Books I want to read

I have a pretty long list of books I want to read someday.  I've read most of Dickens, but there's still Dombey and Son.  I also want to read George Eliot's Middlemarch someday, like a lot of people.  And Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth.  And John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy.  And just about anything by the Texan writer Larry McMurtry.

Every time I finish a book on my list, I seem to get another to replace it.  Like last year when I read Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' superb The Yearling, and now I want to read her Cross Creek too!

I've developed an ambition to read every book that's been made into a Classics Illustrated comic book.  In recent years I've crossed off James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans and King of the Mountains and Erckmann and Chatrian's Waterloo and Jules Verner's From the Earth to the Moon--except that in the last case, I've only read the first of the two books.  But the next one on my list is Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, and that one scares me! (I should read his The Hunchback of Notre Dame first.) There'll be quite a few by Verner and Cooper and H.G. Wells.

Years ago I read a big part of the first half of Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  I want to read the whole of it someday.  Likewise this long Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin, Dreams of the Red Chamber.