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).
- Commedia — Dante Alighieri *
- The Transylvania Trilogy — Miklos Banffy *
- Life of Samuel Johnson — James Boswell
- The Sleepwalkers — Hermann Broch
- Cecilia — Fanny Burney
- The Wanderer — Fanny Burney
- The Anatomy of Melancholy — Robert Burton
- Little Dorrit — Charles Dickens
- Romola — George Eliot
- Stalingrad — Vasily Grossman
- Life and Fate — Vasily Grossman
- Forever Flowing — Vasily Grossman
- The Good Soldier Svejk — Jaroslav Hasek
- Histories — Heroditus
- Roderick Hudson— Henry James
- The Princess Cassamassima— Henry James
- The Bostonians— Henry James
- Finnegans Wake — James Joyce *
- My Struggle — Karl One Knaursgârd
- Harlot’s Ghost — Norman Mailer
- The Executioner’s Song — Norman Mailer
- Le Morte d’Arthur — Thomas Malory
- Joseph and His Brothers — Thomas Mann
- Women and Men — Joseph McElroy
- Pierre, or The Ambiguities — Herman Melville
- From the Terrace — John O’Hara
- A Rage To Live — John O’Hara
- Metamorphoses — Ovid
- Gormenghast Trilogy — Mervyn Peake
- Cantos — Ezra Pound *
- Weymouth Sands — John Cowper Powys
- A Glastonbury Romance — John Cowper Powys
- Owen Glendower — John Cowper Powys
- Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages — John Cowper Powys
- À la recherche du temps perdu — Marcel Proust *
- Gargantua and Pantagruel — Francois Rabelais *
- Clarissa Harlowe; or The History of a Young Lady — Samuel Richardson *
- History of the Peloponnesian War — Thucydides