Here is “my list” that I mention in every blog post that’s even vaguely related to reading novels. I thought I would go ahead and make it public so that you can have some idea of what I’m reading and a list to refer to if you are ever floundering for something to read.
Also, I know that I will devour these one by one like a honey badger devours bees and rattlesnakes, so I want to solicit suggestions for books to add to this list. Please post your favorite books in comments, or post novels you would read if you could only find the time…
- Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
- For Esme with Love and Squalor – J D Salinger (also want to reread Franny and Zooey)
- Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
- Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce (I read this in high school, but feel compelled to revisit it)
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch – Alexsander Solzhenitsyn
- The Remains of the Day – Kasho Ishiguro
- The Essential tales of Chekhov – Anton Chekhov
- The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (didn’t finish)- The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
- The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
- Candide – Voltaire
- Sula – Toni Morrison
- A Universal History of Insanity – Jorge Luis Borges
- An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
- Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
- The Man Who Was Thursday – G K Chesterton
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Fear and Trembling – Amelie Nothomb
- Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote (LOVED, loved In Cold Blood)
- Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
- Notes on a Scandal – Zoe Heller
- The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
The End of the Affair – Graham Greene(B+)- The Bell – Iris Murdoch
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson(A-)- Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
- Herzog – Saul Bellow
- The Broom of the System – David Foster Wallace
- Madam Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carrol
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- The Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde
- Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Then We Came to the End – Joshua Ferris(B+)- One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison (Loved Beloved and The Bluest Eye)
- The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
- Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
- Wise Children – Angela Carter
- American Pastoral – Philip Roth
- Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
American Gods– Neil Gaiman (didn’t finish)- The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
- Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
- The World According to Garp - John Irving
- The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst
- The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
- Postcards – Annie Proulx (She wrote The Shipping News and a collection of short stories that includes “Brokeback Mountain”)
- One of Ours – Willa Cather
- Arrowsmith – Sinclair Lewis
Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell(A+)- In this Our Life – Ellen Glasgow
- Dragon’s Teeth – Upton Sinclair
- A Fable – William Faulkner (loved As I lay Dying, but hated Absalom, Absalom)
A Death in the Family – James Agee(A+)- The Collected Stories of Katherine Ann Porter
- The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford
- The Optimist’s Daughter – Eudora Welty
- Elbow Room – James Alan McPherson
- The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
- The Rabbit Stories – John Updike
The Accidental Tourist – Anne Tyler(B-)Breathing Lessons – Anne Tyler(B)- After This – Alice McDermott
- The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wilde – Junot Diaz
- Tinkers – Paul Harding
- Jesus’s Son – Denis Johnson
- Cities of the Interior
- Old School – Tobias Wolff
- Sent for You Yesterday – John Edgar Wideman
- Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
- The Adventures of Angie March – Saul Bellow
- The Bride of the Inn is Fallen – Eudora Welty
- The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
- Everything that Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Conner (I’m a big fan of her short stories and her 1st novel Wise Blood)
- The Last Gentleman – Walker Percy
- The Chosen – Chain Potok
- A Garden of Earthly Delights – Joyce Carol Oates (liked Expensive People)
- Them – Joyce Carol Oates
- Mumbo Jumbo – Ishmael Reed
- Other People’s Lives – Johanna Kaplan
- From Here to Eternity – James Jones
- Let the Great World Spin – Column McCann
- Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift
- Losing Battles – Eudora Welty
Cold Mountain Charles Frazier(C+)- Peter Pan
- The Brothers Karamazov – Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment rocked my world)
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin(A+)- Black Boy – Richard Wright (read Native Son in college and liked all but the communist rant at the end)
- Annie John – Jamaica Kincaid
- An Ideal Husband – Oscar Wilde
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
- The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald (liked The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise)
- The Secret Adversary – Agatha Christie
- Proud Man – Katharine Burdekin
- Blink – Malcolm Gladwell
The End.
Filed under: Books I read Tagged: authors, books, list, novels, reading list
