For the first time, I actually have a "To Read" list. If I've ever told you 'it's on my to-read list' in the past, I was misleading you slightly - in reality any lists of the kind have always been vague and stored in my brain somewhere.
Now, it's stored on my computer and made up of recommendations and chance encounters. It lacks a few books, like War & Peace, which have sat on my Feel-I-Should-Probably-Read list for some time but about which I am still sceptical. Here are its contents, in no particular order:
Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The Larnachs, by Owen Marshall
A new novel by a New Zealand author, about the family who built NZ's only 'castle', in Dunedin. It looks very promising.
something or more than one something by P. G. Wodehouse
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, by George Orwell
A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh
The Pink Carnation series, by Lauren Willig
Evelina, by Fanny Burney
Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth
all three recommendations above courtesy of Stacy
Live Bodies, by Maurice Gee
Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Conductor, by Sarah Quigley
Another more recent novel, about Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad
Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens
I've never much enjoyed Dickens, but have recently been assured that I just started with the wrong novels. This is my concession to attempts at strong persuasion.
The History of Henry Esmond, by William Makepeace Thackeray
I loved Vanity Fair, so I'm really keen to read another Thackeray novel.
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
Till We Have Faces, by C. S. Lewis
The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald
Westwood, by Stella Gibbons
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe
Who couldn't want to read this after Northanger Abbey?
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
I actually own this so it really shouldn't be too hard, but it's been sitting in my shelf for a couple of years now.
Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré
The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Villette, by Charlotte Brontë
Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
Underworld, by Don DeLillo
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
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So - any comment? If any of these novels are a dead loss, please let me know! Do you have any recommendations of must-reads to add to the list? Should War & Peace have made it?
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