I’ve recently discovered that there is an entire online community calling themselves litbloggers. And it turns out I’m one of them. Something that these litbloggers apparently love to do is participate in “Reading Challenges.”
OK, so the tone of that last sentence was a little bit judgey. Full disclosure here: a Reading Challenge sounds to me like about the most fun I can have with my clothes on. So let’s just say I’m jumping right in.
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| 100 Novels |
I’m not actually new to this, I just didn’t know I was doing it before. A couple years ago I read Jane Smiley’s book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel in which she reviews 100 novels that she recently read (actually its 101, but 100 sounds neater). I decided that I, too, would read said 100 novels. And I did. In about a year and a half. It was awesome and I’m currently working on a post about the experience. So more on that later. I’ve been taking the last six months or so to just read whatever books come to mind, but I have to admit, I’ve been yearning for another list of books to tackle. So imagine my delight when I found a website devoted to collecting lists of books to read: Reading Challenges!
The challenge I’ve decided to take on is the Pulitzer Project – read all 84 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I had already been thinking that this would probably be my next list, so when I found this challenge it was a match made in heaven. I’ve read 8 of the novels already, so I have 76 to go. Given my previous pace and the fact that I now have Miss Adeline to contend with, my goal is to complete the list in the next two years. But that may be over-ambitious. When I read Smiley’s list I read only those books (well, that and my once a month book club books, but who’s counting). This time, though, I’m going to be a little bit easier on myself and read other books, too, if I get the urge. And I’m hoping to keep up on my nonfiction reading. While reading Smiley’s list I didn’t read any nonfiction and I was really missing it by the end. All that is to say that two years might be too ambitious. But we’ll give it a go. First up is His Family (1918), which I’ve just started. I’ll be posting here as I finish each book, so come join me on this journey!
And for the other list-lovers out there, here are the lists:
Jane Smiley’s list from Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
1 Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
2 Author unknown, The Saga of the People of Laxardal
3 Snorri Sturluson, Egil’s Saga
4 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
5 Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron
6 Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes
7 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, vols. 1 and 2
8 Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves
9 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
10 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
11 Samuel Richardson, Pamela
12 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
13 Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote
14 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
15 Voltaire, Candide
16 Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
17 Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
18 The Marquis de Sade, Justine
19 Sir Walter Scott, The Bride of the Lammermoor
20 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
21 Jane Austen, Persuasion
22 James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
23 Stendhal, The Red and the Black
24 Nicolai Gogol, Taras Bulba
25 Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
26 Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette
27 Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
28 Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
29 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
30 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
31 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or the Whale
32 Nathaniel Hawthorne,The House of the Seven Gables
33 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
34 Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
35 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
36 Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
37 Emile Zola, Therese Raquin
38 Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds
39 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
40 Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
41 George Eliot, Middlemarch
42 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
43 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
44 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
45 Bram Stoker, Dracula
46 Kate Chopin, The Awakening
47 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
48 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
49 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
50 Max Beerbohm, The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson, or an Oxford Love Story
51 Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
52 Sinclair Lewis, Main Street
53 Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter, volume I, The Wreath
54 James Joyce, Ulysses
55 Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience
56 E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
57 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
58 Franz Kafka, The Trial
59 Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers
60 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
61 D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
62 Virginia Woolf, Orlando
63 William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
64 Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, volume 1
65 Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet flows the Don
66 Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
67 Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
68 P.G. Wodehouse, The Return of Jeeves
69 T.H. White, The Once and Future King
70 Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
71 Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters
72 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
73 Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows
74 Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate
75 Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
76 Jetta Carleton, The Moonflower Vine
77 Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
78 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
79 John Gardner, Grendel
80 Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
81 Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish
82 Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
83 David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?
84 Muriel Spark, Loitering With Intent
85 Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
86 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
87 Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
88 J.M. Coetzee, Foe
89 Toni Morrison, Beloved
90 A.S. Byatt, Possession
91 Nicholson Baker, Vox
92 Garrison Keillor, WLT: A Radio Romance
93 Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum
94 Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
95 Francine Prose, Guided Tours of Hell
96 Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life
97 Arnost Lustig, Lovely Green Eyes
98 Zadie Smith, White Teeth
99 John Updike, The Complete Henry Bech
100 Ian McEwan, Atonement
101 Jennifer Egan, Look at Me
The Pulitzers
2011 – A Visit from the Goon Squad (Egan)
2010 – Tinkers (Harding)
2009 – Olive Kitteridge (Strout)
2008 – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Diaz)
2007 – The Road (McCarthy)
2006 – March (Brooks)
2005 – Gilead (Robinson)
2004 – The Known World (Jones)
2003 – Middlesex (Eugenides)
2002 – Empire Falls (Russo)
2001 – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Chabon)
2000 – Interpreter of Maladies (Lahiri)
1999 – The Hours (Cunningham)
1998 – American Pastoral (Roth)
1997 – Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (Millhauser)
1996 – Independence Day (Ford)
1995 – The Stone Diaries (Shields)
1994 – The Shipping News (Proulx)
1993 – A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Butler)
1992 – A Thousand Acres (Smiley)
1991 – Rabbit at Rest (Updike)
1990 – The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (Hijuelos)
1989 – Breathing Lessons (Tyler)
1988 – Beloved (Morrison)
1987 – A Summons to Memphis (Taylor)
1986 – Lonesome Dove (McMurtry)
1985 – Foreign Affairs (Lurie)
1984 – Ironweed (Kennedy)
1983 – The Color Purple (Walker)
1982 – Rabbit is Rich (Updike)
1981 – A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole)
1980 – The Executioner’s Song (Mailer)
1979 – The Stories of John Cheever (Cheever)
1978 – Elbow Room (McPherson)
1977 – None given
1976 – Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow)
1975 – The Killer Angels (Shaara)
1974 – None given
1973 – The Optimist’s Daughter (Welty)
1972 – Angle of Repose (Stegner)
1971 – None given
1970 – Collected Stories by Jean Stafford (Stafford)
1969 – House Made of Dawn (Momaday)
1968 – The Confessions of Nat Turner (Styron)
1967 – The Fixer (Malamud)
1966 – Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter (Porter)
1965 – The Keepers Of the House (Grau)
1964 – None given
1963 – The Reivers (Faulkner)
1962 – The Edge of Sadness (Edwin O’Connor)
1961 – To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
1960 – Advise and Consent (Drury)
1959 – The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Taylor)
1958 – A Death in the Family (Agee)
1957 – None
1956 – Andersonville (Kantor)
1955 – A Fable (Faulkner)
1954 – None
1953 – The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
1952 – The Caine Mutiny (Wouk)
1951 – The Town (Richter)
1950 – The Way West (Guthrie)
1949 – Guard of Honor (Cozzens)
1948 – Tales of the South Pacific (Michener)
1947 – All the King’s Men (Warren)
1946 – None
1945 – Bell for Adano (Hersey)
1944 – Journey in the Dark (Flavin)
1943 – Dragon’s Teeth I (Sinclair)
1942 – In This Our Life (Glasgow)
1941 – None
1940 – The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck)
1939 – The Yearling (Rawlings)
1938 – The Late George Apley (Marquand)
1937 – Gone with the Wind (Mitchell)
1936 – Honey in the Horn (Davis)
1935 – Now in November (Johnson)
1934 – Lamb in His Bosom (Miller)
1933 – The Store (Stribling)
1932 – The Good Earth (Buck)
1931 – Years of Grace (Barnes)
1930 – Laughing Boy (Lafarge)
1929 – Scarlet Sister Mary (Peterkin)
1928 – The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Wilder)
1927 – Early Autumn (Bromfield)
1926 – Arrowsmith (Lewis)
1925 – So Big (Ferber)
1924 – The Able McLauglins (Wilson)
1923 – One of Ours (Cather)
1922 – Alice Adams (Tarkington)
1921 – The Age of Innocence (Wharton)
1920 – None
1919 – The Magnificent Ambersons (Tarkington)
1918 – His Family (Poole)
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