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.

1. The Girl in a Swing – Richard Adams
2. The Testaments – Margaret Atwood Finished 8/1/21
3. Emma – Jane Austen
4. The Coral Island – R. M. Ballantyne
5. Peter Pan – J. M. Barrie
6. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Kindred – Octavia E. Butler
9. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John le Carre
10. My Antonia – Willa Cather
11. The Long Call – Anne Cleeves
12. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
13. Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
14. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
15. Lake of Dreams – Kim Edwards
16. Middlemarch – George Eliot
17. Charlotte Gray – Sebastian Faulks
18. A Passage to India – E. M. Forster
19. The Collector – John Fowles
20. Take Nothing With You – Patrick Gale
21. Pincher Martin – William Golding
22. England Made Me – Graham Greene
23. Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
24. Mysterious Skin – Scott Heim
25. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
26. The Aspern Papers / Turn of the Screw – Henry James
27. The Institute – Stephen King
28. The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
29. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence
30. Tishomingo Blues – Elmore Leonard
31. Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel
32. No one Writes to the Colonel – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
33. Machines Like Me – Ian McEwan
34. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
35. Utopia Avenue – David Mitchell
36. Dr Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
37. Bleeding Hearts – Ian Rankin
38. The Plot Against America – Philip Roth – Currently Reading
39. Austerlitz – W. G. Sebald
40. The Accidental – Ali Smith
41. On Beauty – Zadie Smith
42. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
43. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
44. Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
45. Bech at Bay – John Updike
46. Candide – Voltaire
47. The Nickel Boys – Colson Whitehead
48. A Streetcar named Desire – Tennessee Williams
49. Green River Rising – Tim Willocks
50. The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham