Reading Plan

(Link to all my book reviews so far)

(The lists below are still in progress – I’ll be adding to them as and when I think of more books, and there are whole time periods I haven’t got around to adding in yet. Also, keep checking this page for links to my reviews as I make my way through the lists. 😊)

I learnt to read at four, and since then I haven’t gone a week without having a book on the go. My mum is a strong believer in the power of literature, and she’s always stretched me by getting me to read challenging books from all different time periods. For me, reading has encouraged deep thought and discussion, enriched my vocabulary, stimulated curiosity and inspired me myself to write, too.

In 2021, I wrote my Reading Plan for that year, which you can read here. While I did get through quite a few of the books on that classical reading list, there are a lot that I still haven’t read, a year later. But I’m now that year older – a year more enthusiastic, a year more motivated. I have big aspirations when it comes to higher education, and if I want to reach them, I have a lot of reading and writing to get on with.

So this reading plan is going to span across the next three years before I go to university (three years – that doesn’t sound nearly so long when I write it down!). My dream is to go to uni in America, where I think the education is much more broad and well-rounded than the more narrow, specialisation-based degree system in place in the UK. Therefore, I want to be a more well-rounded individual by the time I get there – starting by beginning the Great Books curriculum, and finishing it this time.

By the time I go to university, I want to have read everything on the following list. You’ll find fiction, non-fiction, modern works, ancient works, classics, and random reads that I found on the shelf and looked interesting. I get that this is an awful lot of books to read in three years, but I’m going to try and do it anyway.

Ancient Literature

1700-1900 fiction

  • Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (1772)
  • Journal of a Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (1772)
  • Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
  • Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814)
  • Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (1831)
  • Selected Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
  • The Brothers Grimm, Selected Tales
  • Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1846)
  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847)
  • The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (1848)
  • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1849)
  • Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
  • Bleak House (1852)
  • Villette by Charlotte Bronte (1853)
  • Hard Times by Charles Dickens (1854)
  • North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (1854)
  • Adam Bede by George Eliot (1859)
  • Great Expectations by Charles Dickens [reread] (1860)
  • The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (1860)
  • Silas Marner by George Eliot (1861)
  • Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (1862)
  • Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (1862)
  • Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky (1866)
  • War and Peace by Tolstoy (1869)
  • Anna Karenina by Tolstoy (1878)
  • The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (1880)
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)
  • Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891)
  • The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1895)
  • Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
  • Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

1700-1900 non-fiction

  • History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776)

Pre-1700 fiction

  • Divine Comedy Dante (1320)
  • Don Quixote by Cervantes (1605)
  • Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667)

Post-1900 fiction

  • The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (1907)
  • The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton (1908)
  • Howard’s End by E. M. Forster (1910)
  • Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915)
  • We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924)
  • The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)
  • The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
  • To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
  • Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)
  • The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)
  • The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hammett (1929)
  • As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
  • We The Living by Ayn Rand (1936)
  • The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1936)
  • The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis (1942)
  • The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
  • Essays by George Orwell
  • 1984 by George Orwell (1949)
  • The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951)
  • The Father Brown Stories by G. K. Chesterton (1951)
  • Native Son by James Baldwin (1955)
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
  • Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis (1956)
  • Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
  • Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (1962)
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)
  • In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965)
  • Stoner by John Williams (1965)
  • The Magus by John Fowles (1965)
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
  • The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth (1967)
  • The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgajov (1967)
  • Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson (1971)
  • Hannibal Lecter Trilogy by Thomas Harris (1981-1999)
  • Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
  • The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (1982)
  • The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (1984)
  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
  • Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
  • Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson (1994)
  • Blindness by Jose Saramago (1995)
  • Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
  • Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)
  • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
  • The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway (2008)

Post-1900 non-fiction

  • Essays by G. K. Chesterton
  • History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (1945)
  • The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
  • A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
  • Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple (2001)
  • Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (2008)
  • The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson (2011)
  • Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker (2017)
  • 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan Peterson (2018)

Autobiography/memoir

  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
  • Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup (1853)
  • Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl [reread] (1946)
  • Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg (1967)
  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)
  • The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
  • Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! by Richard Feynman (1985)
  • Wild Swans by Jung Chang (1991)
  • All Rivers Run to the Sea by Elie Wiesel (1994)
  • Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (1994)
  • Man Is Wolf to Man by Janusz Bardach (1998)
  • Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2000)
  • When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (2016)

Politics A-Level Prep

  • Two Treatises of Government by John Locke (1689)
  • The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
  • A Theory of Justice by John Rawls (1971)
  • The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel (1979)
  • Liberalism and the Limits of Justice by Michael Sandel (1982)
  • Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky (1988)
  • Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky (2002)
  • The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley (2010)
  • Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker (2018)
  • The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan (2018)
  • The Jungle Grows Back by Robert Kagan (2018)
  • The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray (2019)

Philosophy

  • Meditations by Descartes (1641)
  • An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke (1689)
  • Philosophical Works by George Berkeley
  • A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume (1739)
  • Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (1779)
  • Thus Spake Zarathustre by Nietzsche (1883)
  • Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche (1886)
  • The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis (1943)
  • The Problem of Knowledge by A. J. Ayer (1956)
  • Reason, Truth and History by Hilary Putnam (1981)
  • The Mystery of Consciousness by John Searle (1990)
  • Modern Philosophy by Roger Scruton (1994)
  • Philosophy: The Classics by Nigel Warburton (2000)
  • On Beauty by Roger Scruton (2009)