Words to Live By – 2016

** November 21, 2016

About a year and a half ago I set a goal to read 25 classic books out of a list of 50. Over the months that followed I began reading and listed out my progress. I made marks next to the names of the books; updated with the approximate dates I finished.

Some of the books I had read before and decided to read through again, though for the majority, I was reading anew. Don’t short yourself by avoiding some of these classics, or, as most people do, nod your head and fake a smile when someone asks if you’ve ever read it. There seem to be fewer and fewer people who make reading a consist part of their schedule.

I’ll use this page as an update to my reading goals. In addition to the 50 titles on my original list, I’ll be adding additional works as well. Due to a business project I’m working on, I’ll be acquiring a number of classic books that I’ll have available to read.

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My Reading Goals

* While I prefer to have physical copies, I may download some via ebooks if I need to.

1. Dracula – Bram Stoker
2. Waiting for Gadot – Samuel Beckett
3. The Wasteland – T.S. Elliot
4. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
5. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
6. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
7. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
8. Paradise Lost – John Milton
9. The Stranger – Albert Camus
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – Completed September, 2015
11. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
12. Arabian Knights aka One Thousand and One Nights – Completed September, 2015
13. The Trial – Frank Kafka
14. Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville
15. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
16. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
17. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
18. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
19. The Brother’s Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
21. A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking – Completed August, 2016
22. Steal This Book – Abbie Hoffman
23. The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli – Completed mid February, 2015
24. Other Writings of Machiavelli (less “The Prince”)
25. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
26. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
27. Slaugterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
28. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
29. The Screwtape Letters – C.S. Lewis
30. The Divine Comedy, Inferno – Dante Alighieri
31. The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio – Dante Alighieri
32. The Divine Comedy – Paradiso – Dante Alighieri
33. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
34. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
35. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
36. The Stand – Steven King
37. Animal Farm – George Orwell
38. Dune – Frank Herbert
39. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – Completed November, 2016
40. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
41. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
42. Ulysses – James Joyce
43. The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
44. 1984 – George Orwell
45. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – Completed late January, 2015
46. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
47. The Art of War – Sun Tzu
48. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
49. Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand – Completed early March, 2015
50. On the Origin of  Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life – Charles Darwin