The Better-Late-Than-Never Book Club
Books
Currently listing 74 books
Read So Far
The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
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.
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.
Title ▾ |
Author ▾ |
Type ▾ |
Genre ▾ |
|---|---|---|---|
Currently Reading |
|||
| Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace | F | Drama |
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 |
| The Fountainhead | Ayn Rand | 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 |
| Jude the Obscure | Thomas Hardy | F | Drama |
| The Lamplighter | Anthony O’Neill | F | Mystery |
| Les Misèrables | Victor Hugo | F | Drama |
| Light in August | William Faulkner | F | Drama |
| The Magnificent Ambersons | Booth Tarkington | F | Drama |
| The Magus | John Fowles | F | Drama |
| Main Street | Sinclair Lewis | 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 Mayor of Casterbridge | Thomas Hardy | 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 |
| 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 Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie | F | Drama |
| The Shell Seekers | Rosamund Pilcher | F | Drama |
| The Sheltering Sky | Paul Bowles | F | Drama |
| Sister Carrie | Theodore Dreiser | 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 |
| Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | F | Drama |
| Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry | F | Drama |
| War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy | 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 |
Contact Me
E-mails make me feel all fuzzy inside. Contact me via the handy pop-up mail form, or send mail directly to the first letter of my name at this domain.
Fresh Offerings
- Blog: Bindle Bells, Bindle Bells
- Blog: Kit(ten) Me, Baby, One More Time
- Review: The Deaths of Ian Stone (2007)
- Blog: There’s Fail, and Then There’s Army Fail
- Review: The Strangers (2008)
- Review: Mesmer (1994)
Favorite Links
- Jem of jemjabella.co.uk
- Leslie of mermaidpark.com
- Nat Marie of crestfallen.nu
- Rachel of intensify.org
- Rose of lifeasrose.ca
- Sars of tomatonation.com