The challenge is this: to pick 100 books that you want to read, but somehow never get around to (because they're kinda hard and you're tired and there are other fun and easy things to read). Commit to reading at least 75% of them in the next five years. That's more than one great but tough book per month. I'm not sure I can do it, even with my voracious reading habits. But I do think it's a great idea because, honestly, without something like this, when will I ever be motivated to read these books?
It was actually hard for me to come up with 100 that I felt were worthy of a project called Fill-in-the-Gaps - at least, to come up with 100 that I was interested in reading and that I hadn't already read. As it is, eight of the books on my list are things I've read before, but I read them so long ago and I only read them once; I keep meaning to re-read them but meet the same problems as with the rest of the list that I've never read. I marked the ones I've read before with a little "(R)" in front of the titles.
So here's my list. They're in alpha order by author, but I probably won't read them in that order. I may post about my progress from time to time, but I'll give the nitty-gritty details on the Fill in the Gaps blog. If you're interested, join the fun!
- Watership Down, Richard Adams
- The Man with the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
- The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
- Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
- (R) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
- Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
- Continental Drift, Russell Banks
- Peter Pan, J M Barrie
- The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
- The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
- (R) Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
- The Good Earth, Pearl S Buck
- Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
- Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs
- Possession, A S Byatt
- The Plague, Albert Camus
- In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
- My Antonia, Willa Cather
- The Awakening, Kate Chopin
- Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, Agatha Christie
- The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
- The Man in the High Castle, Philip K Dick
- David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
- Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
- Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Barrytown Trilogy, Roddy Doyle
- Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
- The House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III
- Middlemarch, George Eliot
- Spartacus, Howard Fast
- Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
- As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
- This Side of Paradise, F Scott Fitzgerald
- A Room with a View, E M Forster
- Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
- Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
- Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
- The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
- A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
- (R) The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
- Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
- (R) Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
- A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
- The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
- Daisy Miller, Henry James
- One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
- The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
- The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
- Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
- The Road to Lichfield, Penelope Lively
- At the Mountains of Madness, H P Lovecraft
- Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
- Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
- The Road, Cormac McCarthy
- The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers
- Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
- Promethea, Alan Moore
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami
- Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov
- Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O'Connor
- Animal Farm, George Orwell
- (R) Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
- Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
- The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
- Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
- The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
- The Wanderers, Richard Price
- The Shipping News, E Annie Proulx
- (R) The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
- The Human Stain, Philip Roth
- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
- Fair and Tender Ladies, Lee Smith
- Maus, Art Spiegelman
- Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
- The Secret History, Donna Tartt
- Short Stories of Mark Twain, Mark Twain
- The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
- Burr, Gore Vidal
- Myra Breckenridge/Myron, Gore Vidal
- Candide, Voltaire
- Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
- Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
- All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
- (R) A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
- (R) A Curtain of Green, Eudora Welty
- The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
- Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
- The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
- Orlando, Virginia Woolf
- Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
- The Book Thief, Mark Zusak
woohoo!! awesome list. we have a bunch in common :)
ReplyDeletei'm SO EXCITED about the joint blog. woot.
Good list!Maybe instead of re-reading "Pride and Prej," you can read "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" since it is supposed to have kept much of the original text!
ReplyDeleteI've noticed that a lot of people on the joint blog have a lot of books in common...which I guess isn't so surprising. There are a lot of classics, and who has time to read them all?
ReplyDeleteOMG, I didn't read the little intro first and saw the (R) in front of titles and was going to be immediately shocked and dismayed (read: jealous) you'd gotten those done already!
ReplyDeleteSo, I feel a little better. :)