It’s that time again. The 2005 list looks a lot like the 2004 list except it’s much longer. Hopefully there will be some deletions in the next month if I actually manage to knock a few more off last year’s list. I didn’t do very well this year, mostly because I took writing classes that left me without any time to read. Normally I read about 85 books a year but this year I am not sure I’ll make it to 60 books. But hey, I read Ulysses, and that should count as nine or ten books all by itself.

Next year I’ll be taking my comprehensive exam, hence all the retreads on this list. I’m also deleting a few from 2004 that are just not appealing to me at the moment. The items in bold are new additions for 2005; the unbolded items are pulled in from the 2004 list.

1. Alai, Red Poppies
2. Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
3. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
4. W.H. Auden, Selected Poems (Review)
5. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Review)
6. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Review)
7. James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain
8. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Review)
9. Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
10. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
11. Camilo Jose Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte
12. Chang Ta-chun, Wild Kids
13. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (Review)
14. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Review)
15. Maryse Conde, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
16. William Congreve, The Way of the World (Review)
17. Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
18. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Review)
19. Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems (Review)
20. John Donne, Selected Poems (Review)
21. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
22. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Review)
23. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
24. T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems (Review)
25. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
26. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” and Other Essays (Review)
27. William FaulknerAs I Lay Dying (Review)
28. William Faulkner, The Hamlet
29. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Review)
30. Carlos Fuentes, The Years With Laura Díaz
31. Glen Gold, Carter Beats the Devil (Review)
32. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
33. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Review)
34. Heaney, Selected Poems (A reread)
35. Linda Hogan, Solar Storms Review
36. Hsiao Li-Hung, A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers
37. Zora Neale HurstonTheir Eyes Were Watching God Review
38. Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (Review)
39. Jennifer Johnston, The Railway Station Man
40. James Joyce, Dubliners (Review)
41. John Keats, Selected Poems (Review)
42. Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge
43. Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
44. Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
45. David Lodge, Nice Work Review
46. Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener (Review)
47. Herman Melville, Billy Budd (Review)
48. John Milton, Paradise Lost (Review)
49. Toni Morrison, Beloved (A reread) (Review)
50. Ovid, Metamorphoses
51. Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
52. Annie Proulx, Postcards
53. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea Review
54. Matt Ruff, Set This House in Order : A Romance of Souls
55. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
56. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
57. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Review)
58. Sam Shephard, True West (A reread)
59. Steven Sherrill, Visits from the Drowned Girl
60. Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India
61. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
62. Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems (A reread) (Review)
63. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters
64. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Selected Poems (Review)
65. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Review)
66. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Review)
67. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat
68. Wang Chen-Ho, Rose, Rose, I Love You
69. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
70. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (Review)
71. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Review)
72. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Review)
73. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
74. William Wordsworth, Selected Poems (Review)
75. W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems (Review)