This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, is the oldest (earliest published) books on our TBR. I decided to limit this topic to authors I haven’t read before, ruling out books by Dickens, Tolstoy, Hugo, etc. These are books and authors I know little about. Many are books I picked up at used book sales and some are recommended by fellow bloggers. While 1999 doesn’t seem that old to me, it is of course 25 years ago, which I guess makes them classics.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether these are books you advise reading. If not, it may be time to take some of them off my TBR (I do mean to cull the list eventually).
Here are the oldest books on my TBR by authors I haven’t read before:
The Earth by Emile Zola (1887) (recommended by Booker Talk)
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipal (1961) (recommended by Nishita’s Rants and Raves)
Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner (1984) (also recommended by Booker Talk)
The Gate to Women’s Country by Sherri Tepper (1987)
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988)
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (1989)
The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks (1991)
The Vizard Mask by Diana Norman (1994) (recommended by The Guardian)
An Anthropologist On Mars by Oliver Sacks (1995) (recommended by Entering the Enchanted Castle)
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997)
Waiting by Ha Jin (1999)
Those are the oldest books on my TBR by authors I haven’t read. Have you read any of these? What did you think?