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