Hello Readers,
I have finally researched and compiled my 2015 Reading List!
There is a total of 150 books on the list; which I doubt very much I will be able to complete in 2015 – but at least it will act as a guide – and for those that I do not get round to reading, they can always be added to my 2016 reading list!
I am going to attempt a different reading approach this year. I generally read at a medium speed, and by doing this I am averaging around 15 books a year. So it is time to speed up and do some scan reading in the places in a book that I see fit! Places like action scenes and scenes that tend to drag on in description will be great places to start. I also have a habit of re-reading certain paragraphs or scenes that are written beautifully or tend to take my breath away, and although this is ‘nice’, I must remember that this is taking away the time that could be spent on other books. If I were to do this even a few times on every book then the time certainly accumulates.
On the list, I have included Classics, Biographies, Teach yourself books, Poetry and a wide range of fiction genres, plus some real-life stories thrown in for good measure! This year I needed include other books that are away from the usual genre areas with which I am familiar. I think that by expanding my literary horizons, I will be colouring my experience as a writer.
Here is the list. I hope you enjoy!
| Book | Author |
| The Red House Mystery | A.A. Milne |
| Naked, Drunk and Writing | Adair Lara |
| Hausfrau: A Novel | Jill Alexander Essbaum |
| The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty | Amanda Filipacchi |
| All Fur Coat | Andrew Holmes |
| The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes | Anna McPartlin |
| Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life | Anne Lamott |
| The Hound of the Baskervilles | Arthur Conan Doyle |
| From A to Biba: The Autobiography of Barbara Hulanicki | Barbara Hulanicki |
| West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and its Working Girls | Barbara Tate |
| Bare Necessity (Original Title: A Compromising Position) | Carole Matthews |
| The Little Old Lady Who Broke all the Rules | Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg |
| Love, Rosie (Original Title: Where Rainbow’s End) | Cecelia Ahern |
| Great Expectations | Charles Dickens |
| David Copperfield | Charles Dickens |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte |
| Never Knowing | Chevy Stevens |
| The Double Bind | Chris Bohjalian |
| The Orphan | Christopher Ransom |
| The Book of You | Claire Kendal |
| Never Tell | Claire Seeber |
| Brooklyn | Colm Toibin |
| Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano | Dana Thomas |
| Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe |
| Rebecca | Daphne du Maurier |
| Life Expectancy | Dean Koontz |
| Innocence | Dean Koontz |
| The Unloved | Deborah Levy |
| Swimming Home | Deborah Levy |
| Writing From the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within | Dennis Palumbo |
| The Zookeeper’s Wife | Diane Ackerman |
| My Little Friend | Donna Tartt |
| The Goldfinch | Donna Tartt |
| Teach Yourself: Understanding Psychology | Dr. Nicky Hayes |
| The Power of Now | Eckhart Tolle |
| The Raven | Edgar Allan Poe |
| The House of Mirth | Edith Whalton |
| After Birth | Elisa Albert |
| Escaping Into the Open: The Art of Writing True | Elizabeth Berg |
| Wuthering Heights | Emily Bronte |
| Room | Emma Donoghue |
| Elizabeth’s Missing | Emma Healey |
| Men Without Women | Ernest Hemingway |
| Scoop | Evelyn Waugh |
| Middlemarch | George Eliot |
| 1984 | George Orwell |
| Animal Farm | George Orwell |
| Life: A User’s Manual | George Perec |
| Gone Girl | Gillian Flynn |
| Dark Places | Gillian Flynn |
| The War of the Worlds | H.G.Wells |
| The Time Machine | H.G.Wells |
| A Little Life | Hanya Yanagihara |
| The People in the Tree’s | Hanya Yanagihara |
| Alys, Always | Harriet Lane |
| Put Your Heart on the Paper: Staying Connected In A Loose-Ends World | Henriette Klauser |
| Moby Dick | Herman Melville |
| The Black Book | Ian Rankin |
| The Hobbit | J.R.R.Tolkien |
| The Call of the Wild | Jack London |
| The Poser | Jacob Rubin |
| Ulysses | James Joyce |
| Write Great Fiction: Revision and Self-editing | James Scott Bell |
| Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen |
| Emma | Jane Austen |
| Daughter | Jane Shemilt |
| Take Joy: A Book for Writers | Jane Yolen |
| The Catcher in the Rye | JD Salinger |
| Into the Forest | Jean Hegland |
| The Glass Castle | Jeanette Walls |
| Three Men in a Boat | Jerome K. Jerome |
| The Executor | Jesse Kellerman |
| The Miniaturist | Jessie Burton |
| Blue-Eyed Boy | Joanne Harris |
| A Kind of Intimacy | John Ashworth |
| The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris | John Baxter |
| On Becoming a Novelist | John C Gardner |
| The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writer’s | John Gardner |
| The Wild Life: A Year of Living on Wild Food | John Lewis-Stempel |
| Of Mice and Men | John Steinbeck |
| Gulliver’s Travels | Jonathan Swift |
| Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad |
| Songbird | Josephine Cox |
| The Artist’s Way | Julia Cameron |
| Chanel – The Legend and the Life | Justine Picardie |
| Teach Yourself: Get Your Book Published | Katherine Lapworth |
| The Buried Giant | Kazuo Ishiguro |
| Get in Trouble; Stories | Kelly Link |
| The Wind in the Willows | Kenneth Grahame |
| The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini |
| Find Me | Laura Van Den Berg |
| Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy |
| Leonard Cohen: Poems 1956-1968 | Leonard Cohen |
| Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll |
| Little Women | Louisa May Alcott |
| Apple Tree Yard | Louise Doughty |
| The Dice Man | Luke Rhinehart |
| The Handmaid’s Tale | Margaret Atwood |
| Gone With the Wind | Margaret Mitchell |
| Improve your Written English | Marion Field |
| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain |
| London Fields | Martin Amis |
| Runaway | Martina Cole |
| Quant by Quant: The Autobiography | Mary Quant |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley |
| The Scold’s Bride | Minette Walters |
| Brick Lane | Monica Ali |
| Writing Down the Bones | Natalie Goldberg |
| The Scarlett Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times | Neil Astley |
| Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances | Neil Gaiman |
| Land of the Living | Nicci French |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde |
| The Price of Salt | Patricia Highsmith |
| Amnesia | Peter Carey |
| Want You Dead | Peter James |
| The Courage to Write: How Writer’s Transcend Fear | Ralph Keyes |
| Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children | Ransom Riggs |
| Zen in the Art of Writing | Ray Bradbury |
| The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler |
| Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff | Richard Carlson |
| Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other Short Stories | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| Story; Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting | Robert McKee |
| Why we Run: A Story of Obsession | Robin Harvie |
| Serena | Ron Rash |
| Revolution | Russell Brand |
| Clarissa | Samuel Richardson |
| Pride and Prejudice and Zombies | Seth Grahame-Smith |
| Trafficked | Sophie Hayes |
| The Host | Stephanie Meyer |
| Everything’s Eventual | Stephen King |
| The Stand | Stephen King |
| The Shining | Stephen King |
| The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath |
| Dying for Christmas | Tammy Cohen |
| Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction | Thaisa Frank |
| Tess of the D’Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy |
| Jude the Obscure | Thomas Hardy |
| The Murder Bag | Tony Parsons |
| Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew | Ursula K. Le Guin |
| The Hunchback of Notre Dame | Victor Hugo |
| Les Miserables | Victor Hugo |
| Mrs Dalloway | Virginia Woolfe |
| Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov |
| Novel Shortcuts – Ten Techniques That Ensure a Great First Draft | Whitcomb |
| The Woman in White | Wilkie Collins |
| The Moonstone | Wilkie Collins |
| Lord of the Flies | William Golding |
| The Elements of Style | William Strunk Jr and E.B. White |
| The Writer’s Digest Handbook of Novel Writing | Writer’s Digest |
a little bird tweets 
For me, Lolita was a very hard book to get through. This is one case where the writing was too good. Good luck getting through you list. It is ambitious.
Thank you. If I can hit 36 (3 books a month) then I will be happy. Happy New Year!
Hi Donna, I’m going to attempt a different reading approach myself this year – I’m actually going to read! Trouble is, I spend so much time writing, my reading gets neglected. So a New Year’s resolution for me is to reserve a quiet hour early each morning for those good books I want to savour, books such as Nabokov’s ‘Letters to Véra’, David Gaffney’s ‘Sawn-Off Tales’ and Simon Armitage’s ‘Walking Home’.
Happy reading and all the best for 2015.
Paul
Hi Paul. It’s so difficult finding time to do reading and writing isn’t it. I find that small bursts of each wirks best, but the hardest part comes when I am tired. So then, I try to write in my head and plan out stories. Good Luck with your reading this year 🙂 Donna
This looks a lot like my “To-Read” list! I’ve been working on Zen in the Art of Writing, and what I’ve read so far, I loved. Bradbury was a genius.
I have never read Bradbury, but I will take your recommendation and find out more 🙂
What an eclectic list! I read Alys, Always last year and was very impressed with it.
Thank you 🙂 It’s good to hear some positive feedback on Alys, Always. It was one of those books I had chosen to read just because the title intrigued me, followed by the synopsis.
My, that is an ambitious list, Birdie… I might suggest ‘The Shadow of the Wind’, if you have not read it. At least take a look at it. Good reading and good luck.
Thank you for your comment and the book recommendation. It is a very ambitious list, considering I managed to read only 15 books last year. Got to speed up my reading if I’m to get through 🙂
So many wonderful books on here. Can’t wait to hear your thoughts on Orwell and Austen in particular.
Thank you, Alex. I am reading ‘The Little Old Lady who Broke all the Rules’ at the moment, as I fancied something lighter in subject, after reading the twisty Claire Seeber thriller. I might choose to read Austen next then 🙂 Thank you so much for your comments.
A lot of super-duper books here. There are several I don’t have a clue about though… now I’m going to have to look things up! 😀
Thank you 🙂 I tried to mix the list up with some different genres and classics. I have already made a note of 15 other books I want to read but they will have to go on next years.
lol I imagine so. 🙂
Some of my favourites on your reading list 🙂 I do look forward to reading what you think about them.
Thank you 🙂 I am writing part of ‘The Little Old Lady who Broke all the Rules’ at the moment. I should be posting that one very soon.
I recently finished Jane Eyre. It left me in tears. That rarely happens.
I love a tear-jerker. I must read that one soon…and keep some tissues at hand 🙂
This is ..wowzie!:D how many done so far?
Thank you. I’m on my sixth book so slightly behind. But I have found some books that can apparently be read in one day so that might up my count 🙂
Haha, alright!
Reblogged this on Chatterboxerr and commented:
When I finish the growing pile of books at home:D
It would be interesting to see what your opinions are of some of these books. So many good books. And, so many in one year. Good luck! And thank you for the list 😀 I now have a few more I need to read this year.
Thank you. I am currently on my tenth book, so I’m slightly behind. But, if I can select a few shorter novellas I should be way on to my more realistic goal of 36 🙂 Good Luck with your reading too 🙂
Have you read Room or The Handmaid’s Tale yet this year? Amazing books, two of my faves 🙂
Hi Shannon. I haven’t read that book yet, but now you recommend it I shall add it to my to-read list. From the title it sounds mysterious and historical which is always a good mix. Thank you for the recommendation. After I read it, I will let you know what I thought.
Didn’t like Handmaids Tale. Was a 3/5 for me. 😦
I haven’t read that one 😦
Make your own opinion. Maybe you will like it.
Great list… how’d you do?
Thank you. I’m good thank you. How are you?
I meant how did you do on your reading list? I’m grand, though.
Ahh sorry 😀 I have read about 14 books, so it hasn’t been as good as I had planned. But hopefully next year I will achieve more 🙂
No problem at all. My slight Southern accent must translate over to writing. It was a pretty heavy task. 14 isn’t so bad.
Yes, I might set myself a more realistic aim for next year. The year previous I managed 16, so I think 20 might be a good number. Thank you.
Very welcome. Cheers.
I know you didn’t read them all, but there are so many really stunning books on this list. Like Love, Rosie. Or Great Expectations, Emma, P&P, Little Women.
Hope you can pick up one or two of them.
Do you still have them?
I have a few classics on my shelf and a few on my to read list. One book I haven’t added this year is Lolita…I loved the film, so hoping the book is better 🙂
Reading a classic is always good. Like a little time traveling. Hope you find that book.