#50: 40 Books Before 40

This post in three months overdue. My original plan was to finalize my list of 40 books to read before my 40th birthday on my 30th birthday, so that I would have exactly ten years to complete them. But then life happened.

Anyway, the list. (The books I’ve read are bold, those waiting to be read in italics.)

  1. J.M. Barrie — Peter Pan
  2. Samuel Beckett — Waiting for Godot
  3. Ferdinand Bordewijk — Karakter
  4. Mikhail Bulgakov — The Master and Margarita
  5. Lewis Carroll — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass
  6. Italo Calvino — If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
  7. Joseph Campbell — The Hero wth a Thousand Faces
  8. Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote
  9. Hugo Claus — Het verdriet van België
  10. Erich von Däniken — Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past
  11. Alexandre Dumas — The Count of Monte Cristo
  12. Mark Dunn — Ibid: A Life
  13. Erasmus — Lof der Zotheid
  14. F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby
  15. Anne Frank — Het Achterhuis
  16. Jostein Gaarder — Sophie’s World
  17. William Gibson — Neuromancer
  18. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Die Leiden des jungen Werther
  19. Brothers Grimm — Fairytales
  20. Joseph Heller — Catch-22
  21. W.F. Hermans — De donkere kamer van Damokles
  22. Homerus — Odyssey
  23. Aldous Huxley — Brave New World
  24. Franz Kafka — Der Prozess
  25. Rudyard Kipling — The Jungle Book
  26. H.D. Lawrence — Lady Chatterley’s Lover
  27. Harper Lee — To Kill a Mockingbird
  28. Herman Melville — Moby Dick
  29. John Milton — Paradise Lost
  30. Alan Moore / David Lloyd — V for Vendetta
  31. Vladimir Nabokov — Lolita
  32. Nescio — De uitvreter / Titaantjes
  33. Gerard Reve — De avonden
  34. J.D. Salinger — The Catcher in the Rye
  35. Bram Stoker — Dracula
  36. Strunk & White — The Elements of Style
  37. Mark Twain — The Adventures of Tom Sawyer / Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  38. Kurt Vonnegut — Slaughterhouse-Five
  39. Oscar Wilde — The Picture of Dorian Gray
  40. Marion Zimmer Bradley — The Mists of Avalon

And in case you’re wondering why, I made this list just because I can. I read a lot anyway, so I might as well make it a little bit challenging by adding some some classics and books that are (at least slightly) outside of my comfort zone to the mix. Also, I was way too late to make a list of 30 books to read before I turned 30.

Eventually, I’ll either integrate this list in my 100 Things list, or put it on a separate page. Until then, I’ll keep crossing off those books I’ve read here.