. Why reinvent the wheel when I could just be reading already?
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
originally published in 1925
started January 1, 2021 – finished January 2, 2021 (re-read) - Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
originally published in 1961 (re-reading)
Started January 2, 2021 – - On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Lord Of The Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
- Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- A Passage to India by EM Forster
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
originally published in 1932 (rereading)
Started January 2, 2021 – - Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- Little Women by Louisa M Alcott
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
- The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
- Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
- A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul
- Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
- Atonement by Ian McEwan
- His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- White Noise by Don DeLillo
- The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
- I, Claudius by Robert Graves
- Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin
- A Dance to The Music of Time by Anthony Powell
- Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- Under The Net by Iris Murdoch
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
- Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
- Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
- The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
- The Trial by Franz Kafka
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
- The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
- Herzog by Saul Bellow
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
- Money by Martin Amis
- Oscar And Lucinda by Peter Carey
- Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth
- Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
- Are You There, God? It’s me, Margaret by Judy Blume
- Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- Watchmen by Alan Moore
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera