Tomorrow, I’ll review my 63rd book from the Time list, The Sot-Weed Factor.
That means I have 38 books remaining from the list, including Ulysses, to round out the 101 books.
It’s definitely not the homestretch, but I can at least see the homestretch off in the distance.
So which books remain? Here are the 38 novels, in alphabetical order. (Note that I’ve scheduled Ubik as my next book.)
- The Adventures of Augie March (1953) by Saul Bellow
- Appointment in Samarra (1934) by John O’Hara
- At Swim-Two-Birds (1938) Flann O’ Brien
- The Berlin Stories (1946) by Christopher Isherwood
- Brideshead Revisited (1946) by Evelyn Waugh
- Call it Sleep (1935) by Henry Roth
- The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) by William Styron
- The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West
- The Death of the Heart (1958) by Elizabeth Bowen
- Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
- The Heart of the Matter (1948) by Graham Greene
- Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow
- Housekeeping (1981) by Marilynne Robinson
- A House for Mr. Biswas (1962) by V.S. Naipaul
- Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner
- The Lord of the Rings (1954) by J.R.R. Tolkien\
- Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis
- The Man Who Loved Children (1940) by Christina Stead
- Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
- Money (1984) by Martin Amis
- Naked Lunch (1959) by William Burroughs
- On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
- The Painted Bird (1965) by Jerzy Kosinski
- Play It As It Lays (1970) by Joan Didion
- Possession (1990) by A.S. Byatt
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) by Muriel Spark
- The Recognitions (1955) by William Gaddis
- Red Harvest (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
- The Sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bowles
- The Sportswriter (1986) by Richard Ford
- Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston
- To The Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf
- Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller
- Ubik (1969) by Philip K. Dick
- Under the Net (1954) by Iris Murdoch
- White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo
- White Teeth (2000) by Zadie Smith
If you’ve been following the blog closely over the last few years, you’ve probably noticed my reading pace has slowed.
In 2011, I read 27 books, ending the year on book 33.
In 2012, I read 18 books, ending the year on book 51. Keep in mind, though, I read A Dance To The Music Of Time in 2012, a 3,000 page, 12-volume book. If I counted each of those 250 page volumes as one book, I could say I read 29 books that year.
So far in 2013, I’ve read 11 books, meaning I’ll probably have read 13 or 14 books by the end of 2013.
As I said in my first post, this project isn’t about speed reading. I thought about trying to do some one-book-a-week craziness originally, but I would’ve never been able to keep that pace, and I would’ve burned out.
This project is just about the joy of reading and showing that, no matter how busy your life is, no matter how many kids you have or work demands that wait, you still have time to read.
So that’s part of the reason my pace has slowed. I’m just enjoying the process more. Plus, having to read A Dance To The Music Of Time throughout 2012 didn’t help either.
I’m aiming for a finish sometime in 2015 right now. We’ll see how that works out.
Now, back to the list of books that remain.
After Ubik, I’m not sure what five books I’ll tackle next. Any suggestions?
