Francine Proses’s Suggested Reading List

Taken from her 2006 book Reading Like a Writer. The books in green are the ones that I have already read.

• My Reading Stats
  • 2014: 7 of 120 read (5.8%)
  • 2015: 10 of 120 read (8.3%)
  • 2016: 12 of 120 read (10%)
  • 2017: 13 of 120 read (10.8%
  • 2018: 13 of 120 read (10.8%)
  • 2019: 13 of 120 read (10.8%)
  • 2020: 13 of 120 read (10.8%)
  • 2021: 13 of 120 read (10.8%)
  • 2022: 13 of 120 read (10.8%)

1. Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
2. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
3. The Song of Roland by Anonymous
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
6. The Collected Stories by Isaac Babel
7. Vintage Baldwin by James Baldwin
8. Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac
9. Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
10. Believers: A Novella and Stories by Charles Baxter
11. The Complete Short Prose (1929-1989) by Samuel Beckett
12. The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen
13. Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
14. Paul Bowles: Collected Stories and Later Writings by Paul Bowles
15. Stories in an Almost Classical Mode by Harold Brodkey
16. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
17. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
18. Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories by Raymond Carver
19. Cathedral by Raymond Carver
20. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
21. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
22. The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
23. A Life in Letters by Anton Chekhov
24. Tales of Anton Chekhov (Volumes 1-13) by Anton Chekhov
25. Drown by Junot Diaz
26. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
27. Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
28. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
29. I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek
30. The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg by Deborah Eisenberg
31. Middlemarch by George Eliot
32. Searches and Seizures by Stanley Elkin
33. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
34. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
35. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
36. A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
37. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
38. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
39. Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant
40. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
41. The Wonders of the Invisible World: Stories by David Gates
42. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
43. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
44. Doting by Henry Green
45. Loving by Henry Green
46. The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
47. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
48. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49. Selected Poems by Zbigniew Herbert
50. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
51. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
52. Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell
53. Angels by Denis Johnson
54. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
55. Le Divorce by Denis Johnson
56. Persian Nights by Diane Johnson
57. The Life of Savage by Samuel Johnson
58. Dubliners by James Joyce
59. The Judgment by Franz Kafka
60. In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka
61. Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka
62. The Trial by Franz Kafka
63. A Perfect Spy by John Le Carré
64. Hope Against Hope: A Memoir by Nadezdha Mandelstam
65. Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield by Katherine Mansfield
66. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
67. The Autumn of the Patriarchs by Gabriel García Márquez
68. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
69. Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
70. Benito Cereno by Herman Melville
71. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
72. Paradise Lost by John Milton
73. Selected Stories by Alice Munro
74. Lectures on Russian Literature by Vladimir Nabokov
75. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
76. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
77. A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O’Connor
78. Collected Stories by Flannery O’Connor
79. Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
80. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
81. Years of Hope: The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky
82. Freedomland by Richard Price
83. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
84. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
85. Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson
86. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
87. Philip Roth: Novels and Stories (1959-62) by Philip Roth
88. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
89. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
90. King Lear by William Shakespeare
91. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart
92. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
93. A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer
94. Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn
95. Some Hope: A Trilogy by Edward St. Aubyn
96. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
97. Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait by Francis Steegmuller
98. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
99. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
100. Plot It Yourself by Rex Stout
101. The Elements of Style, Illustrated by William Strunk and E.B. White
102. A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
103. Sleepwalker in a Fog by Tatyana Tolstaya
104. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
105. The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
106. The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
107. Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
108. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
109. The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor
110. The Collected Stories by William Trevor
111. Fools of Fortune by William Trevor
112. First Love by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
113. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
114. The Marquise of O– and Other Stories by Heinrich von Kleist
115. The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West
116. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia by Rebecca West
117. Escapes by Joy Williams
118. Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Woods
119. On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf
120. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

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