December is my favorite time of combined optimism and laziness, of hot and sweet coffees and fat blankets.
Rarely has the drive come with a wave of bliss when you consider that it can happen in a month, at the top of next year.
And with that, I present you the 2025 top-of-year ambition:
My cooking experiment was one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. Period.
And I carry those lessons every day. I’m a different person now that I learned to cook.
It also helps that I’m eating food every day, so the lessons come up at least once a day.
But no matter! I’m onto the next transformative rabbit hole.
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This next ~chapter~ is my book bucket list: the time-honored authors & books I still haven’t read.
Over the course of January to August, I will read:
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
In Search of Lost Time (Vol. 1), Marcel Proust
Dubliners, James Joyce
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O'Connor
Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
American Pastoral, Philip Roth
My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
Most of these books I’ve never read before. A few will be re-reads. For some, I have an eye on the author as someone I should know or already admire. Others I’m trusting as blind recommendations. of these books spark some curiosity, and it should be a nice eclectic mix.
Here is the awaited syllabus with a timeline for what we will read which week.
And here is a Bookshop affiliate list with all the picks. If you purchase from this affiliate list, I may get a small commission, but I don’t have that kind of book-influencing swagger, so this has never happened. Pleaaasse don’t sue me.
Note on translators: I haven’t purchased all the editions yet. (In my one-at-a-time budget era.) For translated novels, I will let you know what edition I get as soon as I purchase if you’re looking to read alongside me. The books in the Bookshop list may not be the final edition I purchase, but also, they might. I’ll update the list if not. If you have a different edition at home that you’ve already read or wanted to read, don’t buy a new one. Use it to compare and contrast if we dig into particular passages.
What does this mean for you?
On Sundays, free reflective essays will go out to all subscribers.
These collection of essays I write will be broken into different sections:
Wait, what is this book? I’ll paraphrase the blurb so if the title comes up at a dinner party, you can nod along.
What can we learn from this book as readers? I’ll assess the plot, characters, and setting to see what we learn about humans. And ourselves. Dun dun dun.
What can we learn from this book as writers? In case you like to write, or like to evaluate writers, I’ll dig more into the craft: point of view, style, pacing, etc.
What makes this book unforgettable? An analytical spoiler section for some of the deeper passages with people who either are comfortable knowing the end or people who have read the book.
Like the cooking essays, these books are influenced by where I am and what I’m doing while I read it, so my personal voice will filter through.
I am a real human, not an academic.
You will be able to every irreverent “lol” and “wtf” I save for my annotations in a graceful, personal approach. I can find the best in the worst books, so nothing will ever be a slam fest. I am not someone who throws a book at the wall and slanders its Goodreads.
Unless it’s Sounder. I got a C in fifth grade for writing a letter to Sounder’s dead author telling him he was a disgrace.
What if you’re one of those sweet, sweet paid subscribers?
Paid subscribers will receive a Monday discussion post for reader reactions or writing prompts inspired by the books
And that’s not all!
They also receive a Thursday lesson with the biographical, historical, craft context or interviews on the author I found in my research.
Note: Due to my anticipated bandwidth, other features like “The Log” reviews will be posted on an as-needed basis. “The Digest” will still come out on the 15th with behind-the-scenes & real-life updates for paid subscribers.
Disclaimer: despite my best efforts, this list is subjective
This list is tailored to books I’ve (1) already read, (2) haven’t read yet, and (3) would like to read.
It’s not by any means a conclusive list of what should be included in today’s canon.
It’s just me, Chloe, trying to enjoy some of the heavy hitters.
If you’re curious about the above selections, here are some thoughts I had while making the list:
I steered away from 21st century literature. Those are the books I’m reading in my free time. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love them are see today’s writers as valuable. It just means that it doesn’t work for this experiment.
I knew this at the time, but I love every English teacher I ever had, and they did a really good job of bringing me through the canon over middle school, high school, and college. Some of the above books are expansions on authors, like Jane Austen or William Faulkner, I learned in these classrooms.
Anna Karenina, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and A Tale of Two Cities are my only re-reads. As an efficiency reader (gag me), my reading habit is gluttonous. Read as many books as quickly as possible because before I die I want to make sure I read all the good stuff. (Can’t wait for this dismal thought to come up later in the midst of these heavier books.) I rarely re-read a book, even if I loved it, so these books are experiments in returning and patience.
Great lists that were so helpful in narrowing down all of literature were from
George Saunders’ Story Club
the BBC’s “100 Books That Shaped The World”
Harold Bloom’s 1994 Esquire article “278 Books You Should Have Read By Now” (via Goodreads)
that now iconic New York Times list of the top 100 books of the 21st Century (for my two 21st century selections)
my former A.P. Lang teacher and trusted literary adviser, Peggy Judge Hamilton
Below is a list of common books that overlap across these lists but didn’t make it onto my list because I already read and loved.
Or I read and had a mild reaction.
Ok, some of these I didn’t like. That could change, but they left a bad taste in my mouth. A problem to unwind in 2026!
For now, this is a list of the classics—in the randomest non-order available—that didn’t make the list but would be worth your time if you haven’t already read.
Pride & Prejudice, Austen
The Sound & The Fury, Faulkner
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
For Whom The Bell Tolls, Hemingway
The Old Man & The Sea, Hemingway
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Great Expectations Dickens
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
MacBeth, William Shakespeare
Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
The Tempest, Shakespeare
Hamlet, Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
The Plague, Albert Camus
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Nine Stories, JD Salinger
The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger
The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Lolita, Nabokov
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
1984, George Orwell
Animal Farm, Orwell
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Beloved, Toni Morrison
My Brilliant Friend series, Elena Ferrante
Lincoln In The Bardo, George Saunders
CivilWarLand In Bad Decline, Saunders
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The Sentence, Louise Erdich
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
Ulysses, James Joyce (I never finished this, sue me)
The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
All The King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
The Odyssey, Homer
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
My Name Is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
I’m excited about this next adventure and the relative insanity to come. Join me on Jan. 5 when we start with Jane Austen’s Persuasion!
Class is in session: subscribe to “self-taught” to enroll
