I got tired of feeling I was getting older yet dumber. This isn’t an attempt at all to try to “seem smart” but rather (hopefully) shape up my brain and tackle some “must read” classics that I’d just never gotten around to.
As the list of books I wanted to attempt got bigger, I decided to make a little blog to keep track of everything. Originally I planned on only posting the “classics” but since I read a lot of other stuff too I figured I’d just note all of it—classics, manga, danmei, whatever.
As for the table below—the status is for my own reference, the rating is completely arbitrary based on my mood at the time, and the “Owned” column is so I can keep track of what I’ve bought (and where) and my book-gifting benefactor can see what I already have (and what he’s already sent in case he wants to send more).
Title | Author | Status | Rating |
Brave New World | Aldous Huxley | Owned-Physical | |
Alexandre Dumas | Finished May 5, 2026 | ||
Ten Years Later | Alexandre Dumas | Owned-Physical | |
The Man in the Iron Mask | Alexandre Dumas | Owned-Physical | |
The Three Musketeers | Alexandre Dumas | Owned-Physical | |
Twenty Years Later | Alexandre Dumas | Owned-Physical | |
A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess | Owned-Physical | |
Arthur Conan Doyle | Finished April 26, 2026 | ||
Marcus Aurelius | Finished July 4, 2026 | ||
Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand | Owned-Physical | |
Bram Stoker | Finished September 9, 2026 | ||
C.S. Lewis | Finished May 21, 2026 | ||
Mere Christianity | C.S. Lewis | Owned-Physical | |
Miracles | C.S. Lewis | Owned-Physical | |
Screw tape Letters | C.S. Lewis | Owned-Physical | |
Surprised By Joy | C.S. Lewis | Owned-Physical | |
The Four Loves | C.S. Lewis | Owned-Physical | |
The Great Divorce | C.S. Lewis | Owned-Physical | |
The Problem of Pain | C.S. Lewis | Owned-Physical | |
A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens | Owned-Physical | |
A Tale of Two Cities | Charles Dickens | Finished June 2, 2026 | |
Great Expectations | Charles Dickens | Owned-Physical | |
Hard Times | Charles Dickens | Owned-Physical | |
Oliver Twist | Charles Dickens | Owned-Physical | |
Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte | Owned-Physical | |
Emily Bronte | August 14, 2026 | ||
Philosophy of Epicurus | Epicurus | Owned-Physical | |
A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway | Owned-Physical | |
For Whom the Bell Tolls | Ernest Hemingway | Owned-Physical | |
Ernest Hemingway | Finished August 16, 2026 | ||
The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | Owned-Physical | |
Children of Dune | Frank Herbert | Owned-Physical | |
Dune | Frank Herbert | Owned-Physical | |
Dune Messiah | Frank Herbert | Owned-Physical | |
The Trial | Franz Kafka | Owned-Physical | |
Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoevsky | Owned-Physical | |
The Brothers Karamozov | Fyodor Dostoevsky | Owned-Physical | |
Geoffrey Chaucer | Finished June 9, 2026 | ||
Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | Owned-Physical | |
Moby Dick | Herman Mellville | Owned-Physical | |
Hermann Hesse | Finished June 28, 2026 | ||
Steppenwolf | Hermann Hesse | Owned-Physical | |
Homer | Finished July 17, 2026 | ||
Homer | Finished July 18, 2026 | ||
Jack Kerouac | Finished May 28, 2026 | ||
James Joyce | Finished July 30, 2026 | ||
Dubliners | James Joyce | Owned-Physical | |
Jane Austen | Finished June 17, 2026 | ||
Faust | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Owned-Physical | |
Paradise Lost | John Milton | Owned-Physical | |
John Steinbeck | Finished September 3, 2026 | ||
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Ken Kesey | Owned-Physical | |
Kurt Vonnegut | Finished August 21, 2026 | ||
Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | Owned-Physical | |
War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy | Owned-Physical | |
Marguerite Yourcenar | Owned-Physical | ||
Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes | Owned-Physical | |
The Tale of Genji | Murasaki Shikibu | Owned-Physical | |
Natsume Soseki | Finished May 8, 2026 | ||
No Longer Human | Osamu Dazai | Owned-Physical | |
The Setting Sun | Osamu Dazai | Owned-Physical | |
The Picture of Dorian Grey | Oscar Wilde | Owned-Physical | |
The Red and the Black | Stendhal | Owned-Physical | |
In Cold Blood | Truman Capote | Owned-Physical | |
Victor Hugo | Owned-Physical | ||
Les Miserables | Victor Hugo | Owned-Physical | |
Virgil | Finished July 28, 2026 | ||
Vladimir Nabokov | FInished September 11, 2026 | ||
The Sound and Fury | William Faulkner | Owned-Physical | |
Yukio Mishima | Finished August 9, 2026 | ||
Walden -and- Civil Disobedience | Henry David Thoreau | Owned-Physical | |
The Ray Bradbury Collection | Ray Bradbury | Owned-Physical | |
The Fountainhead | Ayn Rand | Owned-Physical | |
We the Living | Ayn Rand | Owned-Physical | |
The Virtue of Selfishness | Ayn Rand | Owned-Physical | |
Anthem | Ayn Rand | Owned-Physical | |
Voltaire | Finished May 22, 2026 | ||
The Call of the Wild and White Fang | Jack London | Owned-Physical | |
Lonesome Dove | Larry McMurtry | Owned-Physical | |
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea | Jules Verne | Owned-Physical | |
The Pillow Book | Sei Shonagon | Owned-Physical | |
On Liberty | John Stuard Mill | Owned-Physical | |
Ender’s Game | Orson Scott Card | Owned-Physical | |
John Steinbeck | Finished, June 28, 2026 | ||
Patrick O’Brian | Finished June 20, 2026 | ||
Finished August 13, 2026 | |||
Gulliver’s Travels | Jonathan Swift | Owned-Physical | |
The Man Who Would Be King | Rudyard Kipling | Owned-Physical | |
The Art of War & Other Classics of Eastern Philosophy | Sun Tzu, etc | Owned-Physical | |
Kim | Rudyard Kipling | Owned-Physical | |
Letters from a Stoic | Seneca | Owned-Physical | |
The Last Days of Socrates | Plato | Owned-Physical | |
Zainins of the Tokyo Islands | Kyota Ko | Owned-Physical | |
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms | Luo Guanzhong | Owned-Physical | |
Butter | Asako Yuzuki | Owned-Physical | |
Robert Louis Stevenson | FInished August 9, 2026 | ||
Madeline Miller | Finished August 1, 2026 | ||
I, Claudius | Robert Graves | Owned-Physical | |
The Republic | Plato | Owned-Physical | |
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | Edward Gibbon | Owned-Physical | |
Oscar Wilde | Finished August 4, 2026 | ||
Treasure Island | Robert Louis Stevenson | Owned-Physical | |
Aesop’s Fables | Aesop | Owned-Physical | |
A Classic Christmas Treasury | Owned-Physical | ||
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Other Tales | Lewis Carroll | Owned-Physical | |
Grimm’s Fairy Tales | Brothers Grimm | Owned-Physical | |
The Stranger | Albert Camus | Owned-Physical | |
Augustus | John Williams | Owned-Physical | |
The Last of the Wine | Mary Renault | Owned-Physical | |
Patrick O’Brian | Finished August 11, 2026 | ||
Complete Fairy Tales | Hans Christian Andersen | Owned-Physical | |
No Country for Old Men | Cormac McCarthy | Owned-Physical | |
Starship Troopers | Robert A. Heinlein | Owned-Physical | |
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress | Robert A. Heinlein | Owned-Physical | |
Stranger in a Strange Land | Robert A. Heinlein | Owned-Physical | |
Devils | Fyodor Dostoevsky | Owned-Physical | |
The House of the Dead & The Gambler | Fyodor Dostoevsky | Owned-Physical | |
The Idiot | Fyodor Dostoevsky | Owned-Physical | |
Notes from Underground | Fyodor Dostoevsky | Owned-Physical | |
The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays | Oscar Wilde | Owned-Physical | |
Irish Fairy Tales and Folklore | W. B. Yeats | Owned-Physical | |
The Complete Fairy Tales | Charles Perrault | Owned-Physical | |
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio | Pu Songling | Owned-Physical | |
Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel | Owned-Physical | |