Books for a new year

Reading Plan for 2010.

These things are always ambitious, always sure to be unfinished. That said, the following is my reading plan for the coming year. I usually read around 50 books, about one a week, and leave space for 15 of them to be new releases from the upcoming year or book club selections. The other 35 I have selected and list below. Reading should be both improving and entertaining, and I have attempted to select works that are both. Finally, I reserve a few spots for re-reads, and those are here was well, though undesignated (can my friends guess which they are?). Here they are, separated by kind, but in no particular order:

Literature

On Love by Stendhal
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Jacques the Fatalist by Denis Diderot
Manon Lescaut by the Abbe Prevost
Auto-da-fe by Elias Canetti
Captain Fracasse by Theophile Gautier
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
The Rebels by Sandor Marai
The Emperor’s Tomb by Joseph Roth
Cliffs by Olivier Adam
Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig
Chateau d’Argol by Julien Gracq
The Man of Fifty by Goethe
Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

Science

Life Ascending: The 10 Great inventions of evolution by Nick Lane
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the nature of Reality by Brian Greene
Summer World: a season of bounty by Bernd Heinrich
Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich

History

Histoires Grecques by Maurice Sartre
The Roman Triumph by Mary Beard
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater
The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648 – 1815 by Tim Blanning
Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the congress of Vienna by Adam Zamoyski

Biography

Beethoven: Biography of a Genius by George Marek
Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment by James Gaines
Casanova: A Study in Self-Portraiture by Stefan Zweig
The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe
The House of Wittgenstein: a family at war by Alexander Waugh

Philosophy

The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton
Beauty by Roger Scruton
Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library Classics) by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
Life, Sex, and Ideas: the good life without god by A. C. Grayling

I will probably do little write-ups of each book, and of course this is in addition to academic reading. Wish me luck, and stay tuned for the next post this week, the somewhat annual multi-authored blog post ‘books of the year.’