Tarquin Rees https://tarquinrees.com/ A blog on literature, art, religion and anomalous phenomena en-us Long-term Reads https://tarquinrees.com/writing/article/4 https://tarquinrees.com/writing/article/4 Thu, 01 Jan 2026 UTC +0000
  • The Odyssey (Homer)
  • Anabasis (Xenophon)
  • Metamorphoses (Ovid)
  • The Seven Princesses (Nezami)
  • Orlando Furioso (Ludovico Ariosto)
  • Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
  • The Life of a Stupid Man (Ryūnosuke Akutagawa)
  • Don Quixote (Cervantes, 1605/1615)
  • The Divine Comedy (Dante, 1320)
  • Gulliver’s Travels (Swift, 1726)
  • Pride and Prejudice (Austen, 1813)
  • Emma (Austen, 1815)
  • Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818)
  • Sense and Sensibility (Austen, 1811)
  • Jane Eyre (Brontë, 1847)
  • Wuthering Heights (Brontë, 1847)
  • David Copperfield (Dickens, 1850)
  • The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne, 1850)
  • Bleak House (Dickens, 1853)
  • Madame Bovary (Flaubert, 1857)
  • A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens, 1859)
  • Great Expectations (Dickens, 1861)
  • Les Misérables (Hugo, 1862)
  • Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson, 1886)
  • The Woman in White (Collins, 1859)
  • Dubliners (Joyce, 1914)
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce, 1916)
  • Ulysses (Joyce, 1922)
  • The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925)
  • The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway, 1926)
  • The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
  • A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway)
  • The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner, 1929)
  • Brave New World (Huxley, 1932)
  • I, Claudius (Graves, 1934)
  • Greek Myths (Graves, 1934)
  • Tropic of Cancer (Miller, 1934)
  • The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck, 1939)
  • The Stranger (Camus, 1942)
  • Invisible Man (Ellison, 1952)
  • Lolita (Nabokov, 1955)
  • Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
  • Lord of the Flies (Golding, 1954)
  • Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak, 1957)
  • The Bell Jar (Plath, 1963)
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey, 1962)
  • The Golden Notebook (Lessing, 1962)
  • Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys, 1966)
  • Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut, 1969)
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez, 1967)
  • The Kite Runner (Hosseini, 2003)
  • Beloved (Morrison, 1987)
  • War and Peace (Tolstoy)
  • In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)
  • Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
  • The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
  • Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
  • The Stories of Anton Chekhov (Anton Chekhov)
  • The Red and the Black (Stendhal)
  • The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann)
  • Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
  • Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol)
  • Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)
  • The Lover (Marguerite Duras)
  • Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)
  • If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Italo Calvino)
  • The House on the Hill (Cesare Pavese)
  • Ficciones (Jorge Luis Borges)
  • Shuttlecock (Graham Swift)
  • 2666 (Roberto Bolaño)
  • By Night in Chile (Roberto Bolaño)
  • The Trial & All (Kafka)
    • ]]>         Reading List 2026 https://tarquinrees.com/writing/article/8 https://tarquinrees.com/writing/article/8 Wed, 31 Dec 2025 UTC +0000  I have a ritual - every year at New Year's eve I select 35 books to read during the year. Some I've read and loved and want to read again, others are ones I've (shamefully) not got round to but should have. Sometimes I read more, sometimes I don't make it so the missed books go on next year's list.

    Last year I completed so this is a fresh list. 

    So these are the books on my metaphorical nightstand this year. In this order. Will most likely review as I go.

    1. A Month in the Country (J.L. Carr)
    2. Heaven (Mieko Kawakami)
    3. Wise Blood (Flannery O'Connor 1952)
    4. The Violent Bear It Away (Flannery O'Connor 1960)
    5. In Memory of Memory (Maria Stepanova)
    6. The Years (Erneaux)
    7. My Lesbian Novel (Renee Gladman 2024)
    8. Be Brief and Tell Them Everything (Brad Listi)
    9. Death in the Family (Knausgaard)
    10. The Book of Disquiet (Fernando Pessoa)
    11. Pachinko (Min Jin Lee)
    12. Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders)
    13. The Wall (Haushofer)
    14. Trust (Hernan Diaz)
    15. The Overstory (Richard Powers)
    16. The Price of Salt (Patricia Highsmith 1952)
    17. Gilead (Marilynne Robinson)
    18. The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood, 1985)
    19. The Testaments(Atwood)
    20. Outline (Rachel Cusk)
    21. Transit (Rachel Cusk)
    22. Kudos (Rachel Cusk)
    23. The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov, 1967)
    24. Wolf Hall (Mantel)
    25. Bring Up the Bodies (Mantel)
    26. The Mirror and the Light (Mantel)
    27. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
    28. My Name Is Red (Orhan Pamuk)
    29. Pale Fire (Nabokov)
    30. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk)
    31. My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante 2012)
    32. The Story of a New Name (Elena Ferrante 2013)
    33. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Elena Ferrante 2014)
    34. The Story of the Lost Child (Elena Ferrante 2015)
    35. Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (Manuel Puig 1982)
    ]]>         Hello World https://tarquinrees.com/writing/article/16 https://tarquinrees.com/writing/article/16 Fri, 26 Dec 2025 UTC +0000

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