Bucket List

These are the books that I really want to read before I die but might represent a challenge, usually due to the size of the book. I often have to wait for the right time which in the past had involved a week or two on vacation when I could concentrate on my reading, usually at the Jersey Shore but also on a lazy Caribbean cruise. What with the ability to read more and more brought to me by CoVid-19, I have added a technique of reading an eclectic collection of books and if there’s still time in the month, reading one of the really big or difficult titles, usually from this Bucket List.

Note that I have read some of these but with some impediment, like an abridged edition or a bewildered understanding, and more than one title is on this list because I abandoned finishing it, either because of literary exhaustion or scheduling urgency (especially when I was at university).

1. Commedia — Dante Alighieri *
2. The Transylvania Trilogy — Miklos Banffy *
3. Life of Samuel Johnson — James Boswell
4. The Sleepwalkers — Hermann Broch
5. Cecilia — Fanny Burney
6. The Wanderer — Fanny Burney
7. The Anatomy of Melancholy — Robert Burton
8. Little Dorrit — Charles Dickens
9. Romola — George Eliot
10. Stalingrad — Vasily Grossman
11. Life and Fate — Vasily Grossman
12. Forever Flowing — Vasily Grossman
13. The Good Soldier Svejk — Jaroslav Hasek
14. Histories — Heroditus
15. Roderick Hudson— Henry James
16. The Princess Cassamassima— Henry James
17. The Bostonians— Henry James
18. Finnegans Wake — James Joyce *
19. My Struggle — Karl One Knaursgârd
20. Harlot’s Ghost — Norman Mailer
21. The Executioner’s Song — Norman Mailer
22. Le Morte d’Arthur — Thomas Malory
23. Joseph and His Brothers — Thomas Mann
24. Women and Men — Joseph McElroy
25. Pierre, or The Ambiguities — Herman Melville
26. From the Terrace — John O’Hara
27. A Rage To Live — John O’Hara
28. Metamorphoses — Ovid
29. Gormenghast Trilogy — Mervyn Peake
30. Cantos — Ezra Pound *
31. Weymouth Sands — John Cowper Powys
32. A Glastonbury Romance — John Cowper Powys
33. Owen Glendower — John Cowper Powys
34. Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages — John Cowper Powys
35. À la recherche du temps perdu — Marcel Proust *
36. Gargantua and Pantagruel — Francois Rabelais *
37. Clarissa Harlowe; or The History of a Young Lady — Samuel Richardson *
38. History of the Peloponnesian War — Thucydides