National Day of Encouragement Reading List

Today, a dollar store calendar my grandmother gave me tells me, is National Day of Encouragement, which is totally a real thing. So here is a National Day of Encouragement Reading List, which is also totally a real thing. Much encouragement to you, citizens!

1. King Lear, William Shakespeare
2. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
3. “Before the Law,” Franz Kafka
4. Candide, Voltaire
5. First Love and Other Sorrows, Harold Brodkey
6. “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
7. Camp Concentration, Thomas Disch
8. “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson
9. “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe
10. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
11. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
12. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
13. Correction, Thomas Bernhard
14. Butterfly Stories, William Vollmann
15. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor
16. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
17. 2666, Roberto Bolaño
18. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe
19. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
20. From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
21. The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus
22. The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski
23. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
24. “The Wasteland,” T.S. Eliot
25. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
26. The Pearl, John Steinbeck
27. Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño
28. Notes from Underground,  Fyodor Dostoyevsky
29. The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
30. The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell
31. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” Flannery O’Connor
32. Gargoyles, Thomas Bernhard
33. The Plague, Albert Camus
34. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman
35. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
36. Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
37. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
38. “Good Old Neon,” David Foster Wallace
39. 1984, George Orwell
40. Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre