From
The National’s Saturday
Magazine, here’s a challenging list of some of what I set out to read in the
near future. I might write a little about each that I read, just so that I’m
practicing what I preach when it comes to my students, by encouraging them to
write and react, rather than to just passively read. Why am I reading what is
deemed as ‘The Classics’, when there’s so much controversy about who defines
the quality and purpose of a ‘classic’? Because, sometimes it’s just nice to
follow someone else’s lead.
1.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Mark Twain
2. The
Age of Innocence (1920), Edith Wharton
3. American
Pastoral (1997), Philip Roth
4. Anna
Karenina (1878), Leo Tolstoy
5. The
Big Sleep (1939), Raymond Chandler
6. The
Blind Assassin (2000), Margaret Atwood
7. Bridget
Jones’ Diary (1996), Helen Fielding
8. Catch-22
(1961), Joseph Heller
9. Double
Indemnity (1942), James M Cain
10. Flashman
(1969), George MacDonald Fraser
11. The
Day of the Locust (1939), Nathanael West
12. The
Day of the Triffids (1951), John Wyndham
13. Great
Expectations (1861), Charles Dickens
14. Frankenstein
(1818), Mary Shelley
15. In
Cold Blood (1966), Truman Capote
16. The
Great Gatsby (1925), F Scott Fitzgerald
17. Jane
Eyre (1847), Charlotte Bronte
18. The
Leopard (1958), Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
19. Les
Liaisons Dangereuses (1782), Choderlos De Laclos
20. The
Little Prince (1943), Antoine de Saint-Exupery
21. Lolita
(1955), Vladimir Nabokov
22. The
Old Man and the Sea (1952), Ernest Hemingway
23. Madame
Bovary (1856), Gustave Flaubert
24. The
Master and Margarita (1973), Mihail Bulgakov
25. Middlemarch
(1871), George Eliot
26. Mrs
Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf
27. Money
(1984), Martin Amis
28. The
Name of the Rose (1980), Umberto Eco
29. Persepolis
(2000), Marjane Satrapi
30. 1984
(1949), George Orwell
31. 100
Years of Solitude (1967), Gabriel Garcia Marquez
32. The
Plague (1947), Albert Camus
33. Possession
(1990), A S Byatt
34. Pride
and Prejudice (1813), Jane Austen
35. The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Muriel Spark
36. Rebecca
(1938), Daphne Du Maurier
37. The
Quiet American (1955), Graham Greene
38. A
Room with a View (1908), E M Forster
39. The
Savage Detectives (1998), Roberto Bolano
40. The
Red and the Black (1830), Stendahl
41. Scoop
(1938), Evelyn Waugh
42. Season
of Migration to the North (1966), Tayeb Salih
43. The
Siege of Krishnapur (1973), J G Farrell
44. Tess
of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Thomas Hardy
45. Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), John Le Carre
46. To
Kill A Mockingbird (1960), Harper Lee
47. Under
the Volcano (1947), Malcolm Lowry
48. Wide
Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys
49. Wuthering
Heights (1846), Emily Bronte
(started,
not finished)
50.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Oscar Wilde
Then, I’d like to add on the mountain of books I’ve piled into my
bookshelf, but haven’t read through yet….
1.
The Blue Notebook – James A Levine
2. The
House of the Mosque – Kader Abdolah
3. The
Silmarillion – J R R Tolkien
4. A
Guide to the Birds of East Africa – Nicholas Drayson
5. The
Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal – Sean Dixon
6. Angela’s
Ashes – Frank McCourt
7. The
Surgeon of Crowthorn – Simon Winchester (started, not finished)
8.
Dracula – Bram Stoker (started, not finished)
Let's see how it goes eh?
