101 Books in 1001 Days

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We all like a good book challenge. These very challenging looking books came up when I searched for an image, they are made of sheet lead and thorn bushes. I like it. I was reading the other day about one of those 101 things to do list challenges and decided that rather than jet-skiing across the pacific I would stay home and read a few of those books ... you know, the ones that you read a review of ages ago, or spotted on a list of 'must reads' or read the obituary of the author, and thought 'I have always wanted to read that some day'.

So my plan is to make such a list. Bear with me, as it may take some time to put together. There will be some classics, there will be some new ones, there will be some non-fiction, there will probably be some poetry too. I might include a few re-reads, something I don't do often, but occasionally I am aware of having read something, but now so long ago that the merest trace of an inkling of the content is all that remains. Some are from my shelves, some from my library wishlist and some from the one on Amazon (I have resolved to stop buying there... but it's still a very useful catalogue). I liked the idea of 1001 days as this means that it doesn't totally dominate what I might choose to read, allowing me new finds as well. I guess I might cheat and add new interesting books to the list but that's ok as I can make my own rules. The list is in a random order, no hierarchy of interest or importance is implied.

1. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
2. Middlemarch by George Eliot
3. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
4. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
5. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
6. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
7. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
8. Girl is a half-formed thing by Eimear McBride
9. Red Doc by Anne Carson
10. Stags Leap by Sharon Olds
11. Hunger by Knut Hamsun
12. The Sound and the Fury by Willian Faulkner
13. Winter Vault by Anne Michaels
14. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
15. When I was a child I read books by Marilynne Robinson
16. Portable Atheist by Christopher Hitchens
17. A visit from the goon squad by Jennifer Egan
18. Can't and Won't by Lydia Davis
19. Who will run the frog hospital by Lorrie Moore
20. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
21. Little Women by Louisa M Alcott
22. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
23. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
24. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
25. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
26. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
27. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin
28. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
29. Inferno by Eileen Myles
30. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevski
31. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
32. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
33. Nine Stories by JD Salinger
34. Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
35. Bento's Sketchbook by John Berger
36. Thirteen Moons by Charles Frasier
37. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
38. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
39. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
40. Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
41. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
42. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
43. Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
44. How to be Alone by Sara Maitland
45. Bad Dirt by Annie Proulx
46. Midnight all day by Hanif Kureshi
47. Without a Map by Meredith Hall
48. I, Etcetera by Susan Sontag
49. Something to Declare by Julian Barnes
50. Faithless by Joyce Carol Oates
51. The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier
52. Misreadings  by Umberto Eco
53. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
54. A Life Worth Living by John Holt
55. Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
56. Sad Robot Stories by Mason Johnson
57. And Yet They Were Happy by Helen Phillips
58. Who was changed and who was dead by Barbara Comyns
59. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Simon Armitage
60. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
61. 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman
62. Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf
63. The Hole by Oyvind Torseter
64. How Proust can change your life by Alain de Botton
65. The Butterfly Tattoo by Philip Pullman
66. Beautiful Words by Nik Perring
67. In the Kettle, the Shriek by Hannah Stephenson
68. You learn by Living by Eleanor Roosevelt
69. On Lies, Secrets and Silence by Adrienne Rich
70. Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
71. The latke who couldn't stop screaming by Lemony Snickett
72. The year of the hare by Arto Paasilinna
73. A Clockwork Orange by Antony Burgess
74. The uncollected Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
75. People First Economics by David Ransom
76. The Fault in our Stars by John Green
77. The Fire Eaters by David Almond
78. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
79. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
80. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
81. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
82. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
83. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by mark Twain
84. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
85. Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
86. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
87. Lost Cat by Caroline Paul
88. Building a Bridge to the 18th Century by Neil Postman
89. How to talk about books you haven't read by Pierre Bayard
90. On Grief and Reason: Essays by Joseph Brodsky
91. Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon
92. The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
93. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 
94. To Have and To Be by Erich Fromm
95. Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher 
96. The Well of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall
97. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
98. 
    





If anyone would like to join in, feel free,
a bit of mutual encouragement is always welcome.
Comment at the bottom so people can visit
and check out your list for interesting suggestions.
The list above will contain links to reviews as and when they are read. My finish date for the challenge (by my torturous calculation) will be 28th September 2017.

List is now moved to the 101 Books page linked on the header.