So after drama, I arrive at the core of the fiction/poetry collection. This part of the list will be novelists and poets (on the shelves) with last names A through D.
A-D basically goes from the middle bookcase down for four shelves. (This picture covers about 60% of the fiction, poetry and drama. The bottom rows are cut off, though you can just make out 1001 Nights, Collected Poems of Garcia Lorca, Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg and Proust.)
I am genuinely
curious how many books are on the shelves, and what proportion have been
read. A big R will stand for actually having read the book, and in a
few cases I will put a small r for the books in the TBR pile that I
truly think I will get to by the fall.
Kobo Abe The Ark Sakura
Kobo Abe The Ruined Map
Achebe R Things Fall Apart
Peter Ackroyd English Music
Peter Ackroyd The House of Doctor Dee
Ama Ata Aidoo Our Sister Killjoy
Alaa Al Aswany Friendly Fire
Alaa Al Aswany The Yacoubian Building
Ann Akhmatova R Selected Poems
Sholem Aleichem R Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories
Sherman Alexie R I Would Steal Horses
Monica Ali Brick Lane
Monica Ali In the Kitchen
Isabel Allende R The House Of The Spirits
Martis Amis R Money
A.R. Ammons Garbage
A.R. Ammons The Selected Poems
Jack Anderson R Field Trips on the Rapid Transit
Jack Anderson R Traffic
Jack Anderson R Getting Lost in a City Like This
John Ashbery Selected Poems
Margaret Atwood The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood R Cat's Eye
Margaret Atwood R Selected Poems
Margaret Atwood R Selected Poems II
Margaret Atwood R Moral Disorder and Other Stories
Margaret Atwood R The Edible Woman
Margaret Atwood R Eating Fire
Margaret Atwood R Payback
W.H. Auden Selected Poems
Jane Austen Mansfield Park
Jane Austen R Pride & Prejudice
Jane Austen R Sense & Sensibility
Jane Austen Emma
Jane Austen Persuasion
Paul Auster Collected Prose (incl. The Invention of Solitude)
Paul Auster R New York Trilogy
James Baldwin Collected Essays
Balzac Lost Illusions
Balzac Cousin Bette
Balzac Cousin Pons
Balzac Eugenie Grandet
Balzac The Human Comedy (NYRB)
Amiri Baraka R The Dead Lecturer
Amiri Baraka Selected Poetry
Djuna Barnes R Nightwood
Donald Barthelme R Sixty Stories
Donald Barthelme R Forty Stories
Donald Barthelme Flying to America
Donald Barthelme R Overnight to Many Distant Cities
Donald Barthelme R Paradise
Donald Barthelme R Sadness
Donald Barthelme R The Dead Father
Donald Barthelme R Unspeakable Practices
Frederick Barthelme Natural Selection
Charles Baudelaire R Les Fleurs du Mal
Charles Baudelaire R Paris Spleen
Charles Baudelaire Twenty Prose Poems
Samuel Beckett Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable)
Madison Smartt Bell R Doctor Sleep
Madison Smartt Bell R The Washington Square Ensemble
Madison Smartt Bell R Waiting for the End of the World
Saul Bellow R The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow R The Dean's December
Ted Berrigan The Collected Poems (read most but not 100% of this tome)
Ted Berrigan R The Sonnets
John Berryman R The Dream Songs
Elizabeth Bishop The Complete Poems
Paul Blackburn R Collected Poems
Marie-Claire Blais R Mad Shadows
Robert Bly R Selected Poems
Robert Bly R Sleepers Joining Hands
Fred Booker R Adventures in Debt Collection
Jorge Luis Borges R Collected Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges Selected Non-Fiction
Jorge Luis Borges Seven Nights
Borges & Bioy-Casares R Chronicles of Bustos Domecq
Tadeusz Borowski This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Elizabeth Bowen R The House in Paris
Elizabeth Bowen Collected Stories
George Bowering R Burning Water
George Bowering Selected Poems
T.C. Boyle After the Plague
T.C. Boyle Stories
T.C. Boyle Stories II
T.C. Boyle World's End
Gwendolyn Brooks Blacks (Collected Poems)
Mikhail Bulgakov Diaboliad
Mikhail Bulgakov R The Master and Margarita
Ed Bullins R The Hungered One
Basil Bunting Complete Poems
Anthony Burgess The Complete Enderby
Anthony Burgess Earthly Powers
Anthony Burgess To the Hermitage
Morley Callaghan R Such Is My Beloved
Morley Callaghan R More Joy in Heaven
Morley Callaghan The Loved and the Lost
Morley Callaghan R The Many Colored Coat
Morley Callaghan R A Fine and Private Place
Morley Callaghan Morley Callaghan's Stories
Italo Calvino R The Baron in the Trees
Italo Calvino Complete Cosmicomics (including R t zero)
Italo Calvino Difficult Loves
Italo Calvino R If on a Winter's Night
Italo Calvino R Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino R Marcovaldo
Italo Calvino Mr. Palomar
Italo Calvino Numbers in the Dark
Italo Calvino R Six Memos for the Next Millennium
Italo Calvino Under the Jaguar Sun
Italo Calvino The Watcher and Other Stories
Italo Calvino The Uses of Literature
Camus The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays
Alejo Carpentier The Lost Steps
Jim Carroll R The Book of Nods
Jim Carroll R Living at the Movies
Jim Carroll Void of Course
Lewis Carroll R Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
Angela Carter Burning Your Boats (including Fireworks, The Bloody Chamber, Black Venus and American Ghosts)
Angela Carter The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman
Angela Carter R Nights at the Circus
Angela Carter The Magic Toyshop
Angela Carter Wise Children
Joyce Cary R The Horse's Mouth
Raymond Carver R Collected Stories
Raymond Carver R No Heroics, Please
Willa Cather R My Antonia
Celine Journey to the End of the Night
Celine Death on the Installment Plan
Cervantes R Don Quixote (though a different translation)
Chaucer R The Canterbury Tales
Amit Chaudhuri Freedom Song
John Cheever The Wapshot Chronicle
John Cheever The Wapshot Scandal
Chekhov Seven Short Novels (including The Duel, Ward No. 6, Three Years and My Life)
Nicholas Christopher R Crossing the Equator: New and Selected Poems
Leo Connelan R Another Poet in New York
Joseph Conrad Great Short Works (including R Heart of Darkness, Youth, Typhoon and R The Secret Sharer)
Joseph Conrad Lord Jim
Joseph Conrad R The Secret Agent
Julio Cortazar We Love Glenda So Much & A Change of Light
Julio Cortazar 62: A Model Kit
Robert Creeley Collected Poems 1945-75
Robert Creeley So There: Poems 1976-83
Robert Creeley Just in Time: Poems 1984-94
E.E. Cummings Collected Poems
Michael Cunningham The Hours
Elspeth Davis The Man Who Wanted to Smell Books and other stories
Machado De Assis R Epitaph of a Small Winner
E.M. Delafield The Diary of a Provincial Lady
Don DeLillo R Americana
Don DeLillo Great Jones Street
Don DeLillo R The Names
Don DeLillo R The Body Artist
Don DeLillo R Cosmopolis
Don DeLillo Falling Man
Don DeLillo Point Omega
Don DeLillo R White Noise
Edwin Denby R The Complete Poems
Thomas De Quincey R Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Philip K. Dick R The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick The Valis Trilogy
James Dickey R Poems 1957-67
Emily Dickinson The Complete Poems
Pietro Di Donato Christ in Concrete
Diane DiPrima R Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems
Dos Passos Manhattan Transfer
Dos Passos R U.S.A. Trilogy (42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Big Money)
Dostoevsky R Crime and Punishment (though a different translation)
Dostoevsky R The Demons
Dostoevsky R The Gambler & The Double
Dostoevsky R Memoirs from the House of the Dead
Dostoevsky R Notes from Underground
Dostoevsky R The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky R Great Short Works (including White Nights, The Eternal Husband, and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man)
Louis Dudek R Infinite Worlds
Alan Dugan Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry
Elaine Dundy The Dud Avocado
Elaine Dundy The Old Man and Me
Lawrence Durrell R The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea)
Lawrence Durrell The Black Book
Stuart Dybek R The Coast of Chicago (autographed copy)
Stuart Dybek I Sailed with Magellan
Stuart Dybek Streets in Their Own Ink: Poems
While the official total depends on how some of the shorter works are counted/classified, I estimate there are 200 entries from A-D. I have read 76 of them (or 37.5%). Not too shabby. In cases of the poetry collections, I have often read or at least skimmed large chunks but I tried to only include them in the total if I remembered reading them cover to cover. No question there are quite a few shorter works I could tackle to get up to 40+%, but I think my current plan of knocking off a few really massive works and then focusing on reading books that I am fairly sure will be donated/discarded should be followed. That said, I can tell I am kind of itching to go through Calvino in a systematic way, and I also have wanted to reread Bell's Waiting for the End of the World for some time (though I am a bit nervous that it won't hold up as well for me now as it did in my mid-20s).
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