The Kent M. Beeson of Western Civilization

The “Educating Kent” Reading List

If you follow me on Twitter (and if you’re reading this, you likely already do), then you know I’ve recently given up movies for Lent to make more time for writing fiction.  The only real problem is that when it comes to the classics the well-reviewed books, I’m functionally illiterate.  Oh, I’ll scream through a few non-fiction titles every year, but I haven’t been really seriously reading since, oh, about 2000.  So to rectify this situation, I’ve composed a list of 24 books to get through in the next year or so, a list made up of regarded classics, lesser-known works, and the (hopefully) just plain fun.  Quite a few of these come from Thomas C. Foster’s book How To Read Literature Like A Professor, which I enjoyed despite (or because?) it being aimed at smart high school students and dumb college ones.  

[Also, some of these I’ve read before, but so long ago I couldn’t tell you what happened in them.]

1. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
2. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
3. The Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
4. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
6. Grendel by John Gardner
7. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
10. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
11. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
12. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
13. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch 
14. Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien
15. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
16. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
17. The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
18. The Terror by Dan Simmons [CURRENTLY READING]
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger [CURRENTLY READING]
20. The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte 
21. Cathedral by Raymond Carver
22. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
23. Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow [FINISHED]
24. The Berlin Stories by Christopoher Isherwood