The unread books.

This post has quite the history. I commenced drafting it a year ago and it had quite a different tone from the final version. The post started with this paragraph, "www.goodreads.com have a yearly reading challenge where you set yourself a certain number of books and try to read that many over the course of a year. I don't find that particularly interesting as I read because I want to and don't need to set a goal to make myself read, any more than I need to set goals to breathe."

This arrogant and inaccurate paragraph was composed while I was clearly in denial about the radical shift in my reading habits. Yes, I still read with a voracious appetite, but firstly the Internet and secondly and more powerfully, the smartphone and tablet have combined to revolutionise my reading habits while I wasn't even noticing. I read copious numbers of short articles and longer articles and that time has been filched from my book reading allocation. It's January 28 and I've only completed 3 books in my Year of Books series. For me, 3 is not a satisfactory total and indicates that more time needs to set aside for book reading.

The primary purpose of this post is to list the books that I've had for a long time and failed to read for whatever reason but still want to read. Recent purchases do not count, most of these books have been on the reading list for a decade or more. as of the 28th January 2017, this is

The Unread Books List: 


Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell I read the start of this and liked it but I didn't finish it, I think the pacing was an issue.

The Wizard Knight Gene Wolfe is a great writer, but his works are usually fairly demanding and the first 100 pages of this was no exception!

 Watchmen I have no idea why I haven't read this yet! I've read other great comics.

Master and Commander I wanted to find out if I would be interested in the whole series - I enjoyed the film! Again, it has been tried but not finished. If the next attempt fails, the book will be culled.

The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm: Winston Churchill is my all time favourite biographical subject and William Manchester wrote two compellingly readable volumes in an intended trilogy. Unfortunately old age got the better of him and he was struck down by a stroke which caused permanent damage to his memory, rendering him unfit to finish the book. He chose Paul Reid to finish the trilogy, which has been well reviewed, but I haven't yet started his contribution.

Pillar of Fire and At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch; Parting the Waters was a magisterial account of the civil rights movement and given it's one of my favourite all time books, it does the beg the question of why I haven't read the sequels. A question which I must confess that I have no reasonable answer to.

War and Peace and Anna Karenina by the incomparable Leo Tolstoy. I've read some of Tolstoy's short stories, loved them but his two masterpieces read I have not.

Charles Dickens is another great author whose works I've read comparatively little of. I'm adding David Copperfield to the list as I own the book, but I could add most of his novels.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Another unread classic.

The Red Badge of Courage by Steven Crane and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman can safely be added to the unread classics list.

For some additional history books there's Norman Davies' Europe: A History. Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution  can't be ignored and Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy, A history of The Russian Revolution is a critically acclaimed account of that dramatic period.

How about some biography with David McCullough's magisterial Truman or the concluding volumes of Edmund Morris's magnum opus about the most important President of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt,  Theodore Rex and Colonel Roosevelt?

Looking for some modern classics? Try Tim Winton's cloudstreet, Commac Mcarthy's The Road or Garbriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

There are some shared characteristics among the books listed here. They're nearly all long and they're generally densely written. They require some effort to read. I found making that effort easier in the pre-Internet age. Also, there were fewer entertainment options for me, there's only so long I can watch television before I get bored, that's not the case when surfing the Internet.

I don't anticipate that A Year of Books will be overrun by these titles but I aim to take four of them off the list this year, that's one every three months. That's an achievable target!