Summer Reading List

My last chance to read whatever I feel like before punishing university reading lists start ruling my existence.

1. Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis (because Oxford baybay.)
2. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (see above)
3. Candide, Voltaire (because my English teacher said it will teach you how to live your life and that kind of wisdom is always welcome.)
4. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
5. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (to honour this great Nigerian writer in the year of his death, and because I like the Yeats allusion.)
6. The Art of Happiness, The Dalai Lama
7. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir (because women owe her everything.)
8. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
9. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (To my eternal shame, I never finished it.)
10. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (likewise.)
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Middlemarch, George Eliot
13. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx (because why not and it is nice to make one's own mind up about things.)
14. Hard Times, Charles Dickens (because I am already in love with that amazing opening.)
15. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
16. The Accidental Theorist, Paul Krugman (because my friend lent me it and my understanding of economics is limited to the point of embarrassing.)
17. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
18. Something by Iris Murdoch (because I hear great things about this woman.)
19. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (to keep my finger on the literary pulse of the nation.)
20. Think, Simon Blackburn (to indulge the philosopher within.)

'What you read when you don't have to determines what you will be when you can't help it.' - Oscar Wilde