I'm Scared: Project Fill-in-the-Gaps

At the behest of MoonRat, over at Editorial Ass, I'm taking on a terrifying challenge. I scared of it, really and truly. You have no idea. It's called Project Fill-in-the-Gaps, and there's a whole blogging collective site for posting about this. I haven't gotten permission to post to it yet, but I have asked and will throw my list up there when permission is granted.

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!

1. Watership Down, Richard Adams
2. The Man with the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
4. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
5. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
6. (R) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
7. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
8. Continental Drift, Russell Banks
9. Peter Pan, J M Barrie
10. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
11. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
12. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
13. (R) Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
14. The Good Earth, Pearl S Buck
15. Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
16. Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs
17. Possession, A S Byatt
18. The Plague, Albert Camus
19. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
20. My Antonia, Willa Cather
21. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
22. Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, Agatha Christie
23. The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
24. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K Dick
25. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
26. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
27. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. The Barrytown Trilogy, Roddy Doyle
29. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
30. The House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III
31. Middlemarch, George Eliot
32. Spartacus, Howard Fast
33. Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
34. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
35. This Side of Paradise, F Scott Fitzgerald
36. A Room with a View, E M Forster
37. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
38. Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
39. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
40. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
41. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
42. (R) The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
43. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
44. (R) Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
45. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
46. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
47. The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
48. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
49. Daisy Miller, Henry James
50. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
51. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
52. The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
53. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
54. The Road to Lichfield, Penelope Lively
55. At the Mountains of Madness, H P Lovecraft
56. Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
57. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
58. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
59. The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers
60. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
61. Promethea, Alan Moore
62. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami
63. Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov
64. Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O'Connor
65. Animal Farm, George Orwell
66. (R) Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
67. Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
68. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
69. Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello
70. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
71. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
72. The Wanderers, Richard Price
73. The Shipping News, E Annie Proulx
74. (R) The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
75. The Human Stain, Philip Roth
76. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
77. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
78. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
79. Fair and Tender Ladies, Lee Smith
80. Maus, Art Spiegelman
81. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
82. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
83. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
84. Short Stories of Mark Twain, Mark Twain
85. The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
86. Burr, Gore Vidal
87. Myra Breckenridge/Myron, Gore Vidal
88. Candide, Voltaire
89. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
90. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
91. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
92. (R) A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
93. (R) A Curtain of Green, Eudora Welty
94. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
95. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
96. Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
97. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
98. Orlando, Virginia Woolf
99. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
100. The Book Thief, Mark Zusak