40 Before 40: My Fiction Bucket List

I turned 30 last week. It was a wonderful week full of family and friends and crawfish boils and delicious desserts, and… I have to say, 30 ain’t bad. So often, I’m tempted to reminisce and think about how far I’ve come in the last 10 years (which is pretty damn far, I must say). Last year, I wrote a blog post of 30 books I wanted to read before I turned 30, and I am quite impressed with my success on that front. I read 18 out of the 30, including all of the ones on my long TBR and none of the ones on the classics list (which is just… who I am as a person).

But last week wasn’t spent reminiscing. For some reason, turning 30 felt more like a big New Years Day, where I wanted to look ahead and make plans for the decade coming up. Last year, I made a 40 Before 40 list on Goodreads, and…. well, I didn’t give myself the option of reading any new and shiny contemporary books. I chose five books from eight different decades, beginning in 1920 and going through the 1990s, and I’m determined to read all of them before I turn 40. That means 4 books a year, which is easy, right?

Not as easy as you would think. You see, publishers still feel the need to publish really good books. And I still feel the need to pick up the new books with the pretty covers over the dusty tried-and-true ones. So squeezing four classics into my year of reading is really easier said than done.

Logically, I know good books existed before I was born, and I know that I will probably find hope and excitement and connection in the older books just like I do in my newer reads. It’s just so hard to pick them up.

So I’m sharing this list with you all, in the hopes that this will act as an accountability partner to keep me honest and reading. I’ve also added a page at the top of my blog to reference and track my reading.

(I enjoyed the process so much that I also made this list with nonfiction, which isn’t sorted by decades but by subject matter. I’ll post that one later.)

(Also, this post contains some affiliate links, which means that if you purchase one of the books linked through here, I get a small, small portion of the sale.)

1920s

1. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
2. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)
3. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1923)
4. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (1927)
5. Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1928)
   alt. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
   

1930s

1. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1931)
2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
3. I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)
4. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
5. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)
   alt. The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White (1938)

1940s

1. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)
2. The Women on the Porch by Caroline Gordon (1943)
3. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)
4. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
5. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
   alt. Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. (1948)

1950s

1. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier (1951)
2. East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952)
3. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
4. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
5. A Separate Peace by John Knowles (1959)
   alt. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
   

1960s

1. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)
3. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968)
5. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)
   alt. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969)

1970s

1. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)
2. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1972)
3. The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (1978)
4. The World According to Garp by John Irving (1978)
5. Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews (1979)
   alt. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

1980s

1. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
2. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)
3. Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin (1983)
4. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1985)
5. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
   alt. Matilda by Roald Dahl (1988)

1990s

1. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)
2. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1994)
3. The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr (1995)
4. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (1997)
5. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
   

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What do you think? Any of your favorites that I missed? Where should I even begin?! Leave a comment below and let me know!