Robert White Creeley (5/21/1926-03/30/2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. Wikipedia
 

​My efforts to read more are foundering.  I am stuck on the the book I am currently reading, Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk.  It's not the author's fault.  MacDonald is an excellent writer.  I am finding myself not interested. So, for now at least, I will put it aside.

One would most likely think if one wanted to read more that making a list of books deemed "difficult" would be counterproductive.  It's probably true.  However, there are many books out there that I have always felt I should read.  Books considered classics, books that many say are challenging, books I should have read in high school or college, books I did read years ago but want to re-read.  And yes, books others have warned me about "Oh that's a terrible book..." 

I started this list in my head, on the drive home from work.  It is just the start.  Some are difficult due to their length, some are simply difficult to read.  I need a reading challenge but never seem to want to read books that others recommend.  Just by saying "You HAVE to read this book" automatically triggers a lack of desire to ever read it.  I can't explain.

So, having said that, this is not a list of recommendations.  Most of the following books I have never read.  Some, like I mentioned, I have read but it's been so long ago I feel they deserve a re-read. My deadline?  I hope to read as many of the books on the list by one year from today.

Here's my Onerous Reading List for 2021-2022

• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) by Herman Hesse
• Little, Big by John Crowley
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Death on the Installment Plan by Celine
• The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
• Das Kapital by Karl Marx
• The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
• The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler (if I ever find a copy of it)
• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
• The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury ( I read it in high school but need to re-read it)
• Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
• On Revolution by Hannah Arendt
• We Have Always Lived in a Castle by Shirley Jackson
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Love in the Time of Cholera by  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The list is by no means complete. I also plan, for the sake of sanity, to pepper in "light reading,"  (my guilty pleasure of detective or horror fiction) I want to see how many of these I can finish in six months and re-evaluate then.  Until then, wish me luck.  I'm going to get started and read a bit before I go to bed.