A Question and a Challenge

Back home again, after a trip down to the Eastern Shore of Virginia, which included a stop at Sysko's Cash and Carry (why do people go there?), lunch at Sonic, and a nice long visit at Thomas's Gardens to buy herbs and a hanging basket to transplant into a big pot. What started out as rather gray and cool turned into a beautiful sunny day . It was lovely, and now we're at home and just a little dopey from hot dogs and cherry limeade chillers.
I've been thinking about reading. I've probably read more this semester than any other during which I was teaching. I managed to keep one or two books on my bedside table and actually read them and then replace them with a couple more.
I realized, though, that if I have a bucket list at all, it's mostly made up of books I'd like to read. I've done pretty well. In high school, in order to get an A in English, we had to read two books every six-week term, and I did that--twelve novels a year, forty-eight in all, and they were mostly really good books. We had to choose them from lists the English teachers provided. I read Henry James and Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. In senior year, the books were in pairs, and we had to read the pair and then write a comparative essay. I remember two of the pairs: Pride and Prejudice was paired with Cry, the Beloved Country, and My Antonia was paired with The Good Earth. I actually loved them all; I didn't relish the writing, but that was probably at least in part because we didn't get a lot of instruction--at least not that I remember.
I don't think I did much pleasure reading while I was in college, but I did read in the summers and continued summer reading after I graduated and started teaching high school. I would go to the library and walk the stacks, looking for something to catch my eye. Once it did, I checked it out and read it, and, if I liked it, I went back and sometimes read everything else by the same author. Sometimes I went in for genres--there was the summer of Jewish writers, starting with My Name is Asher Lev and then going backward and forward through all the other Jewish writers I could identify, including Ira Levin and Philip Roth. Another was the summer of political thrillers--Robert Ludlam and Ken Follett and even Robert Shaw (the actor, who wrote The Man in the Glass Booth, a wonderful novel about a Nazi war crime trial).
After Michael and I were married, we sometimes picked up the Sunday New York Times (now we subscribe) and I would go through the book review section and if there was a review of a new book that looked really good, I'd call the library and put it on reserve, often before they even had their copy. Probably the last book I read that way was Shoeless Joe, which became the movie Field of Dreams, one of a handful of really great baseball movies. Other novels I read because I saw the movie first, like Now Voyager and The Natural.
Over the years I've read many of the classics--most of Faulkner and Steinbeck, much of Hemingway, a little Scott Fitzgerald. I've read Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin. I've also read many of the popular trade paperbacks that have come out in the last twenty years: Eat, Pray, Love, The Bridges of Madison County, Message in a Bottle, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Ishmael, The Life of Pi,and on and on. Ive read Stephen King's entire output except for the Dark Tower series, which I own, but have never opened.
Some books I read out of necessity. I taught two sections of American Women Writers of Color one semester, the fall that Toni Morrison came to campus to speak, so we read Beloved as our first novel, and then I moved on to others less weighty. I lead book talks for Delmarva Discussions, so I've read a variety of books for that, from Gone With the Wind to This Boy's Life. You get the picture: I have read.some books.

So here's where my question and my challenge come in: what should I read before I die? That is the question. The challenge is to come up with a book that fits that description but also is one I haven't read. Suggest a book, and I'll let you know where it lands in the basket of books I hope to collect. I could probably get by on just the books I already own that I have not yet read, but that's not nearly as much fun. .