At the end of 2003 I made myself a reading list for the coming year, with a goal of knocking off at least half of the listed books by the end of 2004. Later I realized that I had included only a few female authors, so I mentally revised the list. I decided it was time to post an update — new additions are in bold; the crossed-off selections are the ones I’ve finished. But now I’m probably just hoping to read a third of these.

1. Alai, Red Poppies
2. Rabih Alameddine, I, The Divine (Review)
3. Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
4. Monica Ali, Brick Lane
5. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
6. Beryl Bainbridge, Watson’s Apology (Abandoned)
7. James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain
8. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (Review)
9. Andrea Barrett, Voyage of the Narwhal
10. Charlotte Brontë, Villette
11. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
12. Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys (Review)
13. Chang Ta-chun, Wild Kids
14. Don DeLillo, Underworld (Review)
15. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Review)
16. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
17. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
18. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
19. William Faulkner, The Hamlet
20. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
21. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (Review)
22. Paula Fox, Desperate Characters
23. Guy Garcia, Skin Deep
24. Molly Gloss, Wild Life (Review )
25. Gunther Grass, The Tin Drum (Review)
26. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
27. Linda Hogan, Solar Storms
28. Hsiao Li-Hung, A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers
29. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (Review.)
30. Jennifer Johnston, The Railway Station Man
31. James Joyce, Ulysses (Review)
32. Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge
33. Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
34. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
35. Herman Melville, Billy Budd (Review)
36. Lorrie Moore, Like Life (Review)
37. Toni Morrison, Jazz
38. Bharati Mukherjee, Desirable Daughters (Review)
39. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
40. Ovid, Metamorphoses
41. Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations
42. Annie Proulx, Postcards
43. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
44. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh
45. Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India
46. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
47. J.M. Synge, Playboy of the Western World
48. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters
49. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Review)
50. David Toscana, Tula Station (Review)
51. Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party (Review)
52. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
53. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway