The 100 Books I've Never Read but Really Should Have

 By it's nature, this is an odd list. The only requirement for a book to make it on the list is that somehow I feel like I should have already read it. A few of these, I've actually read large chunks of already. No joke, I've actually read all but the last chapter of 1984...twice. Some of these books are on here, because multiple people have just blithely assumed that I've read and a couple are on here because I mistakenly assumed that I've already read them and I'm addressing the error. 

So, it's a weird list. The goal is to read 2 of these each month. 25 of them read in 2026 is the win. 

The 100:

1. The 1,001 Arabian Nights
2. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
3. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
4. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
5. Persuasion by Jane Austin
6. A Long Way Home by Ishmael Beah
7. Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear
8. Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
9. The Decameron by Boccacio
10. The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle
11. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
12. Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
13. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
14. The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton
15. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
16. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
17. The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
18. On the Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
19. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
20. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
21. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
22. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
23. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
24. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
25. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
26. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
27. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
28. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
29. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
30. The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner
31. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
32. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
33. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
34. The Magus by John Fowles
35. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskill
36. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
37. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
38. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
39. Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
40. She by H. Rider Haggard
41. Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
42. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
43. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
44. White Lotus by John Hersey
45. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
46. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
47. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
48. Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
49. The Castle by Franz Kafka
50. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
51. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
52. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
53. Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
54. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre
55. In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu
56. Pachinko Min Jin Lee
57. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (Finished 1/24/2026)
58. Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel
59. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
60. The Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
61. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
62. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
63. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
64. Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell
65. House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
66. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
67. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Morena-Garcia
68. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
69. IQ84 by Haruki Murakami
70. Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov
71. Ringworld by Larry Niven
72. Witch Girl by Andre Norton
73. 1984 by George Orwell
74. The Metamorphosis by Ovid
75. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
76. The Bell Jar  by Sylvia Plath
77. "Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe
78. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
79. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
80. American Pastoral by Philip Roth (Abandoned January 2026)
81. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
82. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
83. Contact by Carl Sagan
84. The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
85. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
86. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
87. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
88. I Am Cat by Natsume Sōseki
89. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
90. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
91. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
92. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery
93. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
94. War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy
95. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
96. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
97. Breakfast of Campions by Kurt Vonnegut
98. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
99. Thank You, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
100. Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

New Year 2026

 Happy New Year, Everyone!

It has been a crazy year for me. I graduated from grad school at the end of the previous year, became a Dean of Instructional Development, and then jumped into being the assistant principal mid-way through the fall semester. A lot of my personal goals fell by the wayside in all of that. However, I was still able to read 72 books over the course of the year and I successfully started a running habit (although, I've been off it for about 2 and a half weeks at this point). It was a good year when judged by several metrics.

I'm hoping that 2026 is just as good but maybe a little less hectic. Professionally, my biggest goal is to settle in to my new position and develop some more specific goals.

Personal Goals:

Reading: 

1. I've put together a list of 100 books that I should have read, but somehow haven't. It's a highly personal list and runs heavy to classics. Many of titles are either very dense, very long, or both which accounts for why I haven't read them yet. The goal is to read at least 2 of them each month. I don't think it's feasible to think that I will polish off the list in one year, but I'll consider anything over 25 of them a win. 
2. Because of the size of the books on my list, my goal for the year is only 50 books. I will be reading books outside the list for sanity's sake and also doing Dekalb Library's 26 in '26 challenge.

Health:

1. Running - Back to Running at least 4 mornings a week. I was managing this most of the way through the fall, but fell off right before the holiday break. More specifically, I'm trying to get the 150 of moderate activity recommended by the American Heart Association. 
2. Screen Time - I've deleted all the games off my phone that aren't something I could do with paper and pencil. It occurred to me how much time I'm losing to games that aren't even winnable, they just take up time. I download them, play them obsessively for a week or so, and then delete them. It's a completely pointless waste of time that I will forgo for the year. (crosswords and similar puzzles are safe) 

Family:

1. Family Dinnertime - 5 nights a week, I'd like us to each dinner at the table without screens. There's no real reason we don't do this, we've just fallen into bad habits. However, there is something to be said for time where we only have each other's company for entertainment. I already cook the meals, so it's really only an issue of setting the table.
2. Weekly activities. For a while there, we were doing a good job of playing board games and going on outings. It's hard to keep it going... or rather, it's easy to let it lapse. I want to make sure we a doing something every week this year. It doesn't have to be huge, but it does have to be as a group. So, board games, trips to the zoo, walks in the park, etc. 

Ok, that's it! I'm trying for achievable goals this year and I think all of these are doable!