I've begun using Goodreads to keep track of my reading list and the books I own, pending an attempt to write some custom PHP to do the same. View my reading list at http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/110741, including an up-to-date record of what I'm currently reading.

Penguin Classics

Sometime in 2005 I decided I'd been too confined in my reading—I was reading primarily science fiction and fantasy—and resolved to try more varied material. Rather than waste time reading reviews of new books, I thought I'd rely on the test of time and be open to reading anything considered a classic.

"Classic" turned out to be a unhelpfully vague term, so I further 'narrowed' my selection to the paperback Penguin Classics editions. I quote narrow because the entire collection comprises 1082 books that would take almost 21 years to read at one per week. Given the length of some that I already own, even that is unreasonable.

Anyways, the books are widely available, affordable, well-edited (and translated), and I haven't yet picked up one I didn't like. These are the books I've so far collected (unread books in italics).

• The Aeneid — Virgil
• The Bhagavad Gita
• The Bible (King James Version)
• The Call of Cthulhu and Other Wierd Stores — H.P. Lovecraft
• Don Quixote — Cervantes
• Gargantua and Pantagruel — Rabelais
• The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
• The Koran
• Metamorphoses — Ovid
• The Pilgrim's Progress — John Bunyan
• The Return of the Native — Thomas Hardy
• The Social Contract — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• The Tale of Genji — Murasaki Shikibu
• A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens
• Wuthering Heights — Emily Bronte
• War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy

Modern Classics:

• The Middle Parts of Fortune — Frederic Manning
• Obasan — Joy Kogawa
• Ulysses — James Joyce