Yet Another Reading List

It is somewhat absurd, but I am finding having too many reading lists littering the blog is getting to be confusing.  I actually am making pretty decent progress on the lists here and here, but I decided I should just combine them, as there is so much overlap and I added a few books that have been nagging at me to read them.  For instance, I decided I really wanted to try to tackle Fante before too much more time passes. 

So this is to the best of my intentions what I will be working towards over the rest of the year.  I will also be reading On the Nature of Things ✓ at work and will work my way through a copy of Kafka's Collected Stories ✓ that my cousin gave me (and that I will share in my library out front when I am through with it).

Maugham Cakes & Ale
Narayan The Man-Eater of Malgudi
Waugh Decline and Fall
Malraux Man's Fate
Fontane Effi Briest
Flaubert Madame Bovary
A. Carter Wise Children
Mahfouz The Search (maybe skim The Thief and the Dogs ✓ and Autumn Quail ✓ first)
Munro Open Secrets
Saramago Blindness
Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (probably reread The Sun Also Rises ✓ first)
Conrad Under Western Eyes
Kurkov Grey Bees
Perec Life, A User's Manual
Brewer The Red Arrow
Drabble A Summer Bird-Cage & The Ice Age
Martin Amis The Rachel Papers
Maxwell The Chateau
Mary McCarthy The Group
Pym Excellent Women
Jay McInerney Bright Lights, Big City (reread before watching the Michael J. Fox movie)
Lahiri Whereabouts
Rushdie Fury & Victory City
Karan Mahajan The Association of Small Bombs
Cruz How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
Zalika Reid-Benta River Mumma
Steinbeck East of Eden
Fante West of Rome
Dawn Powell The Golden Spur

(By this point, this almost certainly will be 2024...)

Dupont The American Fiancée
Dickens Oliver Twist
Koestler Darkness at Noon
Sebald Austerlitz
Skorvecky Two Murders in My Double Life
T.C. Boyle Drop City
Sinclair Lewis Main Street
Maritta Wolff Whistle Stop
Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise
Percival Everett Erasure (basis of American Fiction) & Half an Inch of Water (stories)
Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Guillermo Arriaga Jordán The Night Buffalo
Singh Delhi: A Novel
Cela The Hive (NYRB)
Gide The Immoralist & Straight is the Gate (maybe reread Lafcadio's Adventures)
Powers Wheat That Springeth Green & The Stories of J.F. Powers
Joy Williams The Quick and the Dead & The Visiting Privilege (stories)
Natalia Ginzburg Family Lexicon
Lampedusa The Leopard
Mavis Gallant The Cost of Living (stories)
Álvaro Mutis Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll
Tim O'Brien America Fantastica
Morrison The Bluest Eye
Fante The Bandini Quartet
Mahfouz The Beggar
Faulkner The Wild Palms*
Narayan The Vendor of Sweets & The Painter of Signs
Flannery O'Connor A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Carol Shields Swann
I.B. Singer Scum
Pynchon Inherent Vice
Suárez Havana Year Zero
Welty Delta Wedding

The majority are fairly short, so I should feel like I am making decent progress in checking books off this list, though there are definitely some longer novels as I get deeper in, but also I have some long train rides coming up as well.  

Assuming I really do get through them all towards the end of 2023 or early 2024, I will switch back to the original reading list, but clean it up a fair bit and probably put Atwood's MaddAdam Trilogy pretty high up in there, make sure that I hit more Mahfouz and Narayan, get serious about reading James Baldwin (and Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty), wrap up Gide and try to read one Dickens' novel each year.  Time's marching on after all.

* Interestingly, Agnès Varda said that The Wild Palms inspired her first film La Pointe Courte, so I should probably watch this after I read the novel.

Edit (9/03): While it is tempting to add them here, I think it makes more sense to make further changes to the original long list as I clean it up yet again.  I want to add Russo's Empire Falls and The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellanos, promote Ondjaki's Transparent City and Victor Serge's Conquered City (which are already reasonably high in that list) and maybe reread Absurdistan ✓ by Gary Shteyngart.  (I'm currently reading Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story ✓, which is insightful and annoying in equal measure.  I think I need to go back and see what I liked about him in the first place before I decide if I should tackle his pandemic novel, Our Country Friends, but I assume I'll try to read it one of these days -- perhaps while the pandemic is still fresh in memory...)

Edit (9/22): I try to strike a balance between hitting the classics and adding in brand-new fiction.  While they aren't on the list (yet), I'm pretty likely to try to shoehorn in Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels, which is a ripped-from-the-headlines tale about a poet confronting an A.I. trained on her work, and River Mumma ✓ by Zalika Reid-Benta, which is a magic-realist quest through the streets of Toronto, drawing on Jamaican folklore.  While I am on the topic of contemporary Toronto novels, I recall putting aside Ghosted by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, as I thought it might influence my own writing too much.  But having read another review of it recently, it is nothing like my own middle-class foibles and there is no danger reading it.  However, I also don't feel quite the same pressure to read it as River Mumma, so it will just go somewhere on that original reading list...