The Five-Year Plan

I've designed a five-year novel-reading plan. Encyclopedia Britannica has a "Great Books" collection that includes a ten-year reading plan, so I figured there was no rule against my making a plan of my own. Reasons for making the plan: to make sure the greatest books are the ones I actually have read by my 35th birthday, in Dec. 2012. As planned, this will allow me to have read, for example, War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time, and Ulysses, in five years, three novels that are just a little daunting to think of reading at this point. I don't plan to stop reading at 35, but I'd like to be able to relax a bit and enjoy re-reading and discovering various new things by then. I assume there are a number of great authors missing from my reading plan, so I may have to adjust for that along the journey. For most authors, I will be reading just one work per year, but you'll notice Henry James is there three or four times each year. Well, I like Henry James. That's my excuse for that. The plan is provisional, and open to some modifications as I go along, but it looks roughly like this:

2008
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Hadji Murad – Leo Tolstoy
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
Pamela – Samuel Richardson
Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
The Pickwick Papers – Charles Dickens
The Europeans – Henry James
The Spoils of Poynton – Henry James
The Bostonians – Henry James
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
The Portable Faulkner – William Faulkner
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
Middlemarch – George Eliot
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Ulysses – James Joyce
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Stories: Anton Chekhov Ernest Hemingway Flannery O’Connor Henry James Edith Wharton

2009
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower – Marcel Proust
Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Dombey and Son – Charles Dickens
Roderick Hudson – Henry James
The Princess Cassamassima – Henry James
What Maisie Knew – Henry James
Light in August – William Faulkner
Victory – Joseph Conrad
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
Adam Bede – George Eliot
Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
The Ghost Writer – Philip Roth
Underworld – Don DeLillo
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
The Crossing – Cormac McCarthy
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Cousin Bette – Honore de Balzac
Stories: F.Scott Fitzgerald W. Somerset Maugham Guy de Maupassant Ivan Turgenev J.D. Salinger

2010
The Death of Ivan Ilich – Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoyevsky
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
The Guermantes Way – Marcel Proust
The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West
Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
Little Dorrit – Charles Dickens
The American – Henry James
The Awkward Age – Henry James
The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
The Waves – Virginia Woolf
Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
Dubliners – James Joyce
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Cities of the Plain – Cormac McCarthy
North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Stories: Raymond Carver D.H. Lawrence Borges

2011
Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
The Idiot – Dostoyevsky
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Sodom and Gomorrah – Marcel Proust
The Captive – Marcel Proust
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
The Tragic Muse – Henry James
The Ambassadors – Henry James
Sanctuary – William Faulkner
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
The Custom of the Country – Edith Wharton
Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth
V. – Thomas Pynchon
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Child of God – Cormac McCarthy
Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
Eugenie Grandet – Honore de Balzac

2012
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Fugitive – Marcel Proust
Time Regained – Marcel Proust
Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
The Golden Bowl – Henry James
The Hamlet – William Faulkner
Under Western Eyes – Joseph Conrad
Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf
The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
Villette – Charlotte Bronte
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
Comments?

The Reasons for the Plan

I recently turned thirty, am married with an eight-month-old daughter, am the pastor of a Baptist church, and did my undergraduate degree in English at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. For all of these reasons, I've begun to think that I ought to have better reading habits. I've generally gone in spurts of reading well since my undergraduate days, but have not read a great many of the great works of literature.

During my years at seminary, as I became more and more interested in biblical study and theology, I wondered if I might have been better off with a classics degree, which might have given me a start in the ancient languages that would have been a good foundation for the biblical languages. Realistically I probably would have done the same thing with a classics degree as with an English one: enjoy the reading while there, but leave with terrible reading habits.

Last year at our local library I joined a Charles Dickens reading group, which got me to read Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, The Chimes, and half each of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. Unfortunately, my poor reading habits had shown themselves again. I did, however, get a little more of a taste of good writing.

Over the past six months or so, I've enjoyed reading a number of great works: Jane Austen's Emma, the rest of Oliver Twist, a couple of Shakespeare plays, and several works by Henry James, including The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, "The Aspern Papers," and "The Turn of the Screw". Additionally, I've been part of another book club at the library that is reading William Faulkner, George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway. I have found that I really don't like Orwell's vision of the world or his focus on ideas (paranoid ones at that) rather than people; Hemingway I enjoyed during A Farewell to Arms, but The Sun Also Rises seemed kind of empty to me (which I know is probably the point, but I didn't really like it); and Faulkner could easily become a big fascination. So far I've just read The Sound and the Fury and The Unvanquished, but we're going to read through Malcolm Cowley's famous collection
The Portable Faulkner over the next couple months, which will give us more of a broad spectrum of his work.

A former professor of mine has been a helpful guide through much of my reading over this past several months as we've reconnected and struck up an email correspondence and friendship. Helpful also has been Harold Bloom's infectious love of reading (and the importance of prioritizing reading because eventually everyone "reads against the clock") that comes through in his recent books. I know many people dislike him and find him too tradition-bound and annoying, but I have found How to Read and Why and The Western Canon both to be useful pointers written with a lot of excitement. An older book called The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis, which I discovered from a quote on the back of an old Penguin edition of Washington Square, said that the great tradition in the English novel was to be found in four writers: Austen, George Eliot, James, and Joseph Conrad. I don't want to narrow myself down that far, but I have been selective as I've designed a plan for my reading over the next five years, trying to make sure I read the best things and am fairly well-read by the time I'm watching Emily start school.

An analogy from my earlier adulthood: I am a big music fan, and for a while spent a significant amount of time listening almost exclusively to the Beatles and Bob Dylan. It was not by design, but can't be faulted as a good place for a child of my generation to get acquainted with rock music. Later, when 60s-ish pop music became an obsession and I had worked my way through many of the great artists of the 60s and 70s, I started to listen to every obscure band that I could find in that style. Now, as I get a little older (and wiser!) it's easy to see how you can get cornered and find yourself missing the greats for all the minor works. In music I've tried to reverse this tendency of mine, and now plan to do the same thing with reading.

Wish me luck as I set out to read, read, read the very best, and feel free to make suggestions and have conversations along the way.