While I don't read as much as I would like to, I try to do so whenever time permits. Here is a list of recent reads (as best as I can recall) from the past few years. Most of them were of my own choosing, though there are a few I was required to read for classes, and would not recommend. I don't pretend anyone really cares what I have read--instead I just maintain it here for my own benefit, so I can access it from wherever I happen to be.
Special Symbols:
* An unfinished book or one still in progress.
+ A book that was completed after a hiatus.
# A book that was abandoned.
& Completed only under duress, usually for a class
^ Skimmed to some degree
@ Abridged version
~ An ongoing serial
Books Completed 2004 The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells Civil Rites - Terry Pratchett The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown The Five People You Meet in Heaven - by Mitch Albom The Hammer of God - Arthur C. Clarke Kierkegaard in 90 Minutes - Paul Strathern Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Card Prey - Michael Crichton Crimson Joy - Robert B. Parker Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman, et al. Mort - Terry Pratchett Physics - Johnnie T. Dennis American Gods - Neil Gaimon Anthem - Ayn Rand Prelude to Foundation - Isaac Asimov Forward the Foundation - Isaac Asimov Foundation - Isaac Asimov On a Pale Horse - Piers Anthony Bearing an Hourglass - Piers Anthony 2003 Entries - Wendell Berry The History of English Literature - Perry Keenlyside The Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkien Confessions - Kurt Busiek On Writing - Stephen King George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets - Mario A. Di Cesare ed. Astro City ~ - Kurt Busiek The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde Animal Farm - George Orwell The Lord of the Flies - William Golding Little Man - John Galsworthy Tarnished Angel - Kurt Busiek The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde Everything that Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Conner The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien The Violent Shall Bear it Away - Flannery O'Conner The Forged Coupon - Leo Tolstoy The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein Desperation - Stephen King The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Eric S. Raymond Oh, What a Paradise it Seems - John Cheever The Castle - Franz Kafka The Moviegoer - Walker Percy 2002 The Watchmen - Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons Midnight Nation ~ - J. Michael Straczynski Rising Stars ~ - J. Michael Straczynski Spiderman ~ - J. Michael Straczynski Life in the Big City - Kurt Busiek Dubliners - James Joyce The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain A Walk to Remember - Nicholas Sparks To Your Scattered Bodies Go # - Philip José Farmer Eaters of the Dead - Michael Crichton The Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkien Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe Worlds of Wonder - David Gerrold Einstein's Dreams - Alan Lightman Welcome to the Middle - Steven Baliko The Two Towers - J.R.R. Tolkien 2001 Kingdom Come - Mark Waid, Alex Ross The Great Evangelical Disaster - Francis Schaeffer Here on Gilligan's Isle - Russell Johnson Literary Theory (A very Short Introduction) - Jonathan Culler Midnight Nation ~ - J. Michael Straczynski Rising Stars ~ - J. Michael Straczynski Northanger Abbey + - Jane Austen Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock Ringworld - Larry Niven Swann's Way @ - Marcel Proust Don Quixote @ - Cervantes The Best American Short Stories of the Century - John Updike (Editor) The Screwtape Letters - C. S. Lewis Double Star - Robert Heinlein The Diary of Samuel Pepys - Samuel Pepys The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky - Vaslav Nijinsky The Conservative Mind - Russell Kirk Iceberg - Clive Cussler Too Many Women - Rex Stout Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson Murder by the Book - Rex Stout The Girl on the Boat - P. G. Wodehouse The Epic of Gilgamesh The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury Our Game - John Le Carré Saddam's Bombmaker - Khidhir Hamza 2000 The Dialogic Imagination - M.M. Bakhtin Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens The Old Curiosity Shop - Charles Dickens Demon Past - David Wright Rising Stars ~ - J. Michael Straczynski Martin Chuzzlewit ^ - Charles Dickens All the King's Men (play) - Robert Penn Warren Small Craft Warnings - Tennessee Williams Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens Great Expectations - Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend ^ - Charles Dickens Fifty Years of Isaac Asimov - Volume 1 Pebble in the Sky - Isaac Asimov Taliesin * - Steven Lawhead Into You - Lynda Braun Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt The History of Rasselas - Samuel Johnson The Castle of Otronto - Horace Walpole The Green Arrow - Mike Grell, et al. Caleb Williams - William Godwin Midnight Nation ~ - J. Michael Straczynski The X-Men (Early Script) Lyrical Ballads - William Wordsworth & Samuel Coleridge Taylor Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen 1999 The Complete Book of Scriptwriting - J. Michael Straczynski How to Write a Damn Good Novel - James N. Frey Bird by Bird : Some Instructions on Writing and Life - Anne Lamott Out of the Silent Planet - C. S. Lewis The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy A Day in the Life of Ivan Dinisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Great Divorce* - C. S. Lewis Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein Martian Time-slip - Philip K. Dick One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey Silas Marner + - George Eliot Provinces - Czeslaw Milosz A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Conner Perelandra - C. S. Lewis Nostromo - Joseph Conrad The Magician's Nephew - C. S. Lewis How to Be a Fake Kreskin - David Kreskin Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams San Mateo, RVA Is Literary History Possible? - David Perkins Paradise Lost - John Milton NT Server 4 - Davis & Lewis Murder on the Aisle (short stories) - Mary Higgins Clark ed. A Case of Conscience - James Blish Blake's Poetry and Designs - Norton Critical Edition William Wordsworth, Selected Poetry - Penguin Poetry Library Various poetry of Pope and Dryden The Secret Sharer - Joseph Conrad The Stars my Destination - Alfred Bester A Canticle for Liebowitz - Walter M. Miller, Jr. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemmingway Slaughterhouse Five # - Kurt Vonnegut Galactic Pot-Healer - Philip K. Dick The Rape of the Lock - Alexander Pope A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. Le Guinn Writing Down the Bones - Natalie Goldberg The Light Princess - George MacDonald 1998 Les Miserables * - Victor Hugo Journal of the Plague Year - Daniel Defoe Waverly - Sir Walter Scott Anagrams - Lorrie Moore Maus I (My Father Bleeds History) - Art Spiegelman Maus II (And Here My Troubles Began) - Art Spiegelman Woe is I - Patricia T. O'Conner Hamlet - Shakespeare Brave New World - Aldous Huxley If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino 1984 - George Orwell Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury Spanish Reader - No Compromise (The Life Story of Keith Green) - Melody Green Graded Spanish Reader * - Macbeth - Shakespeare How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy - Orson Scott Card Conflict, Action and Suspense - William Noble The Witness of Poetry - Czeslaw Milosz The Hungering Dark - Frederick Buechner Quantum Leap Thinking - James Mapes The Alphabet of Grace - Frederick Buechner The Unattainable Earth - Czeslaw Milosz A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Annie Dillard Fifty Years of Isaac Asimov - Volume 3 Fifty Years of Isaac Asimov - Volume 4 Silas Marner * - George Eliot Holy the Firm - Annie Dillard Now and Then - Frederick Buechner Frankenstein - Mary Shelly Poetics - Aristotle The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald 1997 Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury Psmith in the City - P. G. Wodehouse Garden of Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card Lion Country - Frederick Buechner The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - John Le Carré Creative Writing - Burnt Water * - Carlos Fuentes Double Helix * - Sigmund Brower Shadows of the Empire * - Steve Perry Ulysses * - James Joyce Quarks, Chaos, & Christianity - Polkinghouse Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury A Murder of Quality - John Le Carré This Present Darkness - Frank Peretti Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson How Much for Just the Planet? (ST) - John M. Ford The Man Who was Thursday - G. K. Chesterton Point of View - Orson Scott Card Dialogue - Lewis Turco Valkyries - Jeri Massi Songs of Innocence - William Blake Songs of Experience - William Blake The Marriage of Heaven & Hell - William Blake Wall Street Money Machine - Wade Cook Market Miracles - Wade Cook Space Travel - Ben Bova How Do You Go to the Bathroom in Space? - William R. Pogue 1996 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad Howards End - E. M. Forster Dubliners - James Joyce Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolfe Envy - Anton Chekov Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison Native Son & - Richard Wright Go Down Moses - William Faulkner Jean Santeuil - Marcel Proust Songs of Innocence - William Blake The Client # - John Grisham Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams Long Dark Teatime of the Soul - Douglas Adams Realm of Numbers - Isaac Asimov Five Father Brown Mysteries - G. K. Chesterton Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane 1995 Star Trek Memories - William Shatner Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald Great Expectations @ - Charles Dickens Rising Sun # - Michael Crichton The Honorable Imposter - Gilbert Morris Goals - Zig Ziglar Swann's Way - Marcel Proust Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust The Captive and The Fugitive - Marcel Proust Time Regained - Marcel Proust 1994 Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis Tower of Secrets - Victor Sheymov The Richest Man in Babylon - George Clason One Up on Wall Street - Peter Lynch Beating the Street - Peter Lynch In His image : The Cloning of a Man - David M. Rorvik 1992 Loving God - Charles Colson Kingdoms in Conflict * - Charles Colson 1991 A Flag Full of Stars - Brad Fergusen Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton 1990 The Lost Years - J. M. Dillard Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams So Long and Thanks for all the Fish - Douglas Adams 1989 Sphere - Michael Crichton Hitchiker's Guide - Douglas Adams (Earlier than this, I just don't recall)