Bucket's List

[Bucket]

Thanks, mods, for this space to track our reading! When I first learned about the list back in 2009, I went through and discovered I had already read 77 books. It was a good start, and I've inched my way along ever since.

This thread shows what I've read, in life phases looking back and 5-year chunks now and moving forward. My goal is to read at least 1001 of the full list, and to finish by the time I retire (hopefully before 70?).

[Bucket]

Childhood through high school (1995ish-2002)

1. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
2. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The Once and Future King, T.H. White
4. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
5. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
6. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
7. Dracula, Bram Stoker
8. Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
9. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
10. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
11. Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
12. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
13. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
14. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
15. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
16. The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
17. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
18. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
19. A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift
20. Native Son, Richard Wright
21. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
22. Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
23. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
24. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
25. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
26. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
27. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
28. White Noise, Don DeLillo
29. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
30. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
31. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
32. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
33. Animal Farm, George Orwell
34. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
35. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
36. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
37. Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
38. Beloved, Toni Morrison
39. Waterland, Graham Swift
40. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

[Bucket]

College (2002-2006)

41. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
42. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
43. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
44. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
45. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
46. Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
47. The Quiet American, Graham Greene
48. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
49. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
50. Mao II, Don DeLillo
51. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
52. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
53. Effi Briest, Theodor Fontane
54. The Invention of Curried Sausage, Uwe Timm
55. The Reader, Bernhard Schlink
56. Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood
57. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Heinrich Boll
58. Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
59. Atonement, Ian McEwan
60. Foe, J.M. Coetzee
61. Oroonoko, Aphra Behn
62. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields
63. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

[Bucket]

In my 20s – pre-learning about the 1001 list (2006-2009)

64. Falling Man, Don DeLillo
65. Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
66. Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding
67. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
68. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
69. Underworld, Don DeLillo
70. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
71. House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
72. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
73. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
74. Ada, Vladimir Nabokov
75. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
76. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
77. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon

[Bucket]

In my 20s – after learning about the 1001 list (2009-2014)

78. The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
79. Choke, Chuck Palahniuk
80. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
81. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
82. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
83. The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
84. Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga
85. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
86. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
87. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
88. All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
89. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
90. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
91. Home, Marilynne Robinson
92. The World According to Garp, John Irving
93. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
94. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
95. The Waves, Virginia Woolf
96. The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
97. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
98. The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides
99. Neuromancer, William Gibson
100. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
101. Remembrance of Things Past / In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
102. The Grass is Singing, Doris Lessing
103. Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey
104. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
105. The House with the Blind Glass Windows, Herbjorg Wassmo
106. Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
107. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
108. Dangling Man, Saul Bellow
109. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
110. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
111. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
112. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
113. The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow

[Bucket]

When I was 30-35. (2014-2019)

114. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
115. In a Free State, V.S. Naipaul
116. What I Loved, Siri Hustvedt
117. Rickshaw Boy, Lao She
118. The Story of Lucy Gault, William Trevor
119. The Kreutzer Sonata, Leo Tolstoy
120. Therese Raquin, Emile Zola
121. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
122. Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee
123. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
124. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
125. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
126. Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
127. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
128. The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
129. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
130. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
131. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
132. The Hours, Michael Cunningham
133. Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
134. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
135. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
136. Libra, Don DeLillo
137. Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
138. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
139. American Pastoral, Philip Roth
140. White Teeth, Zadie Smith
141. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
142. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
143. Some Prefer Nettles, Junichiro Tanizaki
144. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
145. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
146. Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
147. The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
148. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
149. Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
150. Fruits of the Earth, Andre Gide
151. The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe
152. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
153. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence
154. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
155. Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth
156. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
157. Herzog, Saul Bellow
158. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
159. The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead
160. The Nose, Nikolay Gogol
161. The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante
162. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
163. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
164. Candide, Voltaire
165. U.S.A., John Dos Passos

[Bucket]

When I was 35-40. (2019-2024)

166. Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
167. Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson
168. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
169. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
170. Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes
171. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
172. Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
173. The Gathering, Anne Enright
174. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
175. Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky
176. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
177. Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
178. The Body Artist, Don DeLillo
179. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
180. Black Dogs, Ian McEwan
181. Amsterdam, Ian McEwan
182. The Monk, M.G. Lewis
183. Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
184. A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
185. The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster
186. Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
187. Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
188. The 13 Clocks, James Thurber
189. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
190. So Long a Letter, Mariama Ba
191. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
192. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
193. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
194. The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan
195. The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector
196. The Light of Day, Graham Swift
197. Cane, Jean Toomer
198. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
199. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
200. A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell
201. The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
202. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
203. The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
204. Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro
205. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
206. On the Eve, Ivan Turgenev
207. The Child in Time, Ian McEwan
208. Saturday, Ian McEwan
209. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
210. Enduring Love, Ian McEwan
211. The Purloined Letter, Edgar Allan Poe
212. Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne
213. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
214. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo
215. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carre
216. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Machado de Assis
217. The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
218. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
219. Myra Breckinridge, Gore Vidal
220. Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
221. The Children’s Book, A.S. Byatt
222. The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, Anonymous
223. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
224. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
225. Voss, Patrick White
226. If This is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz), Primo Levi
227. The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

228. Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin
The poetry is tortured, but joyful, vivid and surprisingly modern. Read my review

229. The Passion, Jeanette Winterson
PERFECTION. On the danger of passion-turned-obsession. Read my review

230. The Trial, Franz Kafka
So dark you can only laugh. Read my review

231. The Professor’s House, Willa Cather
Psychologically intense, but I missed the usual Cather sense of place. Read my review

232. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
Good characters but quaint. Read my review

233. Promise at Dawn, Romain Gary
Fascinating memoir about Gary's mom's controlling love. Read my review

234. Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis
A life in reverse: funny, then sinister. Read my review

235. Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger
Insightful, authentic, deceptively simple. Read my review

236. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
Well-researched, high-stakes whodunit. Read my review

237. Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett
Strip down language to its bones. Keep stripping. Read my review

238. Death and the Dervish, Mesa Selimovic
Slow burn (even for me). Kafka-esque. Read my review

239. The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells
Too much action movie, not enough philosophizing. Read my review

240. Platero and I, Juan Ramon Jimenez
Kid-friendly but full of depth and poetry. Read my review

241. The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
Layers of mystery and identity. Immersive. Read my review

242. The Wonderful "O", James Thurber
Simple (for kids) but charming. Read my review

243. Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne
Fantastical minutiae. Read my review

244. Manhattan Transfer, Don Dos Passos
NYC is the MC. Read my review

245. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
Deft, dark, character-driven. Read my review

246. The Water Margin, Shi Nai'an
Ambitious epic, but becomes repetitive. Read my review

247. Snow, Orhan Pamuk
Cold. Political thriller with something to chew on. Read my review

248. Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto
Melancholy with hope, food and magic. Read my review

249. Orlando, Virginia Woolf
Funny, zesty rule-breaker with depth. Read my review

250. The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
Uniquely tedious. Tediously unique. Read my review

251. Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O'Connor
Unhappy, vicious, beautiful. Read my review

252. The Counterfeiters, Andre Gide
Advances the novel as a form, plus plot twists and complex characters. Read my review

253. Chess Story, Stefan Zweig
Think-piece, not thriller, about survival via chess. Read my review

254. Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
Beautiful, strong, blazing with feeling and sensory moments. Read my review

255. The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez
Dark humor; structural slog. Read my review

256. Cain, José Saramago
IF god exists, he's either a tyrant or dumb. Read my review

257. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos
Funny, character-driven, fluffy. Read my review

258. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, Anonymous
Slightly charming. Read my review

259. Erewhon, Samuel Butler
Adventure, with semi-satirical philosophy. Read my review

260. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Nearly flawless. Read my review

261. The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald
Decay, destruction, hope. Read my review

262. The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño
Bold and sweeping, but hyper-masculine. Read my review

263. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
The murkiness of truth and power. Read my review

264. The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach
Beautiful story, less-than-real characters. Read my review

265. Middlemarch, George Eliot
Best of the classics, feminist to the core. Read my review

266. 2666, Roberto Bolaño
267. Passing, Nella Larsen
268. Spring Torrents, Ivan Turgenev

[Bucket]

When I'm 40-45 (2024-2029)

269. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
270. Martin Fierro, Jose Hernandez
271. Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky
272. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
273. Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset
274. The Accidental, Ali Smith
275. In a Glass Darkly, J. Sheridan Le Fanu
276. The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
277. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
278. The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells
279. Smilla's Sense of Snow, Peter Hoeg
280. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
281. The Country Girls, Edna O'Brien
282. Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais
283. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
284. The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
285. Amelia, Henry Fielding

[Bucket]

When I'm 45-50 (2029-2034)

[Bucket]

When I'm 50-55 (2034-2039)

[Bucket]

When I'm 55-60 (2039-2044)

[Bucket]

When I'm 60-65 (2044-2049)

[Bucket]

When I'm 65-70 (2049-2054)

[Bucket]

When I'm 70+(2054 and beyond)

[Sean]

Bucket wrote: "When I'm 70+(2054 and beyond)"

I love that you set these up all the way to 2054 (and beyond.)

Here's to hoping I'm around to actually see you add to this particular post. (I will only be 83 :P)

[Bucket]

Yeah, I think I had a mini existential crisis when I started putting years on those posts. It's incentive to finish faster, I suppose!

Sean wrote: "Bucket wrote: "When I'm 70+(2054 and beyond)"

I love that you set these up all the way to 2054 (and beyond.)

Here's to hoping I'm around to actually see you add to this particular post. (I will o..."

[Bucket]

Starting to add mini-reviews (and links to my reviews) - working my way backwards.