As mentioned in my last blog, I am not doing an online reading challenge this year. The main reason is I really want to clear my TBR pile and most challenges seem to require me to buy at least one or two new books. I usually buy any such books on my Kindle because at least they don’t take up physical space but I have a ridiculous amount of unread books on there now so I really need to reign it in a bit.
Last year, I attempted an alphabetical challenge and while I didn’t quite manage it (I missed Y) I did enjoy it and was tempted to do it again. However, that would require me buying a book for Q, X and Y and I don’t want to have to do that. While I was bemoaning the fact that I like to have a list of what I will read for the year but I couldn’t find challenge I wanted to do – and probably to shut me up – my husband suggested that I let him choose a list of possible books to read this year – from our shelves and my kindle. I agreed. Possibly foolishly as he seemed to get a lot of glee out of putting things on the list that he knows I’ve been avoiding.
Anyway, here is my list. Although there are no requirements, I’m going to try to write a review for each one. I want to blog more this year anyway so it will help with that as well. There are a lot more classics here then I would normally read so we’ll have to see how it goes.
- The Girl in a Swing – Richard Adams
- The Testaments – Margaret Atwood Finished 8/1/21
- Emma – Jane Austen
- The Coral Island – R. M. Ballantyne
- Peter Pan – J. M. Barrie
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
- Kindred – Octavia E. Butler
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John le Carre
- My Antonia – Willa Cather
- The Long Call – Anne Cleeves
- The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
- Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
- David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
- Lake of Dreams – Kim Edwards
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Charlotte Gray – Sebastian Faulks
- A Passage to India – E. M. Forster
- The Collector – John Fowles
- Take Nothing With You – Patrick Gale
- Pincher Martin – William Golding
- England Made Me – Graham Greene
- Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
- Mysterious Skin – Scott Heim
- The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
- The Aspern Papers / Turn of the Screw – Henry James
- The Institute – Stephen King
- The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence
- Tishomingo Blues – Elmore Leonard
- Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel
- No one Writes to the Colonel – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Machines Like Me – Ian McEwan
- Moby Dick – Herman Melville
- Utopia Avenue – David Mitchell
- Dr Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
- Bleeding Hearts – Ian Rankin
- The Plot Against America – Philip Roth – Currently Reading
- Austerlitz – W. G. Sebald
- The Accidental – Ali Smith
- On Beauty – Zadie Smith
- Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
- Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
- Bech at Bay – John Updike
- Candide – Voltaire
- The Nickel Boys – Colson Whitehead
- A Streetcar named Desire – Tennessee Williams
- Green River Rising – Tim Willocks
- The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
Thanks, I think I’m going to need it!
Good Luck, there are some big reads there!