Still Counting

My Lists of Unread Books

As my single list of unread books was becoming unwieldy, I have divided it up into the following (loose) categories:

Eighteenth Century fiction and essays.

Eighteenth Century biographies and history.

London in the Eighteenth Century.

Historical novels set in the Eighteenth Century.

Historical novels set in other periods.

Fiction pre-Eighteenth Century

Nineteenth Century fiction

Twentieth Century fiction

Fiction from the last 20 years (an arbitrary period and which overlaps with the previous category, but somehow I couldn't bring myself to create a 'contemporary' category).

General books about London.

Biographies and criticism of Shakespeare.

Volumes of poetry which I would like to read in their entirety (rather than my usual dip in/dip out method).

Books about poetry.

Books about books and reading (one of my favourite topics.  There aren't many unread books in this category as I tend to gobble them down as soon as I buy them).

Biographies and memoirs of literary figures.

Short story collections.

Essay collections (including volumes of collected reviews).

Science.

Everything that's left!

Current library borrowings.

Eighteenth Century Fiction and Essays

1. Evelina - Fanny Burney
2. Cecilia - Fanny Burney
3. Roxana - Daniel Defoe
4. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain - Daniel Defoe
5. Belinda - Maria Edgeworth
6. Jonathan Wild - Henry Fielding
7. Joseph Andrews and Shamela - Henry Fielding
8. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
9. The Beggar's Opera - John Gay
10. Caleb Williams - William Godwin
11. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless - Eliza Haywood
12. Love in Excess - Eliza Haywood
13. The Victim of Prejudice - Mary Hays
14. A Simple Story - Elizabeth Inchbald
15. Samuel Johnson - Selected Essays
16. Samuel Johnson - Major Works
17. The Female Quixote - Charlotte Lennox
18. Scriblerus - Alexander Pope
19. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson
20. Pamela - Samuel Richardson
21. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollett
22. Jonathan Swift - Directions to Servants
23. Jonathan Swift - Major Works
24. A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift
25. Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft
26. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden - Mary Wollstonecraft
27. Collected Letters - Mary Wollstonecraft
28. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft

Eighteenth Century - People and History

1. Journals and Letters - Frances Burney
2. The Marlboroughs - Christopher Hibbert
3. The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough - Ophelia Field
4. The Theives' Opera - Lucy Moore
5. The Personal History of Samuel Johnson - Christopher Hibbert
6. Hogarth - Jenny Uglow
7. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire - Amanda Foreman
8. Boswell's London Journal
9. Dr Johnson and Company - Robert Lynd
10. George III - Christopher Hibbert
11. Aristocrats - Stella Tillyard
12. The Life of Samuel Johnson - Boswell
13. Collected Letters - Mary Wollstonecraft
14. Courtesans - Katie Hickman
15. The Knife Man - Wendy Moore
16. Defoe on Sheppard & Wild
17. The Gentleman's Daughter - Amanda Vickery
18. Mistress of the House - Rosemary Baird
19. Daughters of Ireland - Janet Todd
20. Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft - Lyndall Gordon
21. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life - Janet Todd
22. Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld - ed Lucy Moore
23. Jonathan Swift - Victoria Glendinning
24. English Home Life 1500-1800 - Christina Hole

London - Eighteenth Century

1. London Life in the Eighteenth Century - M Dorothy George
2. Discovering Georgian London - Derek Brechin
3. Down and Out in Eighteenth Century London - Tim Hitchcock
4. Illustrated English Social History Vol 3 - G M Trevelyan
5. English Society in the 18th Century - Roy Porter
6. Georgian London - John Summerson

Historical Fiction - Set in Eighteenth Century

1. Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue
2. Life Mask - Emma Donoghue
3. The Scandal of the Season - Janet Gee
4. The Thief Taker - Janet Gleeson
5. Wideacre - Philippa Gregory
6. A Respectable Trade - Philippa Gregory
7. A Spectacle of Corruption - David Liss
8. The Music of the Spheres - Elizabeth Redfern

Historical Fiction - Miscellaneous Periods

1. The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
2. Lady of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
3. The Falcons of Montabard - Elizabeth Chadwick
4. Girl With a Pearl Earring - Tracy Chevalier
5. The Lady and the Unicorn - Tracy Chevalier
6. The Meaning of Night - Michael Cox
7. The Conjuror's Bird - Martin Davies
8. The Red Tent - Anita Diament
9. The Sixth Wife - Suzannah Dunn
10. The Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett
11. King Hereafter - Dorothy Dunnett
12. Voyager - Diana Gabaldon
13. Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon
14. Outlander - Diana Gabaldon
15. Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon
16. The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon
17. A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon
18. The Queen's Fool - Philippa Gregory
19. The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory
20. Earthly Joys - Philippa Gregory
21. The House of Sight and Shadow - Nicholas Griffin
22. Confessions of a Pagan Nun - Kate Horsley
23. An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears
24. The Sunne in Splendour - Sharon Penman
25. London - Edward Rutherford
26. Dissolution - C J Sansom
27. Katherine - Anya Seton
28. Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle - Manda Scott
29. Boudica: Dreaming the Hound - Manda Scott
30. Boudica: Dreaming the Bull - Manda Scott
31. Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
32. Burr - Gore Vidal
33. Lincoln - Gore Vidal

Pre-Eighteenth Century Fiction

1. Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works - Aphra Behn

Nineteenth Century Fiction

1. The Way of All Flesh - Samuel Butler
2. The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
3. Sketches by Boz - Charles Dickens
4. The Karamazov Brothers - Dostoevsky
5. Ruth - Mrs Gaskell
6. New Grub Street - George Gissing
7. The Trumpet Major - Thomas Hardy
8. Under the Greenwood Tree - Thomas Hardy
9. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. The House of the Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
11. The Golden Bowl - Henry James
12. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
13. The Awkward Age - Henry James
14. The Spoils of Poynton - Henry James
15. Moby Dick - Melville
16. The Portable Edgar Allan Poe
17. Kenilworth - Sir Walter Scott
18. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
19. The Prime Minister - Anthony Trollope
20. Phineas Redux - Anthony Trollope
21. The Duke's Children - Anthony Trollope

Twentieth Century Fiction

1. The Floating Opera - John Barth
2. The End of the Road - John Barth
3. The Old Wives' Tale - Arnold Bennett
4. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
5. A Lost Lady - Willa Cather
6. The Innocence of Father Brown - G K Chesterton
7. Gigi and The Cat - Collette
8. A House and Its Head - Ivy Compton-Burnett
9. The Diary of a Provincial Lady - E. M. Delafield
10. The Old Man and Me - Elaine Dundy
11. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
12. Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
13. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
14. The Good Soldier - Ford Maddox Ford
15. The Collector - John Fowles
16. My Brilliant Career - Miles Franklin
17. The Herb of Grace - Elizabeth Goudge
18. Loving; Living; Party Going - Henry Green
19. Hunger - Knut Hamsun
20. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
21. The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac
22. Kim - Rudyard Kipling
23. The Rainbow - D H Lawrence
24. The Weather in the Streets - Rosamund Lehman
25. The People of the Abyss - Jack London
26. Dr Faustus - Thomas Mann
27. Therese - Francois Mauriac
28. Lud-in-the-Mist - Hope Mirlees
29. The Bell - Iris Murdoch
30. The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil
31. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
32. A Dance to the Music of Time - Anthony Powell
33. All Passion Spent - Vita Sackville-West
34. Quiet Flows the Don - Mikhail Sholokhov
35. I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
36. Blaming - Elizabeth Taylor
37. Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
38. Precious Bane - Mary Webb
39. The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West
40. The Birds Fall Down - Rebecca West
41. The Fountain Overflows - Rebecca West

Fiction from the last 20 years

1. The Clerkenwell Tales -  Peter Ackroyd
2. Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
3. In the Flicker of an Eyelid - Alexis
4. Garner - Kirstin Allio
5. The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
6. Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
7. Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood
8. Millennium People - J G Ballard
9. The Untouchable - John Banville
10. Union Street - Pat Barker
11. Talking it Over - Julian Barnes
12. The Catastrophist - Ronan Bennett
13. Extinction - Thomas Bernhard
14. Gathering Evidence - Thomas Bernhard
15. Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
16. Resteless - William Boyd
17. Lost Souls - Poppy Z Brite
18. Brief Lives - Anita Brookner
19. The Rules of Engagement - Anita Brookner
20. March - Geraldine Brooks
21. The Biographer's Tale - A S Byatt
22. Jack Maggs - Peter Carey
23. The Passion of New Eve - Angela Carter
24. Foe - J M Coetzee
25. In a Dark Wood - Amanda Craig
26. The Tale of Murasaki - Liza Dalbey
27. The Salterton Trilogy - Robertson Davies
28. The Body Artist - Don Delillo
29. Talking to the Dead - Helen Dunmore
30. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
31. Glyph - Percival Everett
32. The Girl at the Lion d'Or - Sebastian Faulks
33. The Western Coast - Paula Fox
34. Headlong - Michael Frayn
35. American Gods - Neil Gaiman
36. Devil in Amber - Mark Gatiss
37. The Secret River - Kate Grenville
38. Gerontius - James Hamilton-Paterson
39. The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst
40. Atomised - Michel Houellebecq
41. An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
42. A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro
43. Le Divorce - Diane Johnson
44. Everything Passes - Gabriel Josipovici
45. An Aroma of Coffee - Dany Laferriere
46. Dining with the Dictator - Dany Laferriere
47. Mr Philips - John Lanchester
48. The Earthsea Quartet - Ursula le Guin
49. Samarkand - Amin Maalouf
50. In the Country of Men - Hisham Matar
51. The Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain) - Cormac McCarthy
52. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
53. Enduring Love - Ian McEwan
54. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - Jon McGregor
55. Brightness Falls - Jay McInery
56. When We Were Bad - Charlotte Mendelson
57. Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels
58. Perdido Street Station - China Mieville
59. Iron Council - China Mieville
60. Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
61. Number9dream - David Mitchell
62. Mother London - Michael Moorcock
63. London Bone - Michael Moorcock
64. Passion - Jude Morgan
65. The King's Touch - Jude Morgan
66. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
67. Labyrinth - Kate Mosse
68. Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakimi
69. Somthing Might Happen - Julie Myerson
70. Blonde - Joyce Carol Oates
71. The Puttermesser Papers - Cynthia Ozick
72. The Dante Club - Matthew Pearl
73. The Poe Shadow - Matthew Pearl
74. Life A User's Manual - Georges Perec
75. Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
76. Robinson - Chris Petit
77. My Sister's Keeper - Jodie Picoult
78. That Old Ace in the Hole - Annie Proulx
79. The Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman
80. The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
81. The Dying Animal - Philip Roth
82. The Human Stain - Philip Roth
83. The Interpretation of Murder - Jed Rubenfeld
84. Empire Falls - Richard Russo
85. The Cave - Jose Saramago
86. Vertigo - W. G. Sebald
87. The Book of Dave - Will Self
88. Light on Snow - Anita Shreve
89. We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
90. Lights Out for the Territory - Iain Sinclair
91. Edge of the Orison - Iain Sinclair
92. Radon Daughters - Iain Sinclair
93. Prep - Curtis Sittenfeld
94. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith
95. A Ship Made of Paper - Scott Spencer
96. Mother's Milk - Edward St Aubyn
97. Some Hope - Edward St Aubyn
98. Crossing to Safety - Wallace Stegner
99. The Russian Debutante's Handbook - Gary Shteyngart
100. The Little Friend - Donna Tartt
101. The American Boy - Andrew Taylor
102. In a Summer Season - Elizabeth Taylor
103. Divided Kingdom - Rupert Thomson
104. Girl from the South - Joanna Trollope
105. An Accidental Marriage - Anne Tyler
106. A Patchwork Planet - Anne Tyler
107. The Last Crossing - Guy Vanderhaeghe
108. Miss Garnett's Angel - Salley Vickers
109. Instances of the Number Three - Salley Vickers
110. Myra Breckinridge/Myron - Gore Vidal
111. Lighthousekeeping - Jeanette Winterson
112. Written on the Body- Jeanette Winterson
113. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
114. Modern Baptists - James Wilcox
115. The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder

London - General

1. Rodinsky's Room - Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair
2. The House by the Thames - Gillian Tindall
3. London: the Synfulle Citie - EJ Burford
4. Feeding London
5. London's Coffee Houses
6. The Faber Book of London - A. N. Wilson
7. Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London - A St John Adcock
8. In Search of London - H V Morton
9. H V Morton's London
10. London Bodies - Alex Werner
11. London: a Social History - Roy Porter
12. A History of London - Stephen Inwood
13. London: the Biography - Peter Ackroyd
14. The England of Elizabeth - A L Rowse
15. A History of London Life - Mitchell and Leys
16. London: City of Disappearances - ed Iain Sinclair

Shakespeare Biography and Criticism

1. Shakespeare's Language - Frank Kermode
2. Shakespeare's History Plays - E M Tillyard
3. Ungentle Shakespeare - Katherine Duncan-Jones
4. Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare
5. Shakespeare After All - Marjorie Garber
6. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human - Harold Bloom
7. Shakespeare: The Biography - Peter Ackroyd
8. Will in the World - Stephen Greenblatt
9. Shakespeare the Thinker - A. D. Nuttall

Volumes of Poetry to Read in their Entirety

1. The Metamorphoses of Ovid
2. Sonnets - Shakespeare
3. Paradise Lost - Milton
4. Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
5. The Iliad - Homer
6. The Odyssey - Homer
7. Divine Comedy - Dante
8. Plays and Poems - Christopher Marlowe
9. The Prelude - William Wordsworth
10. Faust Part 1 - Goethe
11. Faust Part 2 - Goethe

About Poetry

1. The Work of Poetry - Hollander
2. The Making of a Poem - Mark Strand and Eavan Boland
3. How Poetry Works - Phil Roberts
4. Poetry and the Age - Randall Jarrell
5. The Well Wrought Urn - Cleanth Brooks
6. The Force of Poetry - Christopher Ricks
7. The Anxiety of Influence - Harold Bloom
8. Hamlet: Poem Unlimited - Harold Bloom
9. The Art of Reading Poetry - Harold Bloom
10. Allusion to the Poets - Christopher Ricks
11. Finders Keepers - Seamus Heaney
12. The Strength of Poetry - James Fenton

Books about Books and Reading

1. The Sound on the Page - Ben Pagoda
2. The History of Reading - Alberto Manguel
3. How to Read a Book - Adler and Van Doren
4. How to Read Literature Like a Professor - Foster
5. The New Lifetime Reading Plan - Fadiman and Major
6. A Reading Diary - Alberto Manguel
7. The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
8. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel - Jane Smiley
9. The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker

Literary Biographies and Memoirs

1. Moments of Being - Virginia Woolf
2. Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life - Lyndall Gordon
3. Thomas Hardy: the Time-Torn Man - Claire Tomalin
4. The Life of John Milton - A N Wilson
5. Tolstoy - A N Wilson
6. Trollope - Victoria Glendinning
7. Edith Wharton - R W B Lewis
8. No Gifts from Chance - Shari Benstock
9. Virginia Woolf - Hermione Lee
10. Dorothy Wordsworth - Gittings and Manton
11. William Wordsworth - Stephen Gill
12. John Clare - Jonathan Bate
13. The Passion of Emily Dickinson - Farr
14. Flaubert: a Life - Geoffrey Wall
15. Christopher Marlowe - Park Honan
16. Flaubert - Herbert Lotman
17. Antonia White - Jane Dunn
18. Robert Graves: the Years with Laura Riding - Richard Perceval Graves
19. Jane Austen: A Life - Claire Tomalin
20. Eden Renewed - Peter Levi
21. Hans Christian Andersen - Jackie Wullschlager
22. Blake - Peter Ackroyd
23. A Life of Colette - Judith Thurman
24. Daniel Defoe - Richard West
25. The Violent Effigy - John Carey
26. Dickens - Peter Ackroyd
27. George Eliot: the Last Victorian - Kathryn Hughes
28. Like a Fiery Elephant: the Story of B S Johnson - Jonathan Coe
29. Sidetracks - Richard Holmes
30. Footsteps - Richard Holmes
31. Savage Beauty - Nancy Milford
32. The Brontes - Juliet Barker
33. The Third Woman - William Cash
34. Memoirs - Julian Maclaran- Ross
35. Speak, Memory - Nabokov
36. The Life of George Crabbe by his son
37. Words - Jean-Paul Sartre
38. Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

Short stories

1. Collected Stories - Isaac Babel
2. Elementals - A S Byatt
3. Collected Stories - John Cheever
4. The Awakening and other stories - Kate Chopin
5. The Snows of Kilimanjaro - Ernest Hemingway
6. Dubliners - James Joyce
7. Stranger Things Happen - Kelly Link
8. Faithless - Joyce Carol Oates
9. Getting a Life - Helen Simpson
10. Tales of the South Seas - Robert Louis Stevenson
11. The Stories of William Trevor
12. Man Descending - Guy Vanderhaeghe
13. The World and Other Places - Jeanette Winterson
14. Classic New England Stories
15. Cape Cod Stories
16. You Have to Read This

Essays and Collections of Reviews

1. The Collection - Peter Ackroyd
2. A View From the Bed - Jenny Diski
3. On Trying to Keep Still - Jenny Diski
4. Essential Writings - Ralph Waldo Emerson
5. How to Be Alone - Jonathan Franzen
6. Collected Essays - Graham Greene
7. A Plea for Eros - Siri Hustvedt
8. The Purloined Clinic - Janet Malcolm
9. Uncensored: Views and (Re)Views - Joyce Carol Oates
10. Mothers of the Novel - Dale Spender
11. The Common Reader - Virginia Woolf

Science

1. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
2. The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
3. The Blank Slate - Stephen Pinker
4. The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
5. In Search of Schrodinger's Cat - John Gribbin
6. A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

Everything that's left

1. Kathy Goes to Haiti - Kathy Acker
2. Restoration London - Liza Picard
3. Victorian London - Liza Picard
4. The Ladies of Langollen - Elizabeth Mavor
5. Journal of a Solitude - May Sarton
6. Best Young American Novelists - Granta
7. The Paston Letters
8. Thomas Moore- Peter Ackroyd
9. Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs - Jeremy Mercer
10. When All the World Was Young - Barbara Holland
11. Rogue River Journal - John Daniel
12. A Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
13. The Casebooks of Simon Forman - A L Rowse
14. Britain BC - Francis Pryor
15. Nature Cure - Richard Mabey
16. Tales of the New Babylon - Rupert Christiansen
17. An  Intimate History of Mankind - Theodore Zeldin
18. Jazz Cleopatra - Phylis Rose
19. The Arcanum - Janet Gleeson
20. Black Sea - Neal Ascherson
21. From the Holy Mountain - William Dalrymple
22. In Xanadu: a Quest - William Dalrymple
23. India - V S Naipaul
24. The Meaning of Everything - Simon Winchester
25. Touching the Void - Joe Simpson
26. Stasiland - Anna Funder
27. Dylan's Visions of Sin - Christopher Ricks
28. Down the Highway; A Life of Bob Dylan - Howard Souness
29. Selected Prose - John Ashbery
30. Coleridge's Notebooks: A Selection
31. Mother Tongue: the English Language - Bill Bryson
32. Boys and Girls Forever - Alison Lurie
33. My Life in Orange - Tim Parks
34. Autobiography - Benvenuto Cellini
35. Cape Cod - Thoreau
36. In the Heart of the Sea - Nathaniel Philbrick
37. The Italian Boy - Sarah Wise
38. The Uses of Enchantment - Bruno Bettelheim
39. What is Good? - A C Grayling
40. Natasha's Dance - Orlando Figes
41. The Penguin History of the USA - Hugh Brogan
42. The Spiral Staircase - Karen Armstrong
43. Grimm's Fairy Tales
44. The Red Fairy Book - Andrew Lang
45. The Song of the Earth - Jonathan Bate
46. All Points North - Simon Armitage