40 books before 40

midlife is creeping up on me, and I've got some books to read

My birthday this week, and so, naturally, like all normal people, I’ve been thinking about what books I have and haven’t read. What classics, what essentials, what life-changing glorious tomes have I neglected?

Photo by Darwin Vegher on Unsplash

The past few years, I’ve been trying out some of those books that for some reason or other were never assigned to me during high school or college or even grad school. Moby Dick, Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace. I’m not afraid of a long book or a difficult book. I do, however, give myself complete permission to quit a book if I don’t like it, because I am adult, and this is my own independent study.

So here is my list so far:

1. Catcher in the Rye by Salinger

2. The Book Thief by Zusak

3. Brave New World by Huxley

4. The Brothers K by Duncan

5. Night by Elie Wiesel

6. Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck

7. Tale of Two Cities by Dickins

8. Frankenstein by Shelley

9. Dracula by Stoker

10. Ender’s Game by Card

11. Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky

12. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

13. The Princess Bride by Goldman

14. A Short History of Everything by Bryson

15. Eat Pray Love by Gilbert

16. Walden by Thoreau

17. Augustine’s Confessions

18. Fragments of Sappho

19. Howl by Ginsburg

20. Songs of Innocence and Experience by Blake

21. Don Quixote by Cervantes

22. Madame Bovary by Flaubert

23. Dune by Herbert

24. Man’s Search for Meaning by Frankl

25. Leaves of Grass by Whitman

26. Doctor Zhivago by Pasternak

27. Gypsy Ballads by Lorca

28. Requiem by Akhmatova

29. The Mysteries of Udolpho

30. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas

I have 10 spots left—what books have been particularly influential to you in your life (nonfiction, fiction, or poetry)? What books am I missing?

Update:
Reader suggestions added to the list:
31. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (thanks

Heather Cadenhead

!)
32. Til We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis
33. Babette’s Feast by Dinesen (thanks to Christine!)

34. Embers by Sandor Marai (Thanks

    Claire
    !)

35. This Day by Wendell Berry (Thanks Timothy!)