My 13 Ways of Looking at The Lifetime Reading Plan Challenge Lists
List One
This list is not a “Hundred Greatest,” Jane Smiley is quick to stipulate, “only a list of individual novels that would illuminate the whole concept of the novel.” (There are actually more than 100 listed, as some list more than one work by the author.)Books in blue are books I own. RPB stands for "Read Pre-Blogging." I will strikethrough books read post-blogging, and add the date read beside it.
Lazarillo de Tormes - Anonymous
Vox - Nicholson Baker
Cousin Pons - Honore de Balzac
Cousin Bette - Honore de Balzac
The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson, or an Oxford Love Story - Max Beerbohm
Oroonoko and "The Fair Jilt" - Aphra Behn
The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio
The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen
The Sleepwalkers - Hermann Broch
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte RPB
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte RPB
Possession - A.S. Byatt
The Moonflower Vine - Jetta Carleton
Don Quixote, vols. 1 and 2 - Miguel de Cervantes (Kindle)
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
Foe - J.M. Coetzee
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins (Kindle)
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad RPB
Robinson Cruose - Daniel Defoe
Roxana - Daniel Defoe
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (Also Kindle - 55 Works)
The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky (Kindle - The Complete Novels)
Look at Me - Jennifer Egan
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling - Henry Fielding
The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
Grendel - John Gardner
Taras Bulba - Nikolai Gogol (Kindle)
The House of Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
The Awkward Age - Henry James (Kindle - Classic Authors)
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Trial - Franz Kafka
WLT: A Radio Romance - Garrison Keillor
Annie John - Jamaica Kincaid
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
Les Liaisons dangereuses - Choderlos de Laclos
Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
A Gesture Life - Chang-rae Lee
The Female Quixote - Charlotte Lennox
A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail Lermontov
Main Street - Sinclair Lewis
How Far Can You Go? - David Lodge
Lovely Green Eyes - Arnost Lustig
The Harafish - Naguib Mahfouz
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Moby Dick; or, The Whale - Herman Melville
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea - Yukio Mishima
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford
Love in a Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford
Don't Tell Alfred - Nancy Mitford
Lives of Girls and Women - Alice Munro
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
The Man without Qualities, vol. 1 - Robert Musil
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Heptameron - Marguerite de Navarre
Guided Tours of Hell - Francine Prose
In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded - Samuel Richardson
Justine - The Marquis de Sade
The Tale of Old Mortality - Sir Walter Scott
The Bride of Lammermoor - Sir Walter Scott
The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu
And Quiet Flows the Don - Mikhail Sholokhov
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollett
Loitering with Intent - Muriel Spark
The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Stern
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe RPB
Egilssaga - Snorri Sturluson
Zeno's Conscience - Italo Svevo
The Makioka Sisters - Junichiro Tanizaki
Vanity Fair - William Makepeaces Thackeray
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
The Last Chronicle of Barset - Anthony Trollope
The Eustace Diamonds - Anthony Trollope (Kindle)
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler
Kristin Lavransdatter, vol. 1, The Wreath - Sigrid Undset
The Saga of the People of Laxardal - Author unknown
The Complete Henry Book - John Updike
Candide - Voltaire (Kindle)
The Fountain Overflows - Rebecca West
The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
The Once and Future King - T.H. White
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Return of Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse
Bertie Wooster Sees It Through - P.G. Wodehouse
Spring Fever- P.G. Wodehouse
The Butler Did It - P.G. Wodehouse
Orlando - Virginia Woolf
Therese Raquin - Emile Zola
List Two
This list includes the original list from The New Lifetime Reading Plan book, plus the list of titles in the "Going Further" section.
Books in red I have read. Books in blue are books I own.
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
The Education of Henry Adams - Henry Adams (Kindle)
The Oresteia - Aeschylus
The Books of Moses, The Old Testament - Anonymous
Bala Kanda, Book One of The Ramayana - Anonymous
Ayodhya Kanda, Book Two of The Ramayana - Anonymous
Aranya Kanda, Book Three of The Ramayana - Anonymous
Kishkindha Kanda, Book Four of The Ramayana - Anonymous
Sundara Kanda, Book Five of The Ramayana - Anonymous
Lanka Kanda, Book Six of The Ramayana - Anonymous
Uttara Kanda, Book Seven of the Ramayana - Anonymous
Adi Parva, Book One of The Mahabharata - Anonymous
Sabha Parva, Book Two of the Mahabharata - Anonymous
Vana Parva, Book Three of the Mahabharata - Anonymous
The New Testament - Anonymous
Lysistrata - Aristophanes
The Clouds - Aristophanes
The Birds - Aristophanes
Ethics - Aristotle (Kindle - Complete Works)
Politics - Aristotle (Kindle - Complete Works)
Poetics - Aristotle (Kindle - Complete Works)
Collected Poems - W.H. Auden
The Confessions - Saint Augustine (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Emma - Jane Austen
Père Goriot - Honoré de Balzac (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Eugénie Grandet - Honoré de Balzac
Cousin Bette - Honoré de Balzac
The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Matsuo Bashô
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
Endgame - Samuel Beckett
Krapp’s Last Tape - Samuel Beckett
The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
Herzog - Saul Bellow
Humboldt’s Gift - Saul Bellow
Selected Works - William Blake (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
Dreamtigers - Jorge Luis Borges
The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell
Pilgrim’s Progress - John Bunyan (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
The Plague - Albert Camus
Through the Looking-Glass - Lewis Carroll May 2012
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes (Kindle)
Uncle Vanya - Anton Chekhov
Three Sisters - Anton Chekhov
The Cherry Orchard - Anton Chekhov
Selected Short Stories - Anton Chekhov
Journey to the West - Wu Ch’eng-en
Records of the Grand Historian - Ssu-ma Ch’ien
Christabel - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Kubla Khan - Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Biographia Literaria - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Writings on Shakespeare - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Analects - Confucius (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
The Divine Comedy - Dante (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Discourse on Method - René Descartes (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens (Kindle - 55 Works)
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (Also Kindle - 55 Works)
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Also Kindle - 55 Works)
Hard Times - Charles Dickens (Also Kindle - 55 Works)
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens (Kindle - 55 Works)
The Old Curiosity Shop - Charles Dickens (Also Kindle - 55 Works)
Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens (Also Kindle - 55 Works)
Collected Poems - Emily Dickenson (Kindle - Classic Authors)
Selected Works - John Donne (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Kindle - The Complete Novels)
The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot
Collected Poems - T.S. Eliot (Kindle)
Collected Plays - T.S. Eliot
Selected Works - Ralph Waldo Emerson (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Alcestis - Euripides
Medea - Euripides
Hippolytus - Euripides (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
The Trojan Women - Euripides
Electra - Euripides
The Bacchae - Euripides (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
Shah Nameh - Firdausi
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality - Sigmund Freud
Civilization and Its Discontents - Sigmund Freud
Collected Poems - Robert Frost (Kindle)
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems - Galileo
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Bhagavad Gita (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Faust - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
The Mayor of Castorbridge - Thomas Hardy
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Selected Tales - Nathaniel Hawthorne (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Short Stories - Ernest Hemingway
Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes
The Dream of the Red Chamber (a.k.a. The Story of the Stone)- Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in
Collected Short Stories - Lu Hsün
The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch - Hui-neng
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - David Hume (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Selected Plays - Henrick Ibsen
The Principles of Psychology - William James
Pragmatism - William James
Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth - William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James
The Ambassadors - Henry James (Kindle - Classic Authors)
The Federalist Papers - Hamilton, Madison, and Jay (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Trial - Franz Kafka
The Castle - Franz Kafka
Selected Short Stories - Franz Kafka
The Cloud Messenger - Kalidasa
Sakuntala - Kalidasa
Beauty and Sadness - Yasunari Kawabata
The Rubaiyat - Omar Khayyam
The Koran
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms - Luo Kuan-chung
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence (Kindle)
Second Treatise of Government - John Locke
On the Nature of Things - Lucretius
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Plum in the Golden Vase - Chin P’ing Mei
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Bartleby the Scrivener - Herman Melville RPB
The Book of Mencius - Mencius
On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
The Subjection of Women - John Stuart Mill
Paradise Lost - John Milton (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Lycidas - John Milton (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity - John Milton (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Sonnets - John Milton
Areopagitica - John Milton (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Confessions of a Mask - Yukio Mishima
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima
Selected Plays - Molière
Selected Essays - Michel de Montaigne
The Tale of Genji - Lady Murasaki
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
Speak, Memory - Vladimir Nabokov
The English Teacher - R.K. Narayan
The Vendor of Sweets - R.K. Narayan
Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Kindle)
The Thousand and One Nights (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Mourning Becomes Electra - Eugene O’Neill
The Iceman Cometh - Eugene O’Neill
Long Day’s Journey into Night - Eugene O’Neill
1984 - George Orwell
Burmese Days - George Orwell
Basic Documents in American History - Thomas Jefferson and others
Thoughts (Pensées)- Blaise Pascal
Selected Works - Plato (Kindle - The Complete Works)
Short Stories and Other Works - Edgar Allan Poe
Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust
Gargantua and Pantagruel - François Rabelais
Confessions - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Complete Works - William Shakespeare
Selected Plays and Prefaces - George Bernard Shaw
The Pillow Book - Sei Shônagon
The First Circle - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
Cancer Ward - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
Oedipus Rex - Sophocles (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Oedipus at Colonus - Sophocles (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Antigone - Sophocles (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Kokoro - Natsume Sôseki
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
The Art of War - Sun-tzu (Kindle)
Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift
The Makioka Sisters - Junichiro Tanizaki
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Walden - Henry David Thoreau (Kindle)
Civil Disobedience - Henry David Thoreau
The History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides
Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Warden - Anthony Trollope (Kindle)
The Last Chronicle of Barset - Anthony Trollope
The Eustace Diamonds - Anthony Trollope (Kindle)
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Autobiography - Anthony Trollope
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
The Aeneid - Virgil
Candide and other works - Voltaire (Kindle)
The Custom of the Country - Edith Wharton (Kindle - Classic Authors)
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
Selected Poems - Walt Whitman
Democratic Vistas - Walt Whitman
Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman (Kindle - Classic Authors)
A Backward Glance O’er Travelled Roads - Walt Whitman
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Orlando - Virginia Woolf
The Waves - Virginia Woolf
The Prelude - William Wordsworth
Selected Shorter Poems - William Wordsworth (Kindle - Harvard Classics)
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads - William Wordsworth
Collected Poems - William Butler Yeats
Collected Plays - William Butler Yeats
Autobiography - William Butler Yeats
Going Further
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson (Kindle)
The Rector of Justin - Louis Auchincloss
Collected Stories (1994) - Louis Auchinloss
Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
The Sot-weed Factor - John Barth
Tidewater Tales - John Barth
The Second Sex - Simone De Beauvoir
The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II - Fernand Braudel
Mother Courage - Berthold Brecht
The Good Woman of Szechuan - Berthold Brecht
The Caucasian Chalk Circle - Berthold Brecht
The Threepenny Opera - Berthold Brecht
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany - Berthold Brecht
So Forth - Joseph Brodsky
The Good Earth - Pearl Buck
The Master and the Margarita - Mikhail Bulgavko
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
Other Voices, Other Rooms - Truman Capote
Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
The Sea Around Us - Rachel Carson
Silent Spring - Rachel Carson
My Antonia - Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
Shadows on the Rock - Willa Cather
Collected Stories - John Cheever
The Rebel Angels - Robertson Davies
What's Bred in the Bone - Robertson Davies
The Lyre of Orpheus - Robertson Davies
Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreiser
American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
The Meaning of Relativity - Albert Einstein
The Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison RPB
This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald (Kindle)
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Good Soldier - Ford Maddox Ford
The Recognitions - William Gaddis
J.R. - William Gaddis
The Revolt of the Masses - Jose Ortega Y Gassett
The Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Spire - William Golding
I, Claudius - Robert Graves
Good-Bye to All That - Robert Graves
The Quiet American - Graham Greene
The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
The Good Soldier Schweik - Jaroslav Hasek
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
The Call - John Hersey
A Bell for Adano - John Hersey
Hiroshima - John Hersey
The Negro Speaks of Rivers - Langston Hughes
Collected Poems - Langston Hughes
The World According to Garp - John Irving
The Berlin Stories - Christopher Isherwood
Christopher and His Kind - Christopher Isherwood
Rickshaw - Lau Shaw (translation by Jean James)
From Here to Eternity - James Jones
Zorba the Greek - Nikos Kazantzakis
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Collected Poems (1993) - Philip Larkin
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold - John LeCarre
Tristes Tropiques - Claude Levi-Strauss
Structural Anthropology - Claude Levi-Strauss
The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology - Claude Levi-Strauss
Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis (Kindle)
Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis
Elmer Gantry - Sinclair Lewis
Dodsworth - Sinclair Lewis
Changing Places - David Lodge
Small World - David Lodge
Collected Poems - Federico Garcia Lorca
The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
The Armies of the Night - Norman Mailer
The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer
Man's Fate - Andre Malraux
The Group - Mary McCarthy
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
Coming of Age in Samoa - Margeret Mead
Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
Jazz - Toni Morrison
A Severed Head - Iris Murdoch
Sandcastle - Iris Murdoch
The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil
Complete Stories (1971) - Flannery O'Connor
Appointment at Samarra - John O'Hara
Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
Life, A User's Manual - Georges Perec
The Caretaker - Harold Pinter
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
Personae - Ezra Pound
A Dance to the Music of Time - Anthony Powell
Complete Collected Stories - V.S. Pritchett
Excellent Women - Barbara Pym
An Unsuitable Attachment - Barbara Pym
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
Duino Elegies - Rainer Maria Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus - Rainer Maria Rilke
Giants in the Earth - Ole Edvart Rolvaag
Goodbye, Columbus - Philip Roth
Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
Children of the Arbat - Anatoli Rybakov
Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour - J.D. Salinger
Being and Nothingness - Jean-Paul Sartre
No Exit - Jean-Paul Sartre
Citizens - Simon Schama
Negritude - Leopold Sedar Senghor
Selected Poems - Leopold Sedar Senghor
The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories - Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Magician of Lublin - Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Interpreters - Woke Soyinka
Death and the King's Horsemen - Woke Soyinka
The Big Rock Candy Mountain - Wallace Stegner
Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Harmonium - Wallace Stevens
Collected Poems - Wallace Stevens
Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey
Queen Victoria - Lytton Strachey
Is Sex Necessary - James Thurber
My Life and Hard Times - James Thurber
This Earth of Mankind - Pramoedya Ananta Tier
Collected Stories - William Trevor
Myra Breckenridge - Gore Vidal
Burr - Gore Vidal
Omeros - Derek Walcot
Collected Stories - Derek Walcot
Ti-Jean and His Brothers - Derek Walcot
The Double Helix - James D. Watson
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
The Loved One - Evelyn Waugh
Collected Stories - Eudora Welty
Black Lamb and Greg Falcon - Rebecca West
Voss - Patrick White
Riders in the Chariot - Patrick White
Our Town - Thornton Wilder
The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams
A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
Collected Poems, Volume I - William Carlos Williams
Collected Poems, Volume II - William Carlos Williams
Native Son - Richard Wright
Black Boy - Richard Wright