Next Year’s Reading List

I did not become a reader until half-way through graduate school. A couple of reasons why were:

1. my addiction to television (which I’ve since overcome)
2. my lack of time (I had lots of homework until I finished grad-school coursework)
3. I hated reading because my teachers assigned crummy books that THEY thought I should read. They didn’t bother consulting me on the matter.

Now that none of these conditions apply, I thoroughly love to read. I choose what I want to read. However, there are a number of titles that I never read that I probably should read in order to be considered a learned individual. Therefore, 201o will be the year of the SUMMER READING LIST. I’ve consulted a number of different lists of great books, thought about titles that often come up in “JEOPARDY” questions, asked my wife, and consulted some of my students to compile the following list of 30 titles. The only titles that I eliminated from consideration were:

• titles that were incredibly long (I’ve budgeted 2 weeks per book). I’m sure that “Crime & Punishment” and “War & Peace” are great books, just not for this exercise
• books I’ve read already
• books where I saw the movie (regardless of how true to the book the movie is)
• books by chicks (sorry, Jane Austin, the Brontes, and especially Toni Morrison, were what caused my dislike of reading) The exception is “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley, but hey it’s a monster book. If it makes any of you feminists feel any better, I do plan on reading “Pride & Prejudice & Zombies” and “Sense & Sensibility and Sea Monsters.”

Without further delay, here is the list:

1. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain
2. “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut
3. “Animal Farm” by George Orwell
4. “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy
5. “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
6. “Around the World in 80 Days” by Jules Verne
7. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway
8. “The Invisible Man” by H.G. Wells
9. 2 Shakespeare plays I haven’t read-TBD
10. “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan
11. “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson
12. “Mere Christianity” by C. S. Lewis
13. “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkein
14. “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley
15. “The Hound of the Baskervilles” by Arthur Conan Doyle
16. “The Agony and the Ecstasy” by Irving Stone (this is for you father-in-law)
17. “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
18. “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck
19. “Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger
20. “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
21. “The Prince” by Niccolo Machiavelli
22. “Swiss Family Robinson” by Johann Wyss
23. “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift
24. “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” by Victor Hugo
25. “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe
26. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams
27. “Ulysses” by James Joyce
28. “Catch-22″ by Joseph Heller
29. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie
30. “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Toole