The After Bar Project

These are some of the books in my modest collection that I haven’t read, and now is the perfect time to do that, since the bar is almost one week behind me like some strange dream I don’t want to think about.

I’m naming this ambitious endeavor as The After Bar Project. I say “ambitious” because it’s a long list, and some of these books are thick, dense, boring and unbelievably insufferable.

Here’s how this project works: I will try to read each one on the list, and then write about it—just so when I look back some fifty years later, I would probably be amazed at how well I missed the point of an entire book (or other similar—but I hope positive—epiphanies). There are no strict rules, and definitely no pressure.

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki (H.H. Munro)

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Dug Down Deep by Joshua Harris

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

What Am I Doing Here by Bruce Chatwin

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Testament by John Grisham

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeannete Winterson

Broken Music by Sting

Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The Sands of Time by Sidney Sheldon

The Summer of the Great-Grandmother by Madeleine L’Engle

John and Charles Wesley: Selected Prayers, Hymns, and Sermons

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century of His Life by D.M. Thomas

Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet

3 Plays by Thornton Wilder

The Enemy Within by Kris Lundgaard

Focus by Arthur Miller

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid

Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis

Jewel by Bret Lott

A Madness of Birds by Jose Wendell Capili

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken

Natasha by David Bezmogzis

The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Twelve Ordinary Men by John MacArthur

Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby

Windows of the Soul by Ken Gire

The Trick of It by Michael Frayn

Saturday by Ian McEwan

Know Who You Believe by Paul E. Little

Know What You Believe by Paul E. Little

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Light in August by William Faulkner

Spies by Mychael Frayn

The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Do Hard Things by Alex and Brett Harris

I’m also open to suggestions. This list is by no means a “canon” of anything, and it certainly isn’t a very good representative of all the books ever written. If you notice, most of these authors are dead, white American or European men, and a lot of books in the list are fiction. So if anyone who happens to read this blog has other books in mind, do tell me.

Happy reading!