Happy 2012 ; Not a Bucket, but a To-Do List

For the second year in a row, I am not happy with the results of my annual list. If lust is to be found between the covers, those covers, alas are not those of a hard cover book. Looking backwards and assessing which made it to the top, I select very few, in fact only four:

A Happy Marriage and The Last Time They Met, both of which told the tale of a lost lover, one who died terribly after a long life together and the other before love could blossom. Each provoked thoughts about the "completeness of love," making one partner more than he or she could be without the beloved. The other two are books of terrible themes of perverted love, Lolita and Sade's Philosophy of the Bedroom. In their case, these novels sent me on tangents to read more books with despicable protagonists. In addition, they tickled my fancy in better defining what the list for 2012 should be. They are both "classics" and I realized there are too many notable books that I've never read and should to be a more erudite lover of literature.

Although I plan on reading more than two dozen books over the upcoming twelve months, I will default to my preferred sorting mechanism, picking a book alphabetically by author. Here's what I've chosen so far:

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe -- January 29, 2012
2. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury -- September 11, 2012 and Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire -- February 25, 2011 and Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
3. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion -- January 29, 2012 and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
5. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco -- November 25, 2012
6. The Sound and the Fury and/or Go Down Moses by William Faulkner
7. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
and A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines -- January 9, 2012
8. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston -- September 24, 2012 and The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne
9. Exit the King by Eugene Ionesco
10. The Phantom Toll Booth by Norton Juster -- March 16, 2012 and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson -- March 16, 2012
11. Flowers of Algernon by Daniel Keyes and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milos Kundera
12. The Giver by Lois Lowry and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Leguin and The Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle -- March 16, 2012
13. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell  and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers; and serendipitous adds: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann -- February 9, 2012 and his Songdogs -- February 23, 2012
14. Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul and The Book of Questions and Intimacies by Pablo Neruda -- December 30, 2012
15. 1984 by George Orwell or The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy and A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor -- April 1, 2012
16. The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe and A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil by V.S. Pritchett
17. Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey
18. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
19. Grapes of Wrath and/or Of Mice and Men by John Steinback
20. The Art of War by by Sun Tzu and Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
21. Gunnar's Daughter by Sigrid Undset
22. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
23. Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton or Beau Geste by Percival Christopher Wren and Decline and Fall by Evenlyn Waugh and My Man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
24. NEED SOMETHING FOR THE LETTER X
25. Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates
26. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

So, dear Slackers, if you have one or more of those books you feel guilty about never cracking open, please add them to the new year's list.

PS. I've decided to do a separate "OFF LIST" for those other books that I consume during the year.

1. The Shakespeare Riots by Nigel Cliff -- January 21, 2012
2. Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen -- February 12, 2012
3. Coming Apart - The State of White American, 1960 to 2010 by Charles Murray -- March 16, 2012
4. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann -- March 30, 2012
5. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker -- April 10, 2012
6. Portrait of a Spy by Daniel Silva -- April 10, 2012
7.  Drift by Rachel Maddow -- April 20, 2012
8.  Come Home by Lisa Scottoline -- April 24, 2012
9.  Unholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith -- April 29, 2012
10.  Natural Woman by Carole King -- May 4, 2012 
11.  The End of Illness by David Agus -- May 9, 2012 
12.  Celebrity in Death by J D Robb -- May 15, 2012 
13.  Dropped Names by Frank Langella -- May 24, 2012 
14.  My Cross to Bear by Greg Allman -- June 1, 2012 
15.  Drop Dead Healthy by A. J. Jacobs -- June 4, 2012
16.  We Have to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver -- July 4, 2012 
17.  The Female of the Species by Lionel Shriver -- July 7, 2012 
18.  The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller -- July 10, 2012 
19.  American Eve by Paula Uruburu -- July 14, 2012 
20.  Seven Seasons in Siena by Robert Rodi -- July 23, 2012 
21.  The Heart of the Matter by Graham Green -- August 3, 2012
22.  The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall -- August 18, 2012
22.  The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver -- August 3, 2012 
23.  The Empty Glass by J. I. Baker -- September 7, 2012
24.  City of Light by Lauren Belfer -- September 7, 2012 
25.  Shrub by Molly Ivins -- November 25, 2012
26.  The Fiction Class by Susan Breen -- November 25, 2012
27.  The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean -- November 25, 2012
28.  Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell