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. Life of Samuel Johnson — James Boswell
4. The Sleepwalkers — Hermann Broch
5. Cecilia — Fanny Burnen
6. The Wanderer — Fanny Burney
7. The Anatomy of Melancholy — Robert Burton
8. Little Dorrit — Charles Dickens
9. Stalingrad — Vasily Grossman
10. Life and Fate — Vasily Grossman
11. Forever Flowing — Vasily Grossman
12. The Good Soldier Svejk — Jaroslav Hasek
13. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid — Douglas R. Hofstadter
14. Les Misérables — Victor Hugo
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 [In Progress]
20. The Kindly Ones: A Novel — Jonathan Littel
21. Harlot’s Ghost — Norman Mailer
22. The Executioner’s Song — Norman Mailer
23. Oswald’s Tale — Norman Mailer
24. Le Morte d’Arthur — Thomas Malory
25. Joseph and His Brothers — Thomas Mann
26. The Betrothed: I Promessi Sposi — Alessandro Manzoni
27. Shadow Country — Peter Matthiessen
28. Women and Men — Joseph McElroy
29. Pierre, or The Ambiguities — Herman Melville
30. From the Terrace — John O’Hara
31. A Rage To Live — John O’Hara
32. Metamorphoses — Ovid
33. Gormenghast Trilogy — Mervyn Peake
34. Cantos — Ezra Pound [In Progress]
35. Weymouth Sands — John Cowper Powys
36. A Glastonbury Romance — John Cowper Powys
37. Owen Glendower — John Cowper Powys
38. Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages — John Cowper Powys
39. À la recherche du temps perdu — Marcel Proust [In Progress]
40. Gargantua and Pantagruel — Francois Rabelais *
41. Clarissa Harlowe; or The History of a Young Lady — Samuel Richardson *
42. Shantaram: A Novel — Gregory David Roberts
43. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — William L. Shirer
44. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia – Sir Philip Sidney
45. The Making of Americans — Gertrude Stein
46. The Wandering Jew — Eugene Sue
47. The Mystery of Paris — Eugene Sue
48. History of the Peloponnesian War — Thucydides
49. The Big Green Tent — Ludmila Ulitskaya
50. The Web and the Rock — Thomas Wolfe
51. You Can’t Go Home Again — Thomas Wolfe