Each of us would like to read more. There is no question about that. Even if you are the most voracious reader in the world, sometimes life gets in the way. Having our face in a book all the time isn’t practical and sometimes can be dangerous. Ask anyone who has ever tried to drive and read.
Here at West Side Books, we decided that though life interrupts our reading at times, we still have hopes and dreams to one day read every title our hearts desire. Because of this, we’ve created the Book Bucket List. We want to read them all! Yes, one day we’re going to be that annoying guy at the party who has read everything under the sun. War and Peace? Read it! Moby Dick? Please, three times! Paradise Lost? As if… I can recite it by heart!
Here are some books we hope to read (someday):
(Keep in mind–this is a collective list from the whole West Side Books staff. There might be some crossover or, at least, we hope there is. No one wants to be the only person in the world who hasn’t read Faust)
The Third Reich by Roberto Bolano
Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes
Notes from the Underground by Theodore Dostovesky
Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
Gargantua and Pantagruel
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
What is the What by Dave Eggers
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
Something by Henry James
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
A House For Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul The Living by Annie Dillard Faust by Goethe As I lay Dying by William Faulkner Madam Bovary by Gustav Flaubert Origin of Species by Charles Darwin Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, and Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi Darkness Visible by William Styron Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Beloved by Toni Morrison The Known World by Edward P Jones Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy Underworld by Don DiLillo
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Complete William Shakespeare by Billy Himself
The Bible
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostovesky
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Naked Lunch by William S.Burroughs
The Book of The New Sun by Gene Wolfe
Beowulf
The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis
This is just a small taste of the books we want to read. We’ll periodically keep updating the list with more titles! Now, get out there and start your own Book Bucket List.