The Better-Late-Than-Never Book Club: Plowing Through the Classics, One Book At A Time

The only thing worse than having to read a bad book is having to read it alone—if you’re the only one plugging away at it, you don’t have anyone to bitch and moan with about the prose, the plot, the people, the whatever.

Currently listing 73 books

With that in mind, my family and I have formed a Better-Late-Than-Never Book Club. Every month or so, we select a reputedly “classic” novel that doesn’t sound like anything any of us would ever want to read on our own, we nag and heckle each other to the very last page, and then we get together to kvetch about its badness and celebrate having finished it. The benefits of this approach? We all get bookworm points for having read a “classic”—and, sometimes, we find a book that’s not as bad as we’d expected it to be.

Read So Far

  • All the King’s Men
    Robert Penn Warren
  • The Name of the Rose
    Umberto Eco
  • Crime and Punishment
    Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Mrs. Dalloway
    Virginia Woolf
  • Moby-Dick
    Herman Melville

Title

Author

Type

Genre

Currently Reading
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Upcoming
The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow F Drama
The Ambassadors Henry James F Drama
An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser F Drama
Angle of Repose Wallace Stegner F Drama
Anna of the Five Towns Arnold Bennett F Drama
Armadale Wilkie Collins F Drama
Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand F Science Fiction
Beasts of No Nation Uzodinma Iweala F Drama
The Beautiful and the Damned F. Scott Fitzgerald F Drama
Behind the Scenes at the Museum Kate Atkinson F Drama
The Betrothed Allesandro Manzoni F Drama
The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas F Drama
The Day of the Triffids John Wyndham F Science Fiction
Death Comes for the Archbishop Willa Cather F Drama
The Death of the Heart Elizabeth Bowen F Drama
Dune Frank Herbert F Science Fiction
East of Eden John Steinbeck F Drama
Everything is Illuminated Jonathan Safran Foer F Drama
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer F Drama
A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway F Drama
Felix Holt, the Radical George Eliot F Drama
Finnegans Wake James Joyce F Drama
Germinal Èmile Zola F Drama
The Golden Bowl Henry James F Drama
The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing F Drama
Gravity’s Rainbow Thomas Pynchon F Science Fiction
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Carson Smith McCullers F Drama
Henderson the Rain King Saul Bellow F Drama
Ironweed William Kennedy F Drama
The Lamplighter Anthony O’Neill F Mystery
Light in August William Faulkner F Drama
The Magnificent Ambersons Booth Tarkington F Drama
The Magus John Fowles F Drama
The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett F Mystery
The Man Without Qualities Robert Musil F Drama
The March E.L. Doctorow F Drama
The Moviegoer Walker Percy F Drama
The Naked and the Dead Norman Mailer F Drama
Nausea Jean-Paul Sartre F Drama
Of Human Bondage W. Somerset Maugham F Drama
The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway F Drama
The Old Wives’ Tale Arnold Bennett F Drama
On Beauty Zadie Smith F Drama
On the Road Jack Kerouac F Drama
The Once and Future King T.H. White F Fantasy
One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez F Drama
Point Counter Point Aldous Huxley F Drama
Portnoy’s Complaint Philip Roth F Mystery
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce F Drama
The Postman Always Rings Twice James M. Cain F Drama
Ragtime E.L. Doctorow F Drama
The Rainbow D.H. Lawrence F Drama
The Red and the Black Stendhal F Drama
The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie F Drama
The Shell Seekers Rosamund Pilcher F Drama
The Sheltering Sky Paul Bowles F Drama
Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut F Drama
The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner F Drama
The Stand Stephen King F Science Fiction
The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway F Drama
Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry F Drama
The War of the Worlds H.G. Wells F Science Fiction
The Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler F Drama
Winesburg, Ohio Sherwood Anderson F Drama
The Wings of the Dove Henry James F Drama
Women in Love D.H. Lawrence F Drama
Zuleika Dobson Max Beerbohm F Drama