Bibliophilia

For the sole, arbitrary reason that the book is sitting on my bookshelf, I've decided that my summer will look like this:

1. Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes
2. War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
3. Ulysses James Joyce
4. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
5. The Brothers Karamazov Feodor Dostoevsky
6. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
7. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
8. Middlemarch George Eliot
9. The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann
10. The Tale of Genji Murasaki Shikibu
11. Emma Jane Austen
12. Bleak House Charles Dickens
13. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
15. Tom Jones Henry Fielding
16. Great Expectations Charles Dickens
17. Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner
18. The Ambassadors Henry James
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
20. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
21. To The Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
22. Crime and Punishment Feodor Dostoevsky
23. The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner
24. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
25. Invisible Man Ralph Ellison
26. Finnegans Wake James Joyce
27. The Man Without Qualities Robert Musil
28. Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon
29. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
30. Women in Love D. H. Lawrence
31. The Red and the Black Stendhal
32. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
33. Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol
34. Tess of the D'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
35. Buddenbrooks Thomas Mann
36. Le Pere Goriot Honore de Balzac
37. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce
38. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
39. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass
40. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable Samuel Beckett
41. Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
42. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
43. Fathers and Sons Ivan Turgenev
44. Nostromo Joseph Conrad
45. Beloved Toni Morrison
46. An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser
47. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
48. The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing
49. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
50. Dream of the Red Chamber Cao Xueqin
51. The Trial Franz Kafka
52. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
53. The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane
54. The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
55. Petersburg Andrey Bely
56. Things Fall Apart Chinue Achebe
57. The Princess of Cleves Madame de Lafayette
58. The Stranger Albert Camus
59. My Antonio Willa Cather
60. The Counterfeiters Andre Gide
61. The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton
62. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
63. The Awakening Kate Chopin
64. A Passage to India E. M. Forster
65. Herzog Saul Bellow
66. Germinal Emile Zola
67. Call It Sleep Henry Roth
68. U.S.A. Trilogy John Dos Passos
69. Hunger Knut Hamsun
70. Berlin Alexanderplatz Alfred Doblin
71. Cities of Salt 'Abd al-Rahman Munif
72. The Death of Artemio Cruz Carlos Fuentes
73. A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway
74. Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh
75. The Last Chronicle of Barset Anthony Trollope
76. The Pickwick Papers Charles Dickens
77. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
78. The Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
79. Candide Voltaire
80. Native Son Richard Wright
81. Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry
82. Oblomov Ivan Goncharov
83. Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston
84. Waverley Sir Walter Scott
85. Snow Country Kawabata Yasunari
86. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
87. The Betrothed Alessandro Manzoni
88. The Last of the Mohicans James Fenimore Cooper
89. Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe
90. Les Miserables Victor Hugo
91. On the Road Jack Kerouac
92. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
93. The Leopard Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
94. The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
95. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
96. The Good Soldier Svejk Jaroslav Hasek
97. Dracula Bram Stoker
98. The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas
99. The Hound of Baskervilles Arthur Conan Doyle
100. Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell

I love setting realistic goals. For the sake of time, I'm going to skip over the books I've already read (highlighted). I figure that, if I'm seriously going to attempt an MFA (and shortly thereafter, a PhD) in creative writing/literary arts, the least I can do is read all the books that are archetypal standards for comparative literature. You know, all the books we were supposed to read in school. (I cannot believe I've never read a stitch of Dickens, but am super grateful to have already trudged through the hobby horse that was Tristram Shandy.)

Aiming to read 75 books whose average page count is hovering around 500 before September is totes reasonable. An achievable goal. Lest you forget that I once hit the entire Harry Potter series in less than a fortnight.

What's a delusional knight got on preteen wizardry, anyway?