In 1991, I started keeping an annual list of books read, after being inspired by L’Amour’s Education of a Wandering Man. I also jotted down what I could remember reading between 1986-90.
This is not a complete list. It doesn’t include the multitude of books I’ve only read parts of or skimmed, or most of the books I’ve read aloud to my kids (which are legion), and it omits titles that are political or apologetic/polemic in nature because that’s not the bent of this website.
And maybe one day I’ll add the books I read from 2017 to the present.
2006-2016
The Importance of Being Earnest
An Ideal Husband
Lady Windermere’s Fan
A Woman of No Importance
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde
The Colour of Magic
The Light Fantastic
Equal Rites
Mort
Fun Home
Are You My Mother?
2004-2005
Frankenstein
A Year in Provence
The Tempest
The Da Vinci Code
The Nanny Diaries
The Sun Also Rises
Reading Lolita in Tehran
The Falls
Le Divorce
Monkey Dancing
Short Stories by E. M. Forster
2003
Sense and Sensibility Diaries
The Secret Life of Bees
The Stand
Life of Pi
Mr. Sammler’s Planet
The Analects of Confucius
Atonement
What I Did Last Summer
Jane Austen in Boca
Tuesdays with Morrie
Holes
2002
The Pooh Perplex
The Merchant of Venice
Guerrilla Learning
Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary
The Edison Trait
The Corn is Green
Serve It Forth
Ethan Frome
Ahab’s Wife
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The Stranger
Our Arcadia: An American Watercolor
The Bacchae
King John
Candide (translated by Roger Pearson)
Good Omens
Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical
2001
Turning Life into Fiction
Pigs in Heaven
Thales to Dewey
Aspects of the Novel
Conversations about Bernstein
Girl With a Pearl Earring
The Domain Book of Intuitive Design
U2: The Ultimate Compendium of Interviews, Articles, Facts and Opinions
2000
A Circle of Quiet
A Separate Peace
The Irrational Season
The Summer of the Great-grandmother
Precious Bane
Gone to Earth
The Scent of Water
The Teenage Liberation Handbook
Dorothy Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life
The Lifelong Learner
The Independent Scholar’s Handbook
Peak Learning
Bird by Bird
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
The Green Mile
Grace (bio of Grace Kelly)
For the Time Being
The Great Gatsby
The Way of All Flesh
1999
Dead Man Walking
Encounters with Chinese Writers
Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light
The Storm
Ice Skating at the North Pole (short stories)
The Importance of Being Earnest
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
At Home in Mitford
A Portrait of Jane Austen
Out of Africa
Me: Stories of My Life
Eight Cousins
Persuasion
1998
East of Eden
An American Childhood
Jane Eyre: A Student’s Companion to the Novel
A City of Bells
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Driving Miss Daisy
Tone Clusters
The Bean Trees
Grapes of Wrath
Fahrenheit 451
The Inferno (translated by John Ciardi)
Our Town
Heidi Chronicles
A Streetcar Named Desire
The Little Foxes
Alias Shakespeare
A Room With a View
1997
The Oxford Book of Oxford
The Divine Comedy: Hell (translated by Dorothy Sayers)
On Stories
Silas Marner
Measure for Measure
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Thirty-Nine Steps
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Howard’s End
Siddhartha
Annie Dillard Reader
Off Balance: The Real World of Ballet
Walden Two
Jane Eyre
1996
Mansfield Park
King Solomon’s Mines
The Iliad (translated by Fitzgerald)
The Allegory of Love
The Elizabethan World Picture
Julius Caesar
King Lear
The Writing Life
The War of the Worlds
An Experiment in Criticism
Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists
The Remarkable Case of Dorothy Sayers
Gaudy Night
The Plague
Waiting for Godot
1995
The Hobbit
Out of the Silent Planet
Treasure Island
Stonewall
Perelandra
The Discarded Image: Intro to Medieval and Renaissance Literature
King Oedipus
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Story of King Arthur and His Knights
Everything That Rises Must Converge (short stories)
Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning
Letters of Flannery O’Connor: The Habit of Being
Lord of the Flies
Tom Sawyer
Oliver Twist
The Scarlet Letter
That Hideous Strength
Godric
Two-part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
A Wrinkle in Time
The Man Who Was Thursday
1994
On Writing Well
The Wind in the Willows
The Hound of the Baskervilles
1984
Wilderness Wife: The Story of Rebecca Boone
The Inner Game of Music
Little Britches
Till We Have Faces
E.B. White: A Biography
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
Writer to Writer
Vienna Prelude
One Writer’s Way
Men of Iron
The Chronicles of Narnia
A Christmas Carol
1992-1993
The Old Man and the Sea
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
A Tale of Two Cities
Anne’s House of Dreams
Anne of Ingleside
Maud: The Life of L.M. Montgomery
Elements of Style
Fine Print
Anne of the Island
Pride and Prejudice
1991
Madame Curie
Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates
Education of a Wandering Man
Jungle Books
Hannah Fowler
A Home-Concealed Woman
Animal Farm
1986-1990
Little Women
Anne of Green Gables
David Copperfield
Cliffs & Wings 