The Jess Mariano Reading List

I've wondered for a while what my first post should be. 
After looking at countless '50 Blog Post Ideas YOU should try' and '30-day Blog Challenge' lists on Pinterest (and realising not one idea sounds fun) I finally decided I should ditch the pressure of the perfect 'first post' and just roll with it. 

That's how I ended up with this idea- Jess Mariano (😉) Reading List. 

My plan is simple:
Read all the books from the list and after I finish each one I'll write what I think of it and cross it out. 
This way I'm killing two birds with one stone (hopefully); I have a motivation to read AND to write here. 

The thing about my reading is that I love to do it, but I have a tendency to read in 'phases'. 

What I mean by that is that I find a bunch of books I want to read, read them all really quickly and then I fall into a slump and don't read anything at all for a few months. And by 'anything at all' I mean I don't finish any book, because I start 5 new ones. But then I finally find one that I get hooked on and the whole process repeats itself. 

Okay, let's get down to business. 

Here's the list:

• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
• Othello by William Shakespeare
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
• Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
• Emma by Jane Austen
• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
• Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
• Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
• Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski
• The Last Night of the Earth Poems by Charles Bukowski
• Factotum by Charles Bukowski
• Scattered Poems by Jack Kerouac
• Poems All Sizes by Jack Kerouac
• James Joyce's Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert
• Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil
• We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews by Daniel Sinker
• Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac
• The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton
• Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken

Now, why did I choose Jess's reading list and not Rory's?

A few reasons. 
For one, Rory's list was too long. Also Jess's 'choices' are more my cup of tea. I read a lot of Hemingway, though mostly his short stories. And a lot of those books have been on my tbr for quite a while. 
Also, some of those books, like for example Pride and Prejudice, I read a bit of in the past, but never finished. (I found Pride and Prejudice really boring then so we'll see how it goes this time)
One more thing- I don't know if I'll read them in order. Time will tell.