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
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