1. The Once and Future King by T.H. White - I took this book from my grandparent's years ago when they were looking to downsize their books. It looked interesting and since then I have carried it around with me from apartment to apartment and I've never read it.
2. The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and Selected Stories by H.G. Wells - Here's another book I took from my grandparent's library that I think I've had even longer than TOFK and I've still yet to read it. I'm hoping the Back to the Classics challenge will fix that.
3. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein - Maybe there's something about authors that use initials but I've had this one since my dad bought it for me when I was, I think, in middle school and still nothing. This is also on my Classics challenge list so maybe I can fix this.
4. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson - So many classics, so many good intentions. Now to just actually read them. This is also tentatively on my Classics challenge. It's one of the reasons I'm doing this challenge; I need to fix all of these books I keep dragging with me but I haven't read.
5. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen - I bought this a little over a year ago in an airport bookstore so I haven't had it with me all that long. However, it is a sense of shame because I started reading it on the plane (I'd run out of the books I brought with me) but then when I got home I put it down and haven't picked it up again.
6. The Malcontents: The Best Bitter, Cynical and Satirical Writing in the World - A friend of mine in high school gave me this book because she said the title made her think of me. I am a ray of sunshine. It's a really great collection with some heavy names (Moliere, Cervantes, Shaw, Wilde) and while I've read some of the stuff in other settings, I've never read this book. Looking at this now I realize there are select works from Flann O'Brien, which makes me really want to read his stuff, since I used to go to a dive bar in college of the same name.
7. The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters - I may have taken this from my brother after he had to read it for a class. It sounded interesting but I got about a page into it before I got distracted by something else and I've yet to pick it up again.
8. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger - Another initial name! I've read Catcher but nothing else. Now technically this is one of boyfriend's books which I'm sure he has read but it's been sitting on our bookshelves for the last 4 years and I haven't read it yet so it counts.
9. Lying, Cheating & Stealing: Great Writers on Getting What You Want When You Want It - I found this on some discount table at a bookstore years ago and loved the writers included in it (Dorothy Parker, ee cummings, Dashiell Hammett, Mark Twain) but I've never made it further than the first short story by Woody Allen. Why haven't I been reading this?
10. All The World's A Grave by John Reed, adapted from the works of William Shakespeare - When I saw this book that says "A New Play by William Shakespeare" how could I not pick it up? It's the characters and the text from Shakespeare rearranged to form a new play. But it's intimidating. At least with Shakespeare-Shakespeare I can read a summary of the story or watch the play, so it's easy to follow along. I can't do that with this Shakespeare-Reed. I've given the play a few tries but I've always backed down.
So what have you had on your TBR pile for years?
