Reading List
September 2026
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Odyssey - Homer (Robert Fagles’ translation)
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
Defence Speeches - Cicero (Oxford Classics edition)
Phantastes - George MacDonald
October 2026
Paradise Lost - John Milton
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
Willa Cather: Double Lives - Hermione Lee
Tales of the Elders of Ireland - translated by Ann Doley and Harry Roe
The Riddle-Master Trilogy - Patricia A. McKillip (rereading solely on my birthday)
November 2026
Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Butcher’s Crossing - John Williams
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful - Edmund Burke
The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
December 2026
The Iliad - Homer (Robert Fagles’ translation)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories - Leo Tolstoy
The Virginian - Owen Wister
Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography - Marion Meade
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life - Søren Kierkegaard
January 2027
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Aeneid - Virgil (Robert Fagles’ translation)
The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem - Matthew Hollis
The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
The Strength of the Few - James Islington
February 2027
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal - The Brontës
Planet Narnia - Michael Ward
The Irish Princess - Elizabeth Chadwick
March 2027
Inferno - Dante Alighieri
The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time - Joseph Frank
The Hero and the Crown - Robin McKinley
The Blue Sword - Robin McKinley
April 2027
One of Ours - Willa Cather
The Oresteia - Aeschylus
Jungian Archetypes - Robin Robertson
Individuation in Fairy Tales - Marie-Louise Von Franz
Irish Fairy Tales and Folklore - W.B. Yeats
May 2027
The Toilers of the Sea - Victor Hugo
Shadows on the Rock - Willa Cather
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Malcolm Guite
Bulfinch’s Mythology - Thomas Bulfinch
June 2027
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
A Month in the Country - J.L. Carr
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh - Vincent van Gogh
Prince of the Blood - Raymond E. Feist
July 2027
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson - Alfred Habegger
The White Mare - Jules Watson
The Dawn Stag - Jules Watson
August 2027
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories - Leo Tolstoy
Selected Speeches - Demosthenes
Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
Nocturnes - Kazuo Ishiguro