It's a little hard to count precisely, but it seems that I read approximately 60 novels (and a dozen or so poetry collections) in the last 12 month span. This suggests that there is a reasonable chance I will be within striking distance of getting to Middlemarch by December 2015, and I won't have to distort my reading list too much to slot it in then (not that I am sure they will be doing the tackle Middlemarch in December blog again, but I can go forward on my own regardless). It also appears as though I will need to add a bit more Canadian fiction to the list to get to 13 by next June, though as usually is the case, I'll probably supplement the novels with some poetry collections. I think I'll aim to end the 9th Challenge with either Paul Quarrington's Whale Music or Steve Zipp's Yellowknife, depending on how I do with the rest of the list (and what else I am doing aside from reading fiction in my limited spare time). It's still somewhat depressing that I have my reading more or less mapped out through 2018 or so, though there are some incredible books on here that I probably won't get to unless I stick to the program. (On the flip side, we do think we'll be in this house for 10+ years, and I should be able to get through this particular list by then, providing I don't continually add to it...)
I would say overall there is a slightly reduced emphasis on getting through books on my TBRD pile (To-Be-Read-and-Discarded) and more emphasis on books that I think I will enjoy but that I have deferred for too long. There are even a small number of books in the list I will actually be rereading, but not very many.
{library hold mishap:
Amit Chaudhuri The Immortals - didn't care for; decided to return unread}
Alice Denham Amo (cannot be acquired through ILL -- I read a bit sitting in the reference library and decided to pass for now)
Smollett Peregrine Pickle (I agree with the reviews that say this goes downhill sharply after page 50 -- a minor novel about a very unpleasant man-child that should be ignored)
Verjee In Between Dreams -- this novel involves a topic (incest) that I am simply not willing to read about
Bove A Singular Man
Spark Memento Mori
Singer Enemies
Faulkner Flags in the Dust & The Unvanquished
P. Roth - The Breast, The Professor of Desire, The Dying Animal
Pushkin The Captain's Daughter
Walser Jakob Von Gunten
Melville The Confidence Man
Mann Felix Krull ??
Pablo Vierci The Imposters
Tony Parsons Departures -- (dialogue/plotting was so amateurish, I had to give up)
Khushwant Singh Train To Pakistan
al-Khamissi Taxi
Mahfouz Midaq Alley
Gregor von Rezzori Death of My Brother Abel
Jez Butterworth Parlour Song
(a bit of interspersion with these shorter works and the Rabbit novels)
Montaigne (&
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 A Time To Be Born
Dawn Powell LOA novels 1944-62 (My Home Is Far Away | The Locusts Have No King | The Wicked Pavilion | The Golden Spur)
(intersperse Maxwell and Powell)
T.C. Boyle Drop City
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
Maugham The Razor's Edge
Aeschylus The Oresteia
Faulkner The Snopes Family (Hamlet, Town, Mansion)
Powers Wheat That Springeth Green
Natalia Ginzburg Family Lexicon
Malamud Pictures of Fidelman
Mary McCarthy The Group
Melville Pierre
Kierkegaard Either/Or &
Mahfouz The Mirage
P. Roth -- Zuckerman Bound, Exit Ghost
Richard Yates Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
John O'Hara Waiting for Winter
Richard Yates Revolutionary Road
John O'Hara Appointment in Samarra
Waugh Decline & Fall and Vile Bodies
Victor Serge Conquered City
Fuentes Where the Air is Clear
Vargas Llosa The Time of the Hero
Elizabeth Bowen The Heat of the Day
Fontane Before the Storm
Tolstoy War and Peace
Vasily Grossman Life and Fate
Victor Serge Midnight in the Century
Don DeLillo End Zone
Bissoondath Digging Up the Mountains
Skvorecky Miss Silver's Past
Roth The Counterlife
Ghosh The Calcutta Chromosome
Natalia Ginzburg The Road to the City (includes The Dry Heart)
Dickens Pictures from Italy & American Notes
Herzen Letters from France and Italy
Bely Petersburg
Victor Serge Unforgiving Years
Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 (and V???)
Kawabata Palm-of-the-Hand Stories
Meera Syal Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee
Russell Smith How Insensitive & Noise
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
Dos Passos Adventures of a Young Man
Fitzgerald Tender Is the Night
Hemingway A Moveable Feast
Fitzgerald The Last Tycoon
Gloria Naylor Mama Day
Fuentes A Change of Skin
Naipaul Miguel Street
Bissoondath A Casual Brutality
Fuentes Aura
Russell Smith Muriella Pent
Laurie Colwin Family Happiness
Bove Quicksand
(after this more Pym and Doris Lessing** and a return to Mahfouz and Narayan)
Chekhov 7 Short Novels
Turgenev Smoke
Huxley Chrome Yellow
Turgenev Virgin Soil
Huxley Mortal Coils (stories, incl.
Gissing New Grub Street
Neruda Isla Negra
Fuentes Terra Nostra
Steinbeck To a God Unknown
Cesare Pavese Selected Works
Mary McCarthy Birds of America
P. Roth American Pastoral
Kafu American Stories
I.B. Singer Enemies
J. Roth Radetzky March & The Emperor's Tomb
Walser The Tanners
Pym Excellent Women
Elizabeth Bowen Eva Trout
McKay Home to Harlem
Don DeLillo Great Jones Street
Mordecai Richler The Street
Constance Beresford-Howe The Book of Eve
Helen Weinzweig Basic Black with Pearls
John Lavery Sandra Beck
Saramago Skylight
R. Mistry Tales from Firozsha Baag
Adiga Between the Assassinations
Fisher The Conjure Man Dies
Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber
Welty The Robber Bridegroom
Taylor The Wedding Group
Green Blindness
Perec A Void
Koestler Darkness at Noon
Victor Serge The Case of Comrade Tulayev
Thien Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Kim Thúy Ru
Malamud The Fixer
DeLillo Ratner's Star
P. Roth Nemeses (Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, Nemesis)
M. Thomas Man Gone Down
Green Living
Levi The Sixth Day
Huysmans Against Nature
Austen Pride and Prejudice
Gide The Immoralist/Strait Is the Gate
Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow
Scarlett Thomas PopCo
Pym Jane and Prudence
Dos Passos Manhattan Transfer
Christopher Isherwood Berlin Stories
Joseph Roth The White Cities/Report from Paris
Fante West of Rome
Ghosh The Glass Palace
Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America - indefinitely suspended for cowardice
de Tocqueville Democracy in America
Trollope The Three Clerks
Achebe A Man of the People
Musil The Man Without Qualities (try to arrange to read Dec. 2018)
Cela The Hive
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 Sense and Sensibility
Guillaume Morissette New Tab
Gornick Louisa Meets Bear
DeLillo Amazons
Findley Dinner Along the Amazon
Churchill Cloud 9
Cortazar 62: A Model Kit
Lessing The Golden Notebook
Musil Five Women
Jean Rhys Quartet & After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
Munro Friend of My Youth
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
Isak Dinesen
Nabokov The Enchanter ?
Narayan The Vendor of Sweets
Chatterjee English, August: An Indian Story
Dickens Oliver Twist
Celine Death on the Installment Plan
Mahfouz The Beggar
Balzac The Human Comedy/Pere Goriot
Davies The Salterton Trilogy
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
O'Connor Wise Blood
Welty Delta Wedding
Zola The Fortune of the Rougons
Téa Obreht The Tiger's Wife
Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov
(I'll have to intersperse a bit more Canadian fiction† (I've already added a bit more Alice Munro), and probably some of the early DeLillo novels, a few more from Narayan and Mahfouz and perhaps Nabokov from their respective lists, maybe tackle Austen, maybe work in a bit more Doris Lessing, 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.)
* Of course, this is yet another novel that the Toronto Public Library owns but has turned into a reference book, so it can only be read in the library; I probably won't bother.
** 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.
† Actually I had no problem adding a bit more Canadian fiction. (I had a considerably harder time finishing Middlemarch in Dec. 2015, but I just made it.) In terms of shaping the list, I am hoping to end the 9th Canadian Challenge with Whale Music in June. I'll probably more or less keep the list in this shape through Vanity Fair, which I am now targeting to tackle in Dec. 2016. After that, I think I will want to blow out the 10th Canadian Challenge with a bang, since it might be the last one. I'll already have gotten a couple of Munro story collections and presumably Mavis Gallant (for the first time) and probably Steve Zipp's Yellowknife. In terms of what I will promote or add, so that I can review them by June 2017, I am thinking about The Book of Negroes, The Stone Carvers, Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage, Bowering's Burning Water (though I might have reread it already), Skvorecky's Miss Silver's Past, at least something by Bissoondath and Vanderhaeghe (probably Daddy Lenin), and Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness (I'll leave All My Puny Sorrows for another year). I have a vague idea of ending with Atwood's dystopian trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam). I doubt very much I can handle anything beyond that, but if there is time, I will consider Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night and Morley Callaghan's The Many Colored Coat and Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. That will almost certainly be shunted off to whatever takes the place of the Canadian Challenge, and I would also strongly consider rereading The Deptford Trilogy at that time.
After this, I will prioritize getting to Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Perec's Life A User's Manual, as they are two of the remaining masterworks I want to make sure I read before I shuffle off this mortal coil, but this is probably 3 years out (more likely 4-5 years, with the most recent changes)! While this is a pretty tremendous list (in my view), it is also more than a little odd to have committed myself to reading specific books that far in advance. 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
Perec A Void
DeLillo The Names
Saramago All the Names
Cunningham The Hours
Plato The Republic (at least Book VII)
Saramago The Cave
Plato The 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. I've already been reading Alice Munro fairly regularly and will start adding in Mavis Gallant and Bernard Malamud in 2016. I might set aside a month or two in late 2017 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. That would certainly merit its own tracking post.
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 (look for Zenith translation from 2002/3)
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
Terry Fallis The Best Laid Plans
Terry Fallis The High Road
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
Guillermo Arriaga The Night Buffalo
M. John Harrison Nova Swing
Richard Ford The Sportswriter
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)
Elias Canetti Memoirs (The Tongue Set Free/The Torch in My Ear/The Play of the Eye)
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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