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One of my resolutions for 2012 was to read books of a more "serious" nature. (And by "serious", I mean more literary and more difficult. The kinds of books that you would find on a college syllabus, shortlisted for literary awards, and/or written about in The New Yorker.) I started off the year wanting to read harder books. Books that challenged me. Books that I was not able to finish in two days. Granted there is something quite satisfying about the easy books that you can finish in a day. They have a predictable story line written in a rather simple style. While, I do enjoy those books, I found that I read too many of those books. Simply for the fact that I wanted to add yet another title to the books that I read that year. Looking back on that list, I was rather disappointed in myself and The Program of Serious Reading (PSR) was born.
Unfortunately, of the 17 books that I had read so far in 2012, I would only consider two of those books to meet the qualifications of PSR. As a result, I decided that I need to be more structured if this resolution is going to actually be successful. I created a list of books that I intend to read in 2012 (in no particular order)*:
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
- Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
- A Room With A View by E. M. Forster
- Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
- The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Wish me luck.
*As I reviewed this list I realized that I had only one female author and no authors of color. PSR fail. However, this is not an exhaustive list. It is simply a list of books that I have always wanted to read in their entirety and needed to document for personal accountability . I reserve the right to add/remove titles, of course. :-)
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