1. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy — ✔️
2. Laurus, by Eugene Vodolazkin — ✔️
3. The Wager, by David Grann — ✔️
4. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges — ✔️
5. on earth we're briefly gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong — ✔️
6. Babel, by R. F. Kuang — ✔️
7. Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez — ✔️
8. PROUST
Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust — ✔️
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by Marcel Proust — ✔️
The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust — ✔️
[+ Proust's Way, by Roger Shattuck; — ✔️
Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time, by Patrick Alexander — ✔️
Lost Time, by Józef Czapski; — ✔️
Proust and the Squid, by Maryanne Wolf; — ✔️
Proust Was A Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer; — ✔️ ]
9. In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes — ✔️
10. A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes — ✔️
11. The Enchanters, by James Ellroy — ✔️
12. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, by William H. Gass — ✔️
To The Ends of The Earth (trilogy):
13. Rites of Passage — ✔️
14. Close Quarters — ✔️
15. Fire Down Below — ✔️
—by William Golding
16. The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker — ✔️
17. A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel — ✔️
18. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver — ✔️
19. The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal — ✔️
20. Sodom & Gomorrah, by Marcel Proust
21. The Prisoner, by Marcel Proust
22. The Fugitive, by Marcel Proust
23. Finding Time Again, by Marcel Proust
24. Unknown Masterpieces, edited by Edwin Frank
25. Beautiful Evidence, by Edward Tufte
26. The Comforts of the Abyss, by Philip Schultz;
failure, by Philip Schultz;
27. best poetry 2023
[+20 poems each by select list of ten poets: ]
28. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders
29. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
30. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
31. Free Indirect, by Timothy Bowes
32. Seduced by Story, by Peter Brooks
33. The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald
34. 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
35. Hyperion, by Dan Simmons (K)
36. 10:04, by Ben Lerner
37. The Saga of Icelanders, trans by various; intro: Jane Smiley
38. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, transl by Simon Armitage
[+ Tolkien's trans ]
39. The Silmarrilion, by J. R. R. Tolkien
40. Macunaíma (The Hero With No Character), by Mário de Andrade
41. The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride
42. A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr
43. Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr
44. Stay True, by Hua Hsu
45. The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich
46. Touch, by Elmore Leonard
47. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
48. The Somme, by Peter Hart
49. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (K)
50. What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, by Michiko Aoyama
51. The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
52. Lempriere's Dictionary, by Lawrence Norfolk
53. The Landmark Anabasis, by Xenophon — (finish)
54. The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk
55. The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith
56. Truth and Repair, by Judith Herman, MD
57. Histories Grecques, by Maurice Sartre — (finish)
58. The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald
59. The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (K)
60. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov — (finish)
61. Blindness, by Jose Saramago
62. My Antonia, by Willa Cather — (finish)
63. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
64. The Night Watchmen, by Louise Erdrich
65. The Trial by Franz Kafka
66. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
67. The Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius — (finish)
68. Americanah, by Chimamanda
69. The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
70. Middlemarch by George Eliot
71. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
72. The Last Mughal, by William Dalrymple — (finish)
73. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Edith Grossman, transl)
74. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by Luo Guanzhong (Penguin, Martin Palmer transl)
75. The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker
+ The Sense of Style, by Stephen Pinker
76. The Treasure of the City of Ladies, by Christine de Pizan
77. The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
78. Weekends at Bellevue, by Julie Holland, M.D.
79. When Religion Becomes Evil, by Charles Kimball
80. Looking for Spinoza, by Antonio R. Damasio
81. (guide to Spinoza)
82. A Book Forged in Hell, by Steve Nadler
83. The Bird Artist, by Howard Norman
84. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood (K)
85. The Landmark Campaigns of Julius Caesar, edited by Robert Strassler (finish)
86. Underworld, by Don DeLillo (finish)
87. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (K)
88. A New World Begins, by Jeremy D. (K)
89. Death in Venice and other stories, by Thomas Mann (K)
90. Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin (K)
91. The Ten Thousand Things, by Marina Dermoût (K)
92. The Outsider, by Stephen King (K)
93. The Caprices, by Silvana Murray (K)
94. Live or Die, by Anne Sexton (K)
95. Epitaph for a Small Winner, by Machado de Assis
96. Ulysses, by James Joyce (K)
97. The Corrections, by William H. Gass
98. God's Chinese Son, by Jonathan Spence (finish)
99. Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee (finish)
100. The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, transl by Royall Tyler
101. Purgatorio, by Dante, Hollander translation (FINISH)
102. The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, nyrb (K)
103. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
104. Absolam, Absolam! , by William Faulkner
105. Butcher's Crossing, by John Williams
106. The Waterworks, by E. L. Doctorow
107. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
108. The Iliad by Homer
109. The Divine Comedy: The Inferno by Dante Alighieri [re-READ]
110. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
111. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
112. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
113. Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence
114. The Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
115. The Ramayana by Valmiki
116. Hiroshima by John Hersey [re-READ]
117. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
118. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
119. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
120. The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine
121. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
122. The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
123. Our Town, by Thornton Wilder
124. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
125. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
126. Middlemarch, by George Eliot
127. The Dirty Dust, by Máirtin O Cadhain
128. Chronicles of Jean Froissart
129. Poems of Wang Wei
130. Satires of Juvenal
131. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
132. The Golden Ass, by Apuleius
133. Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray
134. The Natural History of Selborne, by Gilbert White
135. The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon
136. Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin
137. One Thousand and One Nights
138. Njal's Saga
139. The Outermost House, by Henry Beston
140. The Heptameron, by Marguerite de Navarre
141. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Matsuo Basho
142. The Conference of the Birds, by Attar
143. The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton
144. The History of the Franks, by Gregory of Tours
145. Duino Elegies, by Rainer Maria Rilke
146. Krieg, by Ludwig Renn
147. The Tale of the Heike
148. Antigone, by Sophocles
149. Poems of Du Fu
150. The Scholars, by Wu Jingzi
151. Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
152. Poems of Catullus
153. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
154. The Aeneid by Virgil
155. Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer
156. A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman
157. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville
158. The Mahabharata, by Vyasa
159. Stories of Lu Xun
160. A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume
161. Odes of Catullus
162. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (?)
163. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
164. Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles
165. The Secret History by Procopius
166. Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer
167. The Republic, by Plato
168. The History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth
169. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft
170. The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope
171. Roughing It, by Mark Twain
172. The Story of the Stone, by Cao Xuegin
173. Ring of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell
174. Confessions of Saint Augustine
175. Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto
176. The First Folio of William Shakespeare
177. Lyrical Ballads, by William Wordsworth, Samuel Tavlor Coleridge
178. The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio
179. The Demons, by Heimito von Doderer
180. On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
181. The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli
182. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West
183. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
184. The Once and Future King, by T. H. White
185. The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
186. On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius
187. Paradise Lost, by John Milton
188. The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell
189. The Poetic Edda
190. Annals of Imperial Rome, by Tacitus [I READ IT]
191. North and South, by Elizabeth Bishop
192. Germinal, by Émile Zola
193. The Water Margin, by Shi Nai'an
194. History of the Conquest of Mexico, by William H. Prescott
195. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
196. Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt
197. The Last of the Just, by André
198. A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes
199. Hindoo Holiday, by J.R. Ackerley
200. The Unknown Masterpiece, by Honoré de Balzac
201. Seven Men, by Max Beerbohm
202. On The Yard, by Malcolm Braly
203. The Radiance of the King, by Camara Laye
204. The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley
205. Classic Crimes, by William Roughead
206. The Golovlyov Family, by Shchedrin
207. The Unpossessed, by Tess Slesinger
208. The Life of Henry Brulard, by Stendhal
209. The Pilgrims Hawk, by Glenway Wescott
2. Laurus, by Eugene Vodolazkin — ✔️
3. The Wager, by David Grann — ✔️
4. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges — ✔️
5. on earth we're briefly gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong — ✔️
6. Babel, by R. F. Kuang — ✔️
7. Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez — ✔️
8. PROUST
Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust — ✔️
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by Marcel Proust — ✔️
The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust — ✔️
[+ Proust's Way, by Roger Shattuck; — ✔️
Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time, by Patrick Alexander — ✔️
Lost Time, by Józef Czapski; — ✔️
Proust and the Squid, by Maryanne Wolf; — ✔️
Proust Was A Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer; — ✔️ ]
9. In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes — ✔️
10. A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes — ✔️
11. The Enchanters, by James Ellroy — ✔️
12. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, by William H. Gass — ✔️
To The Ends of The Earth (trilogy):
13. Rites of Passage — ✔️
14. Close Quarters — ✔️
15. Fire Down Below — ✔️
—by William Golding
16. The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker — ✔️
17. A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel — ✔️
18. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver — ✔️
19. The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal — ✔️
20. Sodom & Gomorrah, by Marcel Proust
21. The Prisoner, by Marcel Proust
22. The Fugitive, by Marcel Proust
23. Finding Time Again, by Marcel Proust
24. Unknown Masterpieces, edited by Edwin Frank
25. Beautiful Evidence, by Edward Tufte
26. The Comforts of the Abyss, by Philip Schultz;
failure, by Philip Schultz;
27. best poetry 2023
[+20 poems each by select list of ten poets: ]
28. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders
29. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
30. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
31. Free Indirect, by Timothy Bowes
32. Seduced by Story, by Peter Brooks
33. The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald
34. 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
35. Hyperion, by Dan Simmons (K)
36. 10:04, by Ben Lerner
37. The Saga of Icelanders, trans by various; intro: Jane Smiley
38. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, transl by Simon Armitage
[+ Tolkien's trans ]
39. The Silmarrilion, by J. R. R. Tolkien
40. Macunaíma (The Hero With No Character), by Mário de Andrade
41. The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride
42. A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr
43. Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr
44. Stay True, by Hua Hsu
45. The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich
46. Touch, by Elmore Leonard
47. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
48. The Somme, by Peter Hart
49. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (K)
50. What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, by Michiko Aoyama
51. The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
52. Lempriere's Dictionary, by Lawrence Norfolk
53. The Landmark Anabasis, by Xenophon — (finish)
54. The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk
55. The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith
56. Truth and Repair, by Judith Herman, MD
57. Histories Grecques, by Maurice Sartre — (finish)
58. The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald
59. The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (K)
60. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov — (finish)
61. Blindness, by Jose Saramago
62. My Antonia, by Willa Cather — (finish)
63. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
64. The Night Watchmen, by Louise Erdrich
65. The Trial by Franz Kafka
66. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
67. The Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius — (finish)
68. Americanah, by Chimamanda
69. The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
70. Middlemarch by George Eliot
71. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
72. The Last Mughal, by William Dalrymple — (finish)
73. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Edith Grossman, transl)
74. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by Luo Guanzhong (Penguin, Martin Palmer transl)
75. The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker
+ The Sense of Style, by Stephen Pinker
76. The Treasure of the City of Ladies, by Christine de Pizan
77. The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
78. Weekends at Bellevue, by Julie Holland, M.D.
79. When Religion Becomes Evil, by Charles Kimball
80. Looking for Spinoza, by Antonio R. Damasio
81. (guide to Spinoza)
82. A Book Forged in Hell, by Steve Nadler
83. The Bird Artist, by Howard Norman
84. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood (K)
85. The Landmark Campaigns of Julius Caesar, edited by Robert Strassler (finish)
86. Underworld, by Don DeLillo (finish)
87. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (K)
88. A New World Begins, by Jeremy D. (K)
89. Death in Venice and other stories, by Thomas Mann (K)
90. Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin (K)
91. The Ten Thousand Things, by Marina Dermoût (K)
92. The Outsider, by Stephen King (K)
93. The Caprices, by Silvana Murray (K)
94. Live or Die, by Anne Sexton (K)
95. Epitaph for a Small Winner, by Machado de Assis
96. Ulysses, by James Joyce (K)
97. The Corrections, by William H. Gass
98. God's Chinese Son, by Jonathan Spence (finish)
99. Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee (finish)
100. The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, transl by Royall Tyler
101. Purgatorio, by Dante, Hollander translation (FINISH)
102. The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, nyrb (K)
103. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
104. Absolam, Absolam! , by William Faulkner
105. Butcher's Crossing, by John Williams
106. The Waterworks, by E. L. Doctorow
107. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
108. The Iliad by Homer
109. The Divine Comedy: The Inferno by Dante Alighieri [re-READ]
110. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
111. The Oresteia by Aeschylus
112. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
113. Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence
114. The Shahnameh by Ferdowsi
115. The Ramayana by Valmiki
116. Hiroshima by John Hersey [re-READ]
117. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
118. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
119. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
120. The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine
121. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
122. The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
123. Our Town, by Thornton Wilder
124. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
125. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
126. Middlemarch, by George Eliot
127. The Dirty Dust, by Máirtin O Cadhain
128. Chronicles of Jean Froissart
129. Poems of Wang Wei
130. Satires of Juvenal
131. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
132. The Golden Ass, by Apuleius
133. Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray
134. The Natural History of Selborne, by Gilbert White
135. The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon
136. Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin
137. One Thousand and One Nights
138. Njal's Saga
139. The Outermost House, by Henry Beston
140. The Heptameron, by Marguerite de Navarre
141. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Matsuo Basho
142. The Conference of the Birds, by Attar
143. The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton
144. The History of the Franks, by Gregory of Tours
145. Duino Elegies, by Rainer Maria Rilke
146. Krieg, by Ludwig Renn
147. The Tale of the Heike
148. Antigone, by Sophocles
149. Poems of Du Fu
150. The Scholars, by Wu Jingzi
151. Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
152. Poems of Catullus
153. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
154. The Aeneid by Virgil
155. Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer
156. A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman
157. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville
158. The Mahabharata, by Vyasa
159. Stories of Lu Xun
160. A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume
161. Odes of Catullus
162. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (?)
163. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
164. Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles
165. The Secret History by Procopius
166. Animal Liberation, by Peter Singer
167. The Republic, by Plato
168. The History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth
169. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft
170. The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope
171. Roughing It, by Mark Twain
172. The Story of the Stone, by Cao Xuegin
173. Ring of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell
174. Confessions of Saint Augustine
175. Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto
176. The First Folio of William Shakespeare
177. Lyrical Ballads, by William Wordsworth, Samuel Tavlor Coleridge
178. The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio
179. The Demons, by Heimito von Doderer
180. On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
181. The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli
182. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West
183. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
184. The Once and Future King, by T. H. White
185. The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
186. On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius
187. Paradise Lost, by John Milton
188. The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell
189. The Poetic Edda
190. Annals of Imperial Rome, by Tacitus [I READ IT]
191. North and South, by Elizabeth Bishop
192. Germinal, by Émile Zola
193. The Water Margin, by Shi Nai'an
194. History of the Conquest of Mexico, by William H. Prescott
195. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
196. Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt
197. The Last of the Just, by André
198. A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes
199. Hindoo Holiday, by J.R. Ackerley
200. The Unknown Masterpiece, by Honoré de Balzac
201. Seven Men, by Max Beerbohm
202. On The Yard, by Malcolm Braly
203. The Radiance of the King, by Camara Laye
204. The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley
205. Classic Crimes, by William Roughead
206. The Golovlyov Family, by Shchedrin
207. The Unpossessed, by Tess Slesinger
208. The Life of Henry Brulard, by Stendhal
209. The Pilgrims Hawk, by Glenway Wescott
