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. Homo Sacer — Giorgio Agambin
  2. Commedia — Dante Alighieri *
  3. From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present — Jacques Barzun
  4. Life of Samuel Johnson — James Boswell
  5. The Wanderer — Fanny Burney
  6. The Anatomy of Melancholy — Robert Burton
  7. The Century Trilogy — Ken Follett
  8. The Magician’s Trilogy — Lev Grossman
  9. The Good Soldier Svejk — Jaroslav Hasek
  10. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid — Douglas R. Hofstadter
  11. Finnegans Wake — James Joyce *
  12. The Far Pavilions — M. M. Kaye
  13. The Last Days of Mankind —Karl Kraus
  14. The Adventures of Amir hamza — Ghalib Lakhnavi
  15. Three Kingdoms — Luo Guanzhong
  16. Harlot’s Ghost — Norman Mailer
  17. Oswald’s Tale — Norman Mailer
  18. Le Morte d’Arthur — Thomas Malory
  19. Joseph and His Brothers — Thomas Mann
  20. Shadow Country — Peter Matthiessen
  21. Women and Men — Joseph McElroy
  22. Gormenghast Trilogy — Mervyn Peake
  23. Cantos — Ezra Pound [In Progress]
  24. Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages — John Cowper Powys
  25. Clarissa Harlowe; or The History of a Young Lady — Samuel Richardson *
  26. Juliet — Le Marquise de Sade
  27. Being and Nothingness – Jean-Paul Sartre
  28. The Raj Quartet — Paul Scott
  29. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — William L. Shirer
  30. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia – Sir Philip Sidney
  31. The Making of Americans — Gertrude Stein
  32. The Wandering Jew — Eugene Sue
  33. The Mystery of Paris — Eugene Sue
  34. History of the Peloponnesian War — Thucydides
  35. Rising Up & Rising Down — William T. Vollmann
  36. Imperial — William T. Vollmann
  37. The Big Green Tent — Ludmila Ulitskaya
  38. Kristin Lavransdatter — Sigrid Undset
  39. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton — Richard S. Westfall

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