The Onerous Reading List

The Onerous Reading List Starter Kit

​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.