What do you plan to read in 2020?

My list for the coming year (I am going to try and mix fiction with popular science).

1) Listen to the Sherlock Holmes books on audio (someone bought me the boxset of Stephen Fry reading them all - laying in a hot bath listening to it is pure bliss)

2) Carl Sagan’s Cosmos

3) Dickens Nicholas Nickleby

4) Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time (well, I will give it a try - whether I make it to the end or not remains to be seen!!)

5) D H Lawrence Women in Love

6) Richard Dawkins The Magic of Reality

7) Nabokov Pale Fire

8) Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim

9) T S Eliot Four Quartets (slowly and with notes)

10) Edward st Aubyn The Melrose novels

I also want to read something by the British travel writer Bruce Chatwin, and I might re-read Shakespeare’s Henriad cycle.

Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens - bought six Dickens volumes for £10, how good is that!
Dr Thorne, Anthony Trollope - 3rd in the Barchester series
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorn - American classic
Wives and Daughters, Mrs Gaskell - seems to be Gaskell fans' favourite
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford - somewhere between 11 and 20 of the BBC's top 100 British books survey
Hornblower and the Atropos, C.S. Forrester - reading for fun
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood - the most famous dystopia I have not read yet
Atonement, Ian McEwan - somewhere between 11 and 20 of the BBC's top 100 British books survey
Othello, William Shakespeare - I am going to try to understand and like Shakespeare
Ullyses, James Joyce - the big one.

I already have these waiting on my shelf to be read, but I shall probably read others.
When does all this reading have an effect? I have not changed into a better person yet.

I have been considering this year's French classic, American classic and Russian classic. I think my French classic with be Stendhal's The Red and the Black. I have not decided on the Russian classic: either the Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol or Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. I still have the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne to read, but I think I might have a go at William Faulkner's Absolom, Absolom!

Inspiring lists. I haven´t made a list this year, reading just now For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway. One of the next books might be Oblomow- by Gontscharow.

Neat these lists. Always a potential source of inspiration when I'm looking for something to read.

Somewhere midway 2019, I decided to read, well partially reread, the entire oeuvres of Joe Abercrombie and Pete Dexter, alternating between them. At this point, I (re)read:
- the entire First Law trilogy by Abercrombie
- God's Pocket and Deadwood by Pete Dexter.

Next-up is Paris Trout, for which Dexter got the National Book Award for Fiction.

Francis

I'm half way through Proust whatever you like to call the novel. A very long book with very long sentences. I hope to finish it in the next couple of months but wonder if I'm reading it in the same spirit as mountaineers climb mountains - because it's there.

I suppose you mean the first one, the Swan volume. I didn´t go very far with it. If you are disposed, I think there are four or five more volumes following it.

Not too much, since I'm finishing up nursing school this year, but let's see...

The Portable Edgar Alan Poe next
The Apocrypha and New Testament from the King James Bible (already read the OT)
Maybe either the Aeneid or Paradise Lost (seems unlikely I'd do both)
I'd like to read at least some of the horror books I got recently (The Terror, Song of Kali, The Ruins)
The Haunting of Hill House
Maybe I'll work on the Portable Plato I have

To the OP, I loved A Brief History of Time! I hope you enjoy it, too. And to the second poster, I also loved Atonement back in the day. Been a while since I read it.

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Originally Posted by Danik 2016

I suppose you mean the first one, the Swan volume. I didn´t go very far with it. If you are disposed, I think there are four or five more volumes following it.

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I meant the entire work. I am giving it a rest but I have reached half way through it all. I am on the fourth book of seven, which the classic translation tweely called Cities of the Plain. In French, Sodome et Gomorrhe.

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Originally Posted by Jackson Richardson

I meant the entire work. I am giving it a rest but I have reached half way through it all. I am on the fourth book of seven, which the classic translation tweely called Cities of the Plain. In French, Sodome et Gomorrhe.

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Hi Jackson, so do the volumes of Proust get better after Swann's Way in your opinion? I thoroughly enjoyed that volume, though I found it like reading somnambulistically, which wasn't bad really; enraptured without really knowing why. I hear the works get better.

So books I plan to read...

Evelyn Waugh - The Sword of Honor Trilogy
Richard Ford - Part 2 and 3 of the Bascombe Novels (I've read vol. 1 already)
Arthur Schnitzler - The Road to the Open
D.H. Lawrence - The Rainbow
Michel Houellebecq - Atomised
Hermann Broch - The Guiltless
Vladimir Nabokov - Ada
Franz Werfel - The Song of Bernadette

Lastly Mann's Joseph and His Brothers (4 volumes), but who am I kidding, maybe once I retire and have the drive...or maybe the time and nothing else to attend too. It seems so daunting.

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Originally Posted by Danik 2016

Inspiring lists. I haven´t made a list this year, reading just now For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway. One of the next books might be Oblomow- by Gontscharow.

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I put down For Whom the Bell Tolls as I didn't care much for Hemingway's style. Goncharov's Oblomov is soooooo good! Read it!

@JR-You are my favorite mountain climber!You must have enjoyed it some. He is one of the greatest authors there are but reading is a matter of taste.There is a Proust reading group in my German forum, for them he is one of the authors of their life. They read him for years.
I am half through For Whom the Bell Tolls. I think it is good but not outstanding.