My TBR
These are books that I own but have not yet read. The idea was shamelessly stolen from Novel Insights, so thank you/apologies to her for that.
A few of these I have actually started reading at some point and then given up on – mostly “classics” or I would have got rid of the book – and I have marked these with an asterisk.
EDIT: I have now moved this to its own page. I will update it there. This post can stay as a historical record, or something.
A
Edward Abbey – The Monkey Wrench Gang
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Half of a Yellow Sun
Isabel Allende – The Sum of Our Days
Tash Aw – The Harmony Silk Factory
B
Honore de Balzac – Old Goriot
Iain Banks – Dead Air
Louis de Bernières – Red Dog
Vinoba Bhave – Moved by Love
Christopher Brookmyre – Not the End of the World
Christopher Brookmyre – A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil
Anita Brookner – Falling Slowly
Anita Brookner – Providence
Mikhael Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita
William Burroughs – Naked Lunch
A S Byatt – Still Life
C
Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus
Angela Carter – Nights at the Circus
Bernardo Carvalho – Fear of De Sade
Blaise Cendrars – Dan Yack
Blaise Cendrars – Moravagine
Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote*
Raymond Chandler – Farewell My Lovely
Vikram Chandra – Red Earth and Pouring Rain
Anton Chekhov – Three Plays
Jonathan Coe – The Rotters’ Club
Colette – Break of Day*
Colette – Cheri/The Last of Cheri
Colette – Claudine at School
Colette – Claudine in Paris
Colette – The Rainy Moon and Other Stories
David Crystal – The Stories of English
D
Roald Dahl – My Uncle Oswald
Charles Dickens – The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Charles Dickens – The Old Curiosity Shop
Charles Dickens – The Pickwick Papers
Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment
Carol Ann Duffy – Feminine Gospels
Alexandre Dumas – The Black Tulip
Lawrence Durrell – The Alexandria Quartet [3 books – one’s missing]
E
Umberto Eco – Foucault’s Pendulum
Umberto Eco – The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
Bret Easton Ellis – The Informers
F
E M Forster – A Passage to India
G
Neil Gaiman – Coraline
Neil Gaiman – The Graveyard Book
Gabriel García Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude
Luiz Alfredo García Roza – Southwesterly Wind
Graham Greene – The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene – The Ministry of Fear
Andrew Sean Greer – The Confessions of Max Tivoli
George and Weedon Grossmith – The Diary of a Nobody
Ursula le Guin – The Earthsea Quartet*
H
H Rider Haggard – Allan Quatermain
Knut Hamsun – Hunger
Thomas Hardy – The Return of the Native
Joseph Heller – Catch-22*
Joseph Heller – God Knows
Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway – For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway – The Snows of Kilimanjaro
Ernest Hemingway – To Have and Have Not
Hermann Hesse – The Glass Bead Game
Michel Houellebecq – The Possibility of an Island
I
Christopher Isherwood – The Memorial
J
Henry James – The Bostonians
Henry James – The Portrait of a Lady*
James Joyce – Dubliners
K
Richard Kelly – Southland Tales II – Fingerprints
Richard Kelly – Southland Tales III – The Mechanicals
Mark Kermode – It’s Only a Movie
Jack Kerouac – On the Road
Milan Kundera – Immortality
Hanif Kureishi – The Black Album
L
J Robert Lennon – The Light of Falling Stars
Primo Levi – The Periodic Table
Charles de Lint – The Ivory and the Horn
M
Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince
Thomas Mann – Death in Venice and Other Stories
Yann Martel – The Facts Behind the Helsinki Reclamation
Hisham Matar – In the Country of Men
M Somerset Maugham – The Moon and Sixpence
Daphne du Maurier – The Glass-Blowers
Daphne du Maurier – The House on the Strand
Daphne du Maurier – The King’s General
Daphne du Maurier – The Progress of Julia
Ian McEwan – Enduring Love
Robert McGill – The Mysteries
Haruki Murakami – Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Iris Murdoch – Under the Net*
N
Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire
Irène Némirovsky – David Golder
David Nicholls – Starter for Ten
Geoff Nicholson – Bedlam Burning
O
Elsa Osario – My Name is Light
Jim Ottaviani – T-Minus: the Race to the Moon
P
Chuck Palahniuk – Non-fiction
Alan Paton – Cry, the Beloved Country
Elliot Perlman – Three Dollars
D B C Pierre – Vernon God Little
Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar
Dennis Potter – Blackeyes
R
Rainer Maria Rilke – Turning Point
Salman Rushdie – Fury
Salman Rushdie – The Ground Beneath Her Feet*
Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie – The Moor’s Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie – Shame
Geoff Ryman – The Child Garden
S
J D Salinger – For Esmé: With Love and Squalor*
Paul Scott – The Jewel in the Crown*
Hubert Selby Jr – Requiem for a Dream*
Will Self – Great Apes
George Bernard Shaw – Pygmalion
Mary Shelley – The Last Man
Mary Shelley – Lodore
Murasaki Shikibu – The Tale of Genji*
John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath
Stendhal – The Red and the Black
R L Stevenson – Travels With a Donkey
Theodore Sturgeon – More Than Human
T
Dorothea Tanning – Chasm: a Weekend
William Thackeray – Vanity Fair
Hunter S Thompson – Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72*
Hunter S Thompson – Hell’s Angels
Mark Thompson – A Paper House: the Ending of Yugoslavia
V
Voltaire – Candide
Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse 5
W
H G Wells – boxset of short stories and novellas [3 books]
H G Wells – The History of Mr Polly
Thomas Wolfe – You Can’t Go Home Again
Tom Wolfe – The Bonfire of the Vanities
Virginia Woolf – Orlando
Virginia Woolf – Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid
Total = 137
Don Quixote is next on my list but I might just read the first part and have a break. Read Midnight’s Children soon!
You’ve got a lot of classics there! Is that your favorite genre? Or is that what is left over when you’ve read all the “fun” books?
I read classics once in a while only, I’m afraid. They don’t appeal to me as a genre.
You’ve got some way to go, still! Happy reading!
Monkey Tennis That’s what I did with Don Quixote but then I didn’t pick it up again. Oops.
Leeswammes As a teenager and during my degree I tried to read a lot of classics and most of those above are leftover from that, though occasionally I’ll still buy one if it’s recommended. I read them much less these days. My genre, if I have one, is literary fiction.
I’m slightly appalled by how few of those I’ve read!
Word of warning – you need to be in an amazingly happy place to get through the Bell Jar in one piece, it’s brutal.
(PS Bought the Orwell essay collection you reviewed a while back and loved it!)
Funny, there’s a lot of those in my TBR pile too.
You should read Slaughterhouse 5 urgently. And then get hold of Cat’s Cradle.
That makes me feel SOOO much better about the books I buy and sit gathering dust as others leap frog them in my pecking order.
But makes me feel SOOO bad that you have more unread books than books I own!
I agree with gusset- Slaughter House 5 really is something else. BBc Radio 7 have just finished a 4 part serialisation of it, too.
I would recommend “The snows of Kilimanjaro” story itself; too.
Im reading a great book called “My Name is Red” at the moment. Have you read it?
Hope alls well with you guys.
Lloyd.
Eliza I wouldn’t expect any less of Plath. Glad you liked the Orwell.
gusset Will def tackle Slaughterhouse 5 soon.
Lloyd I do have a lot of books. Thousands, I’d guess. I’ve read My Name is Red, yes. A while ago now but I know I enjoyed it.
Great list! (finally made it over here :))
I definitely recommend Great Apes (wierd but good) and Crime and Punishment – don’t be deterred – I found it a much easier read than I expected and quite compelling.
I haven’t heard of that Dahl book – how curious!
How frustrating to have 3 out of four of the Durrell books!!
A TBR is a dangerous thing, the growing realisation that you can never read enough gnawing at your conscience. I used to be quite good at reading books as I acquired them, but now my TBR is steadily accumulating. Sudden thoughts enter my head late at night. ‘Why have I still not read Facial Justice by L.P Hartley,’ my Id cries out to me. Okay, the Id isn’t technically the right part of my brain to be crying out thoughts on novels. I do like to think of the part of my brain which reads as raw, animalistic in character though, so that’s how I’ll describe it. Well that is the fate of the addicted reader I suppose, ending up like Prometheus. In our case however, we are not chained to a rock, but to our accursed To Be Read list.
matt I quite like having listed them. For one thing it made me re-read the synopses and discover that there are several I’ve been ignoring because I thought they were something completely different! Also I get the satisfaction of deleting titles from the list and (hopefully) seeing the number go down.