MindFULLY Reading

It’s Labor Day. A funny name, for I think few labor on this day. Nonetheless, it marks the end of summer and beginning of Fall. And the beginning of Fall marks a soon to be Winter.

Having spent the last year in the pursuit of all things outside of myself, I am ready to turn my attention back to my mind. Some days I feel like I am losing it. I think one of the best ways to keep it sharp  is to pick up a good book. Colette would say it is by playing Words With Friends and learning all the two letter words she claims are real, but that is a post for other time. This Fall and Winter, I have committed to reading one Classic per season. However, there are so many. Where to begin? Pondering this notion over our usual glass of wine one evening, Erica shared a Classic Reading List from a friend of hers. I am sure there are many “must-read Classic Reading Lists” out there. But, in the spirit of “pick one and get reading”, I am using this one. I am starting with #26. It has always been on my list.

Maybe something on this list will strike your fancy. On this day of supposed ease, maybe there is an hour embedded for you to put your feet and get started. No matter your choice, may you find inspiration, stimulation and satisfaction. And may the Winter months pass easily with each page turned.

1. Crime and Punishment – Dostoyevksy
2. Brother’s Karamazov – Dostoyevsky
3. Ulysses – Joyce
4. Native Son – Richard Wright
5. Passage to India  – E.M. Forester
6. Of Human Bondage – Maugham
7. Henderson the Rain God – Bellow
8. 1984 – Orwell
9. Animal Farm – George Orwell
10. The Great Gatsby – Fitzgerald
11.  Lord of the Flies – Golding
12.  Lolita – Nabakov
13.  The Sound and the Fury – Faulkner
14.  Light in August – Faulkner
15.  To the Lighthouse – Virginia Wolf
16.  Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
17.  Invisible Man  – Ralph Ellison
18.  Pride and Prejudice – Austen
19.  The Catcher in the Rye – Salinger
20.  To Kill a Mockingbird –  Harper Lee
21.  One Hundred Years of Solitude – Marquez
22.   The Grapes of Wrath – Steinbeck
23.   East of Eden – Steinbeck
24.  Brave New World – Huxley
25.  Madame Bovary -Flaubert
26.  Anna Karenina – Tolstoy
27.  Slaughterhouse Five – Vonnegut
28.  In Cold Blood – Capote
29. The Sun Also Rises – Hemingway
30.  Sons and Lovers – Lawrence
31.  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – McCullers
32.  Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
33.  An American Tragedy – Dreiser
34.  Remembrance of Things Past – Proust
35.  All the Pretty Horses – McCarthy
36.   Dune – Herbert
37.   Stranger in a Strange Land – Heinlein
38.  Death Comes for the Archbishop – Cather
39.  My Antonia – Cather
40.  The Moviegoer – Percy
41.  Ender’s Game – Card
42.  The Alexandria Quartet – Durrell
43.  Angle of Repose – Stegner
44.  A Room with a View – Forster
45.  Sun Also Rises  – Hemingway
46.  The French Lieutenant’s Woman – Fowles
47.  Native Son – Wright
48.  Brideshead Revisted – Waugh
49.  I, Claudius – Graves
50.  White Noise – Delillo
51.  Beloved – Morrison
52.  The Remains of the Day – Ishiguro
53.  So Long, See You Tomorrow – Maxwell
54.  The Day of the Locust – West
55. The Bell Jar – Plath
56.  Babbitt – Lewis
57.  Howard’s End – Forster
58.   One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Kesey
59.   The Color Purple – Walker
60.  Of Mice and Men – Steinbeck
61.   A Farewell to Arms – Hemingway
62.   On the Road – Kerouac
63.   The Call of the Wild – London
64.   All the King’s Men – Warren
65.   The Jungle – Sinclair
66.   The Age of Innocence – Wharton
67.   A Clockwork Orange – Burgess
68.   A Good Man is hard to Find – O’Connor
69.   Cat’s Cradle – Vonnegut
70.   Look Homeward Angel – Wolfe
71.  This Side of Paradise – Fitzgerald
72.   Middlemarch – Eliot
73.   Gone with the Wind
74.  Catch 22 – Heller
75.  The Lord of the Rings – Tolkien
76.  A Clockwork Orange – Burgess
77.   For Whom the Bell Tolls – Hemingway
78.   Frankenstein – Shelley
79.  The Big Sleep – Chandler
80.  Go Tell it on the Mountain – Baldwin
81.  Heart of Darkness – Conrad
82.   Night – Wiesel
83.   Rabbit Run – Updike
84.   The Day of the Locust – West
85.   Goodbye to all that – Graves
86.   Pride and Prejudice – Austen
87.  Jane Eyre – Bronte
88. Wuthering Heights – Bronte
89. The Stranger – Camus
90. A Tale of Two Cities – Dickens
91. A Mill on the Floss – Elliott
92. The Good Soldier – Ford
93. Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Hardy
94. The Scarlett Letter – Hawthorne
95. The Iliad  – Homer
96. The Odyssey – Homer
97. Their Eyes were Watching God – Hurston
98. Brave New World – Huxley
99. The Metamorphosis – Kafka
100. The Woman Warrior – Kingston
101. Magic Mountain – Mann
102. Moby Dick – Melville
103. All Quiet on the Western Front – Remarque
104. The Crying of Lot 49 – Pynchon
105. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Solzhenitsyn
106. War and Peace – Tolstoy
107. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Twain
108. Candide – Voltaire
109. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Wilde
110. Charlotte’s Web – White
111. The Old Man and the Sea – Hemingway
112. Schindler’s List – Kenealy
113. Mrs. Dalloway – Woolf
114. Jazz – Morrison
115. Cat’s Cradle – Vonnegut
116. The Wings of the Dove – James
117. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Adam
118. Naked Lunch – Burroughs
119. The War of the Words – Wells
120. The Naked and the Dead – Mailer
121. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Stein
122. The Wind in the Willows – Grahame
123. Dead Souls – Gogol
124. Great Expectations – Dickens
125. Cry the Beloved Country – Paton
126. The Man and His Servant – Tolstoy
127. The Lover – Duras
128. Ethan Frome – Wharton

 What will you MindFULLY choose to read this season? Let us know!