Hardy Far from the Madding Crowd (so very terrible that I bailed halfway in)
Rabbit, RunRabbit ReduxRabbit is RichRabbit at RestRabbit Rememberedfrom Licks of Love
Jez Butterworth Parlour Song
Krzhizhanovsky The Letter Killers Club
David Lodge The British Museum is Falling DownHomer Iliad & Odyssey
Atwood The Penelopiad
Virgil The Aeneid
Ovid Metamorphoses
Montaigne Essays (Selected) & Shakespeare's Montaigne (NYRB)
Musil The Man Without Qualities (after a 3 month slog!)
Max Apple The Oranging of America & The Jew of Home Depot
Narayan Malgudi Days (short stories)
Toews A Complicated Kindness
Cyprian Ekwensi Lokotown and Other Stories (includes Glittering City)
Achebe Arrow of God
Powers Morte d'Urban
Grimson Within Normal Limits
Stone A Hall of Mirrors
William Maxwell LOA novels (Bright Center of Heaven | They Came Like Swallows | The Folded Leaf | Time Will Darken It | The Château | So Long, See You Tomorrow)
Dawn Powell Turn, Magic Wheel & A Time To Be Born
Dawn Powell Angels on Toast
Dawn Powell LOA novels 1944-62 (My Home Is Far Away | The Locusts Have No King | The Wicked Pavilion | The Golden Spur)
Dawn Powell The Happy Island
(intersperse Maxwell and Powell)
Thisby The Good People of New York
Albert Cossery Men God Forgot & The House of Certain Death
Hanif Red Birds (so very disappointing)
DeLillo Cosmopolis (not good at all)
Amos Oz Judas
Pym Some Tame Gazelle
Sontag Debriefing (I, Etcetera plus 3 additional stories)
Burroughs Naked Lunch (pretty grim reading overall)
Craig Nova Wetware (dropped this mediocre rehash of standard SF tropes)
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky The Doomed City & Monday Starts on Saturday
Evelyn Lau Fresh Girls and Other Stories
Celine Journey to the End of the Night
Tokarczuk Flights
Talk Linda Rosenkrantz
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez The Insatiable Spiderman
T.C. Boyle The Road to Wellville & Drop City
Adam Langer Crossing California
Ariel Dorfman Burning City (abandoned 3/4 through, not worth my time)
DeLillo The Body Artist (really disliked this one)
Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay Panty
Sinclair Lewis (Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth and It Can't Happen Here)
Maritta Wolff -- Whistle Stop, Night Shift, Sudden Rain, Buttonwood and The Big Nickelodeon
(intersperse Lewis with Wolff)
Tom Wolfe Bonfire of the Vanities
Paul Auster Leviathan
Masuji Ibuse Black Rain
Maugham The Razor's Edge
Maharaj Adjacentland
Elaine McCluskey The Most Heartless Town in Canada
Aeschylus The Oresteia
Aristophanes The Clouds & The Birds
Faulkner The Snopes Family (Hamlet, Town, Mansion)
Powers Wheat That Springeth Green
Bioy-Casares Asleep in the Sun
Mavis Gallant Home Truths
Natalia Ginzburg Family Lexicon
Morrison The Bluest Eye & Sula
Camilla Grudova The Doll's Alphabet
K.D. Miller Late Breaking
Malamud Pictures of Fidelman
Raspe-Burger Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Krzhizhanovsky The Return of Munchausen
Eggers A Hologram for the King
Kling Qualityland
Teju Cole Known and Strange Things (essays on literature, photography and politics)
Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo (dropped with prejudice after 30 pretentious pages)
Guy Vanderhaeghe Things as They Are?
David Bezmozgis Immigrant City
Mary McCarthy The Group
Pym Excellent Women
Murakami Men Without Women
Melville Pierre
Kierkegaard Either/Or & Fear and Trembling
Tadeusz Borowski This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Amis The AlterationCarrianne Leung That Time I Loved You
Kamila Shamsie In the City by the Sea
Mahfouz The Mirage (disappointing -- I read it before but suppressed the memory)
Walser Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories
P. Roth -- Zuckerman Bound, The Counterlife, Exit Ghost
Nikos Kazantzakis Zorba the Greek (dropped for too much stupid, macho posturing)
Carlos Fuentes Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins
Kathleen Jamie Findings
Richard Yates Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
John O'Hara Waiting for Winter
Richard Yates Revolutionary Road
John O'Hara Appointment in Samarra
Anthony Marra The Tsar of Love and Techno
Bohumil Hrabel I Served the King of England
Vladimir Voinovich The Life of Private Ivan Chonkin & Pretender to the Throne
Craig Nova Incandescence & The Good Son
Ribeyro The Word of the Speechless & Marginal Voices
Fontane Effi Briest
Beckett Krapp's Last Tape & Three Novels
Waugh Decline & Fall and Vile Bodies
Cyprian Ekwensi People of the City & Jagua Nana
Ondjaki Transparent City
Victor Serge Conquered City
Vladimir Voinovich A Displaced Person & Monumental Propaganda
Fuentes Where the Air is Clear
Wendell Berry The Long-Legged House & The World-Ending Fire Perec Life: A User's Manual
Walker Percy The Last Gentleman & The Second Coming
Benoît Duteurtre The Little Girl and the Cigarette (unpleasant and too self-satisfied)
Vargas Llosa The Time of the Hero
Lethem Feral Detective
Craig Nova The Informer
Robert Cohen The Organ Builder & Inspired Sleep
Chaudhuri Friend of My Youth
Chan Koonchung (Guanzhong) The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver
Elizabeth Bowen The Heat of the Day
Mieko Kawakami Ms. Ice Sandwich
Hideo Furukawa Slow Boat
Fontane Before the Storm (try to arrange to read Dec. 2024)
Tolstoy War and Peace
Vasily Grossman Stalingrad & Life and Fate
Marra A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Vikram Chandra Love and Longing in Bombay
Victor Serge Midnight in the Century
Don DeLillo End Zone
Ivan Vladislavić Double Negative
Pym Jane and Prudence
Sayle Overtaken
Bissoondath Digging Up the Mountains
Zalika Reid-Benta Frying Plantain
Skvorecky Miss Silver's Past & The Swell Season
Tanizaki A Cat, A Man and Two Women
Tomoka Shibasaki Spring Garden
Bellow Ravelstein
Roth The Human Stain
Prager A Visit From the Footbinder
Jem Calder Reward System: Stories
Morrison Home (very disappointing)
A. Barrett Ship Fever
Mahfouz In the Time of Love & The Search
Lowry Under the Volcano
Hesse Siddhartha
Mohsin Hamid Moth Smoke
Ghosh The Calcutta Chromosome
Khushwant Singh Delhi Lahiri Whereabouts
Narayan The Guide
Natalia Ginzburg The Road to the City (includes The Dry Heart)
Dickens Pictures from Italy & American Notes
Herzen Letters from France and Italy
Gogol Dead Souls
Conrad The Secret Agent
Bely Petersburg
Victor Serge Unforgiving YearsKurkov Death and the Penguin & Penguin Lost
Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 (and V???) Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being Ed Park Personal Days
John Fante The Big Hunger
Kawabata Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
Meera Syal Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee
Amitava Kumar Nobody Does the Right Thing
Berberova Billancourt Tales & Cape of Storms
Russell Smith How Insensitive & Noise
Julian Barnes Pulse (stories)
Takashi Hiraide The Guest Cat
Hemingway The Sun Also Rises
Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise
Hemingway A Farewell to Arms
Fitzgerald The Beautiful and Damned
Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls
Conrad The Duel
Dos Passos Adventures of a Young Man
Fitzgerald Tender Is the Night
Hemingway A Moveable Feast
Fitzgerald The Last Tycoon
Guillermo Arriaga The Night Buffalo
James Crumley The Wrong Case & Dancing Bear
Gloria Naylor Mama Day
Fuentes A Change of Skin
Naipaul Miguel Street
Kevin Patterson Consumption
Lethem Fortress of Solitude
Lorrie Moore Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Kundera Life is Elsewhere
Sontag Against Interpretation
Didion Slouching Towards BethlehemTim O'Brien July, July (felt like an extended riff on The Big Chill, not a stand-alone novel)
Paule Marshall The Fisher King
Bissoondath A Casual Brutality
Hoban Turtle Diary
Fuentes Aura
Russell Smith Muriella Pent
Nina
Laurie Colwin Family Happiness (disappointing compared to Happy All the Time)
Madeleine St John The Women in Black
Bove Quicksand
(after this more Pym and Doris Lessing* and a return to Mahfouz and Narayan)
Desani All About H. Hatterr
Bellow Adventures of Augie March
Dostoevsky Crime and Punishment
Conrad Under Western Eyes
Chekhov 7 Short Novels
Turgenev Smoke
Huxley Chrome Yellow
Turgenev Virgin Soil
Paula Martinac Out of Time
Huxley Mortal Coils (stories, incl. The Gioconda Smile)
Sciascia Open Doors & To Each His OwnCarter Wise Children
Gissing New Grub Street
Neruda Isla Negra
Fuentes Terra Nostra
Steinbeck To a God Unknown
Cesare Pavese Selected WorksMary McCarthy Birds of AmericaP. Roth American Pastoral
Kafu American StoriesI.B. Singer Scum
J. Roth Radetzky March & The Emperor's Tomb
Walser The Tanners
Pym Less Than Angels
Elizabeth Bowen Eva TroutNatsuko Imamura The Woman in the Purple Skirt
McKay Home to Harlem
Don DeLillo Great Jones Street David Jones In ParenthesisConstance Beresford-Howe The Book of EveHelen Weinzweig Basic Black with PearlsJohn Lavery Sandra BeckRhyno To Me You Seem GiantSaramago SkylightRushdie Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight NightsR. Mistry Tales from Firozsha Baag
Adiga Between the Assassinations
Fisher The Conjure Man Dies
Angela Carter The Bloody ChamberWelty The Robber Bridegroom Taylor The Wedding Group
Didion The White Album
The CoinGunter Grass My CenturyGreen BlindnessSaramago BlindnessKnut Hamsun HungerJohn Fante The Bandini Quartet (Wait Until Spring, Bandini; The Road to Los Angeles; Ask the Dust and Dreams From Bunker Hill)
Perec A VoidCamus The Plague (and perhaps reread/skim The Stranger)Katherine Anne Porter Pale Horse, Pale RiderBuzzati The Tartar Steppe & The Siren
Malraux Man's FateKoestler Darkness at NoonDanilo Kis A Tomb for Boris Davidovitch
Victor Serge The Case of Comrade TulayevThien Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Kim Thúy Ru
Pushkin Tales of BelkinJohn Cheever Thirteen Uncollected TalesMalamud The Fixer
DeLillo Ratner's Star
Skvorecky The Miracle Game & Dvorak in Love
P. Roth Nemeses (Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, Nemesis)
Selvon The Moses Trilogy (The Lonely Londoners, Moses Ascending, Moses Migrating)Lamming In the Castle of My Skim & The EmigrantsRushdie The Golden House & Quichotte
M. Thomas Man Gone Down
Green Living Taylor Blaming Levi The Sixth DayMann The Magic MountainHuysmans Against NatureAusten Mansfield Park (quite disappointing actually)Chloe Benjamin The ImmortalistsGide The Immoralist/Strait is the Gate
Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow
Scarlett Thomas PopCo
Pym A Glass of Blessings
Dos Passos Manhattan Transfer
Christopher Isherwood Berlin Stories
Joseph Roth The White Cities/Report from ParisFante West of Rome
Ghosh The Glass Palace
Craig Nova The Congressman's Daughter & Tornado AlleyKamila Shamsie Home Fire
Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America - indefinitely suspended for cowardice
Trollope The Three Clerks
Achebe A Man of the People
Achebe Anthills of the Savannah
Hoban Riddley Walker
Tunney Flan
Powys Wolf Soylent
Drew Hayden Taylor Take Us to Your Leader
Lem Tales of Pirx the Pilot
Lem More Tales of Pirx the Pilot (a lot of Lem worth reading, but I might circle back first to Pirx and then Ijon Tichy (The Star Diaries, Memoirs of a space traveler and The Futurological Congress))
Victor Pelevin Omon Ra
Hardy Return of the Native
Steinbeck Tortilla Flat
Álvaro Mutis Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Murdoch The Sea The Sea (way out of sequence, maybe rethink this)
Pynchon Against the Day
DeLillo Players/Running Dog
Murakami Norwegian Wood
Austen Emma
Guillaume Morissette New Tab
DeLillo Amazons
Findley Dinner Along the Amazon
Churchill Cloud 9
Cortazar 62: A Model Kit
Lessing The Golden Notebook
Craig Nova The Book of Dreams
Didion Democracy
Malamud The Tenants
Forrest Meteor in the Madhouse
Trollope Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices
Vicki Baum Grand Hotel
Anna Seghers Transit (NYRB)
Bove Night Departure & No Place
D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (uncut version)
Faulkner Sanctuary & Requiem for a Nun
Green Party Going
Woolf Mrs. Dalloway/Mrs. Dalloway's Party
Austen Persuasion
Isak Dinesen Babette's Feast & Ehrengard
Nabokov The Enchanter ?
Rushdie The Enchantress of Florence & Victory City
Elias Canetti Memoirs (The Tongue Set Free/The Torch in My Ear/The Play of the Eye)
Narayan The Vendor of Sweets
Chatterjee English, August: An Indian Story
Dickens Oliver Twist
Celine Death on the Installment Plan
Mahfouz Heart of the Night & The Beggar
Balzac The Human Comedy/Pere Goriot
Davies The Salterton Trilogy
Salter Light Years
Didion Play It As It Lays
Trollope He Knew He Was Right
Bissoondath Doing the Heart Good
Rhys Good Morning, Midnight
Engel Lunatic Villas
Mann Buddenbrooks
Morrison Song of Solomon O'Connor Wise Blood
Welty Delta Wedding
Zola The Fortune of the Rougons
Téa Obreht The Tiger's Wife
Ian Williams Reproduction
Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov
(I'll have to keeping intersperse a bit more Canadian fiction (I've
already added a bit more Alice Munro and some Atwood), and probably some of the early
DeLillo novels, a few more from Narayan and Mahfouz and perhaps Nabokov
from their respective lists, reread Barbara Pym and then perhaps tackle Dickens
and Trollope. Still, this is a decent 2-3 year plan (or 4-5 if I throw
in a lot of Trollope and Musil's The Man Without Qualities and maybe
cycle back through Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa), so we'll just see
how it goes. I'm sure unpacking and rearranging the books will cause me
to promote others on the list higher. I think after I make it through
this extended list, I will more or less work my way through the rest of
the books on the shelves to make sure I have had a chance to read them
all. I believe I have read roughly 35% of the fiction & poetry
books on the shelves, which is actually not that shabby. That will
obviously change radically if I add another bookcase of fiction, but I
think I probably will have to break down and get more shelves.)
*
If I really do start in on Lessing's Children of Violence series, I
will probably follow it up with Eric Kraft's tres amusant books about
Peter Leroy. I got through 6 or so of the early short novellas but not
the later, longer novels. Anyway, I think before the Doris
Lessing/Eric Kraft
combo, I should revisit Jose Saramago, even though some of this will be
rereading. I'm thinking something sort of like this:
Saramago Skylight
R. Mistry Tales from Firozsha Baag
Adiga Between the Assassinations
Saramago Blindness
Perec A Void
DeLillo The Names
Saramago All the Names
Cunningham The Hours
Plato The Republic (special focus on Book VII)
Saramago The Cave
Plato The Symposium
Muriel Spark Symposium
Saramago Seeing
Norfolk The Pope's Rhinoceros
Saramago The Elephant's Journey
Murakami The Elephant Vanishes
Pynchon Inherent Vice
Faulkner The Wild Palms (linked through the palm trees of 'Miami Vice')
(I've already moved just a few up to the tail end of the main list)
If
I really do make it through this and have not gotten completely sick of
this list, it will be time to really tackle Dickens and Trollope -- and
for some variety the longer novels of Murakami -- and probably the
Edmund White trilogy and Joyce Cary's First Trilogy.
I'm
also thinking of tackling far more short stories in 2017-18, as I am tracking here. I've already
been reading Alice Munro fairly regularly and will start adding in
Mavis Gallant and Bernard Malamud. I might set aside a month or
two in 2018 where I work through a number of short story
collections in a cyclical fashion -- perhaps John Cheever, T.C. Boyle,
Angela Carter, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Lessing,
Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, John Updike,
etc. Maybe even John O'Hara and J.F. Powers.
Undetermined position
(books that I purged (unread) but available in Toronto libraries)
Terry Darlington Narrow Dog to Carcassonne
Mulisch The Discovery of Heaven
Transferred from VPL lists
Husain Basti
Albert Cossery A Splendid Conspiracy (UT)
Albert Cossery Laziness in the Fertile Valley (UT)
Laura Lush Fault Line
Andrew Crumey Sputnik Caledonia
Amy Waldman The Submission
4 poets : Daniela Elza, Peter Morin, Al Rempel, Onjana Yawnghwe
Tash Aw Five Star Billionaire
Machado de Assis A Chapter of Hats: Stories
Machado de Assis The Devil's Church and Other Stories (UT)
Machado de Assis Esau and Jacob (UT)
Joseph Roth Right and Left (UT)
Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet
Cesare Pavese The Political Prisoner (UT)
Trichter Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Stewart O'Nan Last Night at the Lobster
Ben Winters The Last Policeman
Frederick Busch The Mutual Friend (UT)
Frederick Busch Closing Arguments
Ken Kalfus The Commissariat of Enlightenment
Ken Kalfus A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
Chloe Aridjis Book of Clouds
Sunjeev Sahota Ours Are the Streets (UT)
Rebecca Lee City Is A Rising Tide
Alex Shakar The Savage Girl
Jansson The True Deceiver
M. John Harrison Nova Swing
Richard Ford The Sportswriter (indeed the entire Bascombe trilogy and coda)
Bishop-Stall Ghosted
John Connolly The Book of Lost Things
Rowan Somerville The End of Sleep
Kenny Fries The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory (UT)
Hisham Matar Anatomy of A Disappearance
Sergio de la Pava A Naked Singularity
Samuel Delany Babel-17
Samuel Delany Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Samuel Delany Nova ?
David Deutsch The Fabric of Reality
David Deutsch The Beginning of Infinity Explanations That Transform the World
Stephen Graham Cities Under Siege The New Military Urbanism
Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot
Michael J. Meyer The Last Days of Old Beijing
Jennifer Egan The Invisible Circus
Joe LeSueur Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara
Will Clarke Lord Vishnu's Love Handles A Spy Novel
Clark Blaise The Meagre Tarmac Stories
Josephine Johnson Now in November (TPL - reference only...)
Martin Flavin Journey in the Dark (UT-Downsview)
Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination Essays on Literature and Society (NYRB edition)
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s By Wilson, Edmund (UT)
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s By Wilson, Edmund (UT)
Edmund Wilson Memoirs of Hecate County
The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs By Bierce, Ambrose (UT)
Roald Nasgaard The Mystic North
Michael North Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age (UT)
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