A photographer for the Washington Post has a listicle up called Books for the Ages which includes a book (or a series, or more) for each year of life.
It’s a silly list, but it’s an excuse for me to compare what I’ve read against the list.
Books I’ve read I’ve put in bold; books I have to read are in orange. I’ve included links for the books I’ve read and reported on on this very blog.
Here they are:
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
- Llama Llama Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney
- Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
- Charlie Parker Played Be Bop by Chris Raschka
- The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
- Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary
- The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
- Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume
- Smile by Raina Telgemeier
- Ghost by Jason Reynolds
- Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
- I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
- The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell
- A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
- Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
- Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
- In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
- The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort
- Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story by Paul Monette
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
- Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson
- The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
- The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
- What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike
- The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
- Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
- Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
- Stretching by Bob Anderson
- Bossypants by Tina Fey
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau
- Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
- Who Do You Think You Are? by Alice Munro
- Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami
- A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
- The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
- When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön
- Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
- Dynamic Aging by Katy Bowman
- The Five Years Before You Retire by Emily Guy Birken
- Fear of Dying by Erica Jong
- Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
- Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
- Old in Art School by Nell Painter
- 65 Things to Do When You Retire edited by Mark Evan Chimsky
- The Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
- I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron
- Master Class: Living Longer, Stronger, and Happier by Peter Spiers
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson four volumes, by Robert Caro
- Paris in the Present Tense by Mark Helprin
- The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
- Women Rowing North by Mary Pipher
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
- The Coming of Age by Simone de Beauvoir
- Coming Into Eighty: Poems by May Sarton
- Devotions by Mary Oliver
- The Summer of a Dormouse by John Mortimer
- All the thrillers and mysteries
- The Last Unknowns: Deep, Elegant, Profound Unanswered Questions About the Universe, the Mind, the Future of Civilization, and the Meaning of Life edited by John Brockman
- Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
- Old Filth by Jane Gardam
- King Lear by William Shakespeare
- Nearing Ninety: And Other Comedies of Late Life by Judith Viorst
- A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing 90 by Donald Hall
- Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God by Joe Coomer
- Selected Poems: 1988-2013 by Seamus Heaney
- Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
- Sapiens by Yuval Harari
- This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite
- The Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante
- Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill
- My Own Two Feet by Beverly Cleary
- Life Is So Good by George Dawson and Richard Glaubman
- Little Boy by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
- Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author by Herman Wouk
Of the books that I don’t have colored in the list above, I don’t expect that I’ll even consider reading. I mean, most of the YA fiction listed above that I haven’t read is message-oriented, as are many of the other novels. I might read Gilead but that’s only because I gave a copy to my beautiful wife and her mother for Christmas a couple years ago, so there’s bound to be one or more floating around by the end of my retirement.
Fun fact: Rabbit, Run and Stretching are both at the chairside book accumulation point. I’ve tried to read Rabbit, Run, but I’ve found it odious. And I got Stretching on the indirect advice of my editor. For years, I’ve meant to take up stretching, but I haven’t yet.
At any rate, make of it what you will, the intersection of my reading habits with that of a photographer.
(Link via Althouse.)
