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