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Reading Themes

Below are several reading themes with example books.

Prize books
Prize-winning books are a good place to start.

• Pulitzer
• Orange
• Booker

7 books in 7 days
This one's simple; read a book a day, or, read a little of each every day, and finish them all on the seventh day. The wise reader chooses slim books for this one.

• Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
• Clyde Edgerton, Redeye : A Western
• Jim Crace, Being Dead
• Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin
• Fred Chappell, I Am One of You Forever
• Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
• Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

Authors A-Z
Read one book per week by authors whose last names begin with the letters A-Z, going through the alphabet twice (52 books in 52 weeks, get it?).

• A-Z in 2005

100 years / 100 books
Read a book published in each year of the 20th century. Try not to duplicate authors.

• 100 x 100

Gardens
Read books with gardens as themes or in titles.

• In the Garden in 2006
• Burnett, Frances Hodgson, The Secret Garden
• Bassani, Giorgio, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
• Rick Moody, Garden State: A Novel
• Slung, Michelle (ed.), The Garden Of Reading [story anthology]

Colors

• Don Delillo, White Noise
• Ian McEwan, Black Dogs
• Nathaniel Hawthorn, The Scarlet Letter
• Lawrence Naumoff, A Southern Tragedy in Crimson and Yellow
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth
• Orpham Pamuk, My Name is Red
• Rick Moody, Purple America
• Xueqin Cao, Dream of the Red Chamber

Directions

• John Steinbeck, East of Eden
• Doris Betts, Heading West
• Frederick Busch, North
• Robert Louis Stevenson, South Sea Tales
• Shannon Ravenel, New Stories from the South

Numbers

• George Orwell, 1984
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
• David Mitchell, Number9Dream
• Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three
• Nathaniel Hawthorn, The House of the Seven Gables
• Katherine Neville, The Eight

Shapes

• Katherine Neville, The Magic Circle
• Henry James, Washington Square
• Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

Months

• Geraldine Brooks, March
• Julia Glass, Three Junes
• Tim O'Brien, July, July
• Nadine Gordimer, July's People
• William Faulkner, Light in August
• Ray Bradbury, The October Country

Seasons

• Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
• Edith Wharton, Summer
• Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Night and Day

• Lawrence Naumoff, The Night of the Weeping Women
• Ira Levin, This Perfect Day
• Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days
• Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day

Cities and Towns

• Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
• Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
• Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt, Maine
• Andy Duncan, Beluthahatchie

Places

• John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire
• Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

Countries

• Clyde Edgerton, Walking Across Egypt

People and the things they carried

• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
• Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
• Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Umberto Eco, Baudolino, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
• Phillip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
• E.M. Forster, Howard's End
• Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost
• Michael Palin, Hemingway's Chair
• William Styron, Sophie's Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner
• Italo Svevo, The Confessions of Zeno
• Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest
• John Irving, The World According to Garp
• Brady Udall, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

Animals

• Giuseppe Lampedusa, The Leopard
• William Golding, The Lord of the Flies
• Lorrie Moore, Birds of America
• Stephen King, Cycle of the Werewolf
• John Crowley, Beasts
• Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
• Wendy Brenner, Large Animals in Everyday Life: Stories

Food

• ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Fruit

• John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
• Bailey White, Quite a Year for Plums

Water

• Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

Careers in Literature

• John Crowley, The Translator
• Martha Cooley, The Archivist

Friends

• Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth
• Mary O'Hara, My Friend Flicka

Music

• Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons
• Paul Auster, The Music of Chance
• Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music