The List

One day, I was watching an episode of Game of Thrones and happened to glance over at my bookshelf, where A Feast for Crows, book four in the series, has been sitting unread since I bought it. Three years ago. I thought, hmm, maybe I should read that at some point. It is taking up valuable shelf space. Along with Our Mutual Friend and War and Peace and various books on grammar and the history of the English language that I thought I would get around to reading.

And thus, this blog idea was born. I’m going to read my way through all of the unread books on my shelf and post about them here. Along with the other books I’m reading. The rules (because I love rules) of this project are simple: 1. I can’t buy a new book until I read an unread one that I already own. (I am allowed to keep reading library books and books borrowed from friends.) 2. I’m allowed to quit books, but only if I’ve read at least 100 pages and I’m really not into it.

Books of poetry have been excluded from this project, because I said so.

Without further ado, here is the complete list in alphabetical order:

Madame Bovary’s Ovaries, David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash
The Brontes, Juliet Barker
How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom
Santa Claus: A Biography, Gerry Bowler
Mr. Darcy’s Guide to Courtship, Emily Brand (disclaimer: I did not buy this for myself)
A Truth Universally Acknowledged, ed. Susannah Carson
Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens
The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
For Her Own Good, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Invention of Murder, Judith Flanders
Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn
Jane Goes Batty, Michael Thomas Ford
On the Map, Simon Garfield
Sylvia’s Lovers, Elizabeth Gaskell
Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt
Under the Greenwood Tree, Thomas Hardy
Moby-Duck, Donovan Hohn
Red Herrings and White Elephants, Albert Jack
Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales, ed. Gordon Jarvie
What We Hide, Marthe Jocelyn
The Ghost Map, Stephen Berlin Johnson
The First Word, Christine Kenneally
In Darkest London, John Law (a pseudonym for Margaret Harkness)
The Xmas Files, Stephen Law
Word Origins, Anatoly Liberman
A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
My Life in Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead
Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami
The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
Origins of the Specious, Patricia T. O’Conner
The Complete Stories, Flannery O’Connor
The Son, James Scott
Contested Will, James Shapiro
Richard III, William Shakespeare
King Lear, William Shakespeare
The Great Charles Dickens Scandal, Michael Slater
The Jane Austen Handbook, Margaret Sullivan
Vanity Fair, William Thackeray
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester
A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf
Robert Schumann, John Worthen
If You Catch an Adjective, Kill It!, Ben Yagoda

This is going to take longer than I thought…