Bucket List Books

I think there are essentially two ways of generating a bucket list of books, both equally valid.  First, what are the books I would really like to make sure I read at least once before I shuffle off this mortal coil?  Second, if I knew or merely thought I only had six months left to live, which books would I choose to read?  There is some but only a relatively small amount of overlap between the two, as with the second list, I would probably mostly focus on rereading some of my favourites, including likely all of the books on these lists here and here (possibly dropping Crime and Punishment and Fathers and Sons, which I've reread recently).  Though I suspect I might end up doing more travel to Europe (depending just how sick I really was in the meantime) and watching a lot of 80s flicks and binge-watching Red Dwarf and Futurama, and reading might fall relatively low on my list of priorities.  It's hard to say.

Anyway, while this is definitely only a very partial list, subject to vast changes as the mood takes me, here are the books (as of today) that would be on the first list, and I will add a star if they would also be on the second list.  Of course, if I get through all or most of these books, I will likely wrap up this list from 2016.

* Jane Austen Mansfield Park ✓
Jane Austen Emma (I actually knew a professor who was holding off on reading this to have one 'perfect' Austen book to save for his retirement, which seems more than a little pretentious)
* Angela Carter everything save for Nights at the Circus which I have read
Celine Death on the Installment Plan ✓
Desani All About H. Hatterr ✓
Dickens David Copperfield
Doblin Berlin Alexanderplatz
Fante The Bandini Quartet ✓
Fontane Effi Briest ✓
Fuentes Terra Nostra
Grossman Stalingrad & Life and Fate †
Hardy Jude the Obscure
* Koestler Darkness at Noon ✓
* Lucretius On the Nature of Things
Mann Buddenbrooks
Murakami Kafka on the Shore
Narayan The Vendor of Sweets & The Painter of Signs
* Flannery O'Connor everything save for Wise Blood, which I recently read
* Perec Life A User's Manual ✓
Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
Trollope He Knew He Was Right
Waugh Vile Bodies & Brideshead Revisited
Eudora Welty everything save for The Golden Apples, which I read in university
Maritta Wolff Whistle Stop & Night Shift

In terms of the six month list, I might lean a bit towards shorter books that reflect on mortality, including Waugh's The Loved One ✓ and rereading Ford's The Good Soldier and Platonov's Happy Moscow.  I would certainly try to reread all of Donald Barthelme's short stories and most of Raymond Carver's and Kafka's, plus Borges and the core Calvino.  I suspect I would reread Joyce's Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I might have to pass on a third time through Ulysses, as well as rereading Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, just because they are both a bit too long.  I probably would reread The Great Gatsby, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, Morrison's Song of Solomon and maybe Zelazny's Roadmarks, all of which are reasonably short.  I'd like to squeeze in another pass through Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, though I don't know that I would find the time.  In any remaining time, I would be squeezing in the core poets: Ted Berrigan, John Berryman, Paul Blackburn, Jim Harrison, Jane Kenyon, Faye Kicknosway, August Kleinzahler, Philip Levine, Audre Lorde, W. S. Merwin, Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Charles Reznikoff, Anne Sexton, Karl Shapiro, Charles Simic and as many others as I possibly could.

I'm not going to completely distort my reading list(s) to accommodate all these books (though maybe I will move Perec up several slots), but the lists are slowly converging, and I can at least try to focus on books that I really want to read and less on books I just want out of the house.  There are a couple above that I should get to in the next month with a few more set to be crossed off by the fall.  I guess more than anything, I just need to keep plugging away and not get too morbid about it... 

† While I do hope to someday get to Tolstoy's War and Peace, the Grossman strikes me as generally more essential than War and Peace.  Anna Karenina, however, was definitely a bucket-list book, but I read that in 2013, right alongside with Madame Bovary.  I would consider rereading them both, though practically speaking Madame Bovary is a bit more realistic, perhaps pairing it with my first time through Effi Briest.