Welcome to Scaling the TBR Pile, a blog that follows one man’s attempts to decrease the books he has to read as they threaten to run exponentially away from him in terms of volume.
As a habitual book buyer, I’ve decided that the purchasing of books has significantly begun to outpace my speed of reading. With that in mind, my resolution this year is to read 75 fiction books from my collection – without purchasing any new books in the process.
To add a further wrinkle to my plan, I thought that it made the most sense in terms of broadening my reading horizons to choose books by authors that I haven’t yet read anything by. That I can easily choose 75 books that cover that criteria is somewhat worrying; the real number would easily go into three figures.
The journey will be underpinned by me reading ‘In Search of Lost Time’ by Marcel Proust. Having read ‘War and Peace’ several years ago, I felt it was time for another long reading challenge.
More information is due to come, but for the time being, here is the 75:
1-7. ‘In Search of Lost Time’ by Marcel Proust
- ‘Look Who’s Back’ by Timur Vermes
- ‘Red Rising’ by Pierce Brown
- ‘A Death in the Family’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard
11. ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ by Thomas Pynchon
12. ‘Titus Groan’ by Mervyn Peake
13. ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ by Richard Flanagan
14. ‘The Bone Clocks’ by David Mitchell
15. ‘Anno Dracula’ by Kim Newman
16. ‘Ship of Magic’ by Robin Hobb
17. ‘Papillion’ by Henri Charrière
18. ‘Ring’by Koji Suzuki
19. ‘The Song of Achilles’ by Madeline Miller
20. ‘Under the Volcano’ by Malcolm Lowry
21. ‘My Brilliant Friend’ by Elena Ferrante
22. ‘Ancillary Justice’ by Ann Leckie
23. ‘The Sisters Brothers’ by Patrick deWitt
24. ‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara
25. ‘The English Patient’ by Michael Ondaatje
26. ‘Fates and Furies’ by Lauren Groff
27. ‘Wilt’ by Tom Sharpe
28. ‘End of the Affair’ by Graham Greene
29. ‘Olive Ketteridge’ by Elizabeth Strout
30. ‘Saville’ by David Storey
31. ‘The Famished Road’ by Ben Okri
32. ‘The Sellout’ by Paul Beatty
33. ‘The Axeman’s Jazz’ by Ray Celestin
34. ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’ by Ben Fountain
35. ‘Of Human Bondage’ by W. Somerset Maugham
36. ‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson
37. ‘Children of Time’ by Adrian Tchaikovsky
38. ‘The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet’ by Becky Chambers
39. ‘Temeraire’ by Naomi Novik
40. ‘The Forever War’ by Joe Haldeman
41. ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier
42. ‘The Prestige’ by Christopher Priest
43. ‘Hyperion’ by Dan Simmons
44. ‘The Night Circus’ by Erin Morgenstern
45. ‘The Black Dahlia’ by James Ellroy
46. ‘A Prayer for Owen Meany’ by John Irving
47. ‘Alone in Berlin’ by Hans Fallada
48. ‘All The Light We Cannot See’ by Anthony Doerr
49. ‘Never Mind’ by Edward St Aubyn
50. ‘Different Class’ by Joanne Harris
51. ‘Purple Hibiscus’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
52. ‘Fight Club’ by Chuck Palahniuk
53. ‘The Gallows Pole’ by Benjamin Myers
54. ‘Red Mars’ by Kim Stanley Robinson
55. ‘Flights’ by Olga Tokarczuk
56. ‘Wizard of the Crow’ by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
57. ‘Lolita’ by Vladimir Nabokov
58. ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison
59. ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ by Kevin Kwan
60. ‘The Golden Notebook’ by Dorris Lessing
61. ‘Milkman’ by Anna Byrns
62. ‘The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle’ by Stuart Turton
63. ‘The Fifth Season’ by N.K. Jemisin
64. ‘The Third Policeman’ by Flann O’Brien
65. ‘Conversations with Friends’ by Sally Rooney
66. ‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt
67. ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
68. ‘Runaway’ by Alice Munro
69. ‘Kavalier and Clay’ by Michael Chabon
70. ‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen
71. ‘Offshore’ by Penelope Fitzgerald
72. ‘Wool’ by Hugh Howey
73. ‘Shadow of the Wind’ by Carlos Ruis Zafon
74. ‘Midnight’s Children’ by Salman Rushdie
75. ‘The Master and Margarita’ by Mikhail Bulgakov
Scaling the TBR Pile 