40 Before 40

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Fiction

Total Books to Read: 40
Total Books Read: 12

1920s

  1. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
  2. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)
  3. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1923)
  4. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (1927)
  5. Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1928)
    alt. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)

1930s

  1. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1931)
  2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
  3. I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)
  4. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937) Read 2019
  5. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939) Read 2018
     alt. The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White (1938)

1940s

  1. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)
  2. The Women on the Porch by Caroline Gordon (1943)
  3. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943) Read 2019
  4. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
  5. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
    alt. Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. (1948)

1950s

  1. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier (1951) Read 2020
  2. East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952) Read 2020
  3. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
  4. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958) Read 2021
  5. A Separate Peace by John Knowles (1959)
    alt. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

1960s

  1. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
  2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)
  3. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
  4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968)
  5. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)
    alt. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)

1970s

  1. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970) Read 2019
  2. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1972) Read 2021
  3. The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (1978)
  4. The World According to Garp by John Irving (1978) Read 2021
  5. Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews (1979)
    alt. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

1980s

  1. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
  2. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)
  3. Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin (1983)
  4. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1985)
  5. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
    alt. Matilda by Roald Dahl (1988)

1990s

  1. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides (1993) Read 2018
  2. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1994)
  3. The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr (1995)
  4. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (1997) Read 2019
  5. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998) Read 2020