These are books that I own but have not yet read. I’m going to try to keep this list up to date, with a current total at the bottom. I wrote a few notes about this exercise in a blog post here.
A few of these books 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.
A
Aravind Adiga – The White Tiger
Isabel Allende – Kingdom of the Golden Dragon
Isabel Allende – The Sum of Our Days
Kingsley Amis – Lucky Jim
Nadeem Aslam – The Wasted Vigil
Margaret Atwood – The Robber Bride
Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy
Tash Aw – The Harmony Silk Factory
B
Honore de Balzac – Old Goriot
John Banville – The Sea
Maria Barbal – Stone in a Landslide
Julian Barnes – Nothing to be Frightened of
Max Barry – Machine Man
Gertrude Bell – The Desert and the Sown
Mikhael Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita
A S Byatt – The Children’s Book
A S Byatt – Still Life
C
Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus
Bernardo Carvalho – Fear of De Sade
Blaise Cendrars – Moravagine
Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote*
Raymond Chandler – The High Window
Raymond Chandler – The Lady in the Lake
Raymond Chandler – Trouble is My Business
Vikram Chandra – Red Earth and Pouring Rain
Anton Chekhov – A Russian Affair
Anton Chekhov – Three Plays
Apsley Cherry-Garrard – The Worst Journey in the World
Jonathan Coe – The Rotters’ Club
J M Coetzee – Disgrace
Colette – Cheri/The Last of Cheri
Colette – The Rainy Moon and Other Stories
David Crystal – The Stories of English
D
Charles Dickens – The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Charles Dickens – The Old Curiosity Shop
Joan Didion – The Last Thing He Wanted
Alexandre Dumas – The Black Tulip
E
Umberto Eco – The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
Umberto Eco & Jean-Claude Carrière – This is not the end of the book;
F
Aminatta Forna – The Memory of Love
E M Forster – A Passage to India
Kate Fox – Watching the English
G
Sergios Gakas – Ashes
Amitav Ghosh – Sea of Poppies
Stella Gibbons – Cold Comfort Farm
Grant Gillespie – The Cuckoo Boy
Graham Greene – The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene – The Ministry of Fear
Ursula le Guin – The Earthsea Quartet*
H
H Rider Haggard – Allan Quatermain
Colin Harvey – Damage Time
Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway – For Whom the Bell Tolls
Nick Hornby – 31 Songs
Michel Houellebecq – The Possibility of an Island
I
Laura Ingalls Wilder – Little House on the Prairie
Christopher Isherwood – The Memorial
Kazuo Ishiguro – The Unconsoled
J
James Joyce – Dubliners
K
Mary Kingsley – The Congo and the Cameroons
Milan Kundera – Immortality
Andrey Kurkov – The President’s Last Love
L
Margharita Laski – The Victorian Chaise-longue
J Robert Lennon – The Light of Falling Stars
Primo Levi – The Periodic Table
M
Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince
Constance Maud – No Surrender
M Somerset Maugham – The Moon and Sixpence
Tim Maughan – Paintwork
Daphne du Maurier – The Birds and other stories
Daphne du Maurier – The Breaking Point: short stories
Daphne du Maurier – The King’s General
Daphne du Maurier – Mary Anne
Daphne du Maurier – The Progress of Julia
Ian McEwan – On Chesil Beach
Rohinton Mistry – A Fine Balance
Jari Moate – Paradise Now
Iris Murdoch – Under the Net*
N
Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire
Irène Némirovsky – The Wine of Solitude
Pablo Neruda – Memoirs
Emma Newman – The Split Worlds book 1: Between Two Thorns
Geoff Nicholson – Bedlam Burning
O
Véronique Olmi – Beside the Sea
George Orwell – Burmese Days
George Orwell – Decline of the English Murder
George Orwell – Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
Elsa Osorio – My Name is Light
P
Orhan Pamuk – Istanbul
Orhan Pamuk – Other Colours
Alan Paton – Cry, the Beloved Country
Elliot Perlman – Three Dollars
Sylvia Plath – Journals 1950–1962
R
Salman Rushdie – Fury
Salman Rushdie – The Ground Beneath Her Feet*
Salman Rushdie – The Moor’s Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie – Shame
Geoff Ryman – The Child Garden
S
Rafik Schami – The Dark Side of Love
Paul Scott – The Jewel in the Crown*
Hubert Selby Jr – Requiem for a Dream*
Will Self – Great Apes
Mary Shelley – The Last Man*
Mary Shelley – Lodore
Lionel Shriver – The Post-Birthday World
Ahdaf Soueif – Cairo: My City, Our Revolution
Ahdaf Soueif – In the Eye of the Sun
John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath
Stendhal – The Red and the Black
R L Stevenson – Travels With a Donkey
T
Dorothea Tanning – Chasm: a Weekend
Donna Tartt – The Secret History
William Thackeray – Vanity Fair
Wilfred Thesiger – Across the Empty Quarter
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
Colm Tóibín – Brooklyn
Mark Twain – Can-cans, Cats and Cities of Ash
V
Kurt Vonnegut Jr – Breakfast of Champions
W
H G Wells – The History of Mr Polly
Thomas Wolfe – You Can’t Go Home Again
John Carter Wood – The Most Remarkable Woman in England
Daniel Woodrell – Winter’s Bone
Virginia Woolf – On Fiction
Virginia Woolf – Orlando
Z
Carlos Ruiz Zafón – The Prince of Mist
Various authors
Birthday Stories – selected by Haruki Murakami
Secret Ingredients: the New Yorker Book of Food and Drink
Total = 128