The first part of the challenge for me is to choose the three New School books. These are books written after 1900 but before 1999.
The long list is:
I have felt for a long time that I ought to read more of Virginia Woolf. I read Orlando years ago, but did not really get on with it. Mrs Dalloway is regarded as not being particularly easy, but it has the advantage of being fairly short. Some of the books I’m thinking of reading next year are very long.
Midnight’s Children is the most recent book on the list (although it beats The Collected Stories only by a few months) and it’s a book that I’ve been promising myself to read for over thirty years. I’d like to read it to find out what all the fuss was about.
I first read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager and remember nothing of it. I lost my first copy and bought a new one, which I also lost, finding it again only this year. It would be interesting to read it after a gap of a few decades.
There are two other American works on the list – The Caine Mutiny and The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. I don’t very often read short stories, so I think they would add some variety. I’m only familiar with The Caine Mutiny through the film. My copy of the book is disintegrating, though, so I probably need to read it soon.
Whilst I haven’t owned The Quiet American for quite as long as you might think from the edition in the photograph, it’s been on my shelves for some years. The book is a second-hand copy and I have no idea where or when I bought it. I haven’t read any Greene, not even Brighton Rock, so this should probably make my final list.
Since I don’t read much poetry, I wanted to add a poet to my list. I have read some of Brooke’s poems over the years, but not all of them. He’ll definitely make the list.
I was going to leave Dr Zhivago until next year, or later, but the Catching up on Classics group has it down as a group read for January. For this reason, I think it will be the first book of the twelve that I read.
Have you read any of these books? Do you have any advice about which ones to choose?
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