The Official Reading List

To keep myself honest, here is the list of books that I need to read.   This may actually get slightly revised, because there are a few books that relatives bought me for the holidays that I'm still waiting to get delivered, and whose titles I can't quite recall at the moment.  


I listed these a bit haphazardly, and probably will read them in an order in no way resembling the order given here. My strictly objective criterion of the order to read them in will be whatever I damn well feel like reading next.

All right, to the list!

1.) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell 

2.) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy, by Stieg Larsson

3.) Conversation in the Cathedral, by Mario Vargas Llosa  

4.) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

5.) Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray

6.) The Ancestor's Tale, by Richard Dawkins

7.) The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood

8.) Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev

9.) White Noise, by Don DeLillo

10.) Friday Night Lights, by H. G. Bissinger

11.) The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James

12.) Life and Times of Michael K, by J. M. Coetzee

13.) Selected Writings, by Ralph Waldo Emerson (probably will just skim this bad boy)

14.) Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie

15.) Humboldt’s Gift, by Saul Bellow

16.) Foe, J. M. Coetzee

17.) Genealogy of Morals, by Friedrich Nietzsche

18.) Steppenwolfe, by Hermann Hesse

19.) Elmer Gantry, by Sinclair Lewis

20.) Homeland, by R. A. Salvatore

21.) Sabbath’s Theater, by Philip Roth

22.) Collected Poems, 1909-1962, by T.S. Eliot

23.) Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), by Jerome K. Jerome

24.) Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo

25.) American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

26.) Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov

27.) City of Thieves, by David Benioff

28.) The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene

29.) City of Bohane, Kevin Barry

30.) Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

31.) The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon

32.) Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman

33.) Red Calvary, by Isaac Babel

34.) God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History, by Stephen Hawking*

35.) A House for Mr. Biswas, by V. S. Naipaul

36.) Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon

37.) Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

38.) Fall of Giants, by Ken Follett

39.) Bismarck: A Life, by Jonathan Steinberg

40.) Reconstruction, by Eric Foner

41.) The Oxford History of the French Revolution, by William Doyle

42.) The House of Morgan, by Ron Chernow

Update: Found four I missed
43.) Empire Falls, by Richard Russo
44.) Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
45.) A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
46.) The Autobiography of Malcolm X

*Quail, literature majors! It’s math!  Rest easy, I’ll keep any discussions about this book boiled down to the finer points (read: easily digestible) for any general person who accidentally found this blog on the way to something better.