the booklists

Quite a long time ago, I was reading someone else's blog that talked about what to do when gathering an overwhelmingly long list of books that you want to read.
The solution: edit the list down to the Top 100 books and set a deadline for when you'd like to read them.

Maybe, just maybe, when I get around to accomplishing one of my many goals this year (organizing all of my bookmarks and starred Google Reader feeds), I'll be able to find that blog entry back and direct you to it. But for now, I'm going to take the suggestion and figure out my top 100. I think I'm going to give myself 7 years to get these all ready. That seems like a very long time, but I like to try to set realistic goals, and realistically with everything that's going on in my life, I think 7 years is a good time frame.

So, in no particular order, here are the 100 books I would like to try to read between now and 2017. (Wow, that year looks so ... future-y). Obviously I'll be reading many books between now and then that won't be on this list - new books are written every day folks! Especially in the young adult area, which is really the genre I must read these days. But this will be my core selection that I'll work on. I have no real criteria for these other than they are all books I've heard about and want to read, or they are books that I feel like I must read to be a more well-read person, or they are books that I've started reading and haven't finished.

1. Spoon River Anthology, Edgar Lee Masters
2. White Noise, Don Delillo
3. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
4. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
5. Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Lynne Truss
6. Persuasion, Jane Austen
7. The Heart Is A Lonley Hunter, Carson McCullers
8. The Overcoat, Nikolai Gogol
9. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
10. Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck
11. Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
12. The Hours, Michael Cunningham
13. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
14. Blue Highways: A Journey Into America, William Least Heat Moon
15. Where I'm Calling From, Raymond Carver
16. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
17. The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
18. Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller
19. This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
20. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
21. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
22. Ulysses, James Joyce
23. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
24. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
25. Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin Read April 2010
26. The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
27. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
28. The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
29. The Milagro Beanfield War, John Nichols
30. A Lantern in Her Hand, Bess Streeter Aldrich
31. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
32. The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson
33. Freakanomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
34. The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman
35. The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck
36. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
37. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
38. Middlemarch, George Eliot
39. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
40. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
41. The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey
42. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
43. Death Comes For the Archbishop, Willa Cather
44. The Republic, Plato
45. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
46. The Iliad, Homer
47. The Odyssey, Homer
48. Daddy Long Legs, Jean Webster
49. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
50. Beloved, Toni Morrison
51. Runaway, Alice Munro
52. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
53. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
54. The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
55. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
56. The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, Barry Glassner
57. The Alienist, Caleb Carr
58. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
59. Peter Pan, J.M Barrie
60. The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
61. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
62. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
63. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
64. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
65. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
66. A Child Called "It", Dave Pelzer
67. I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away, Bill Bryson
68. Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
69. Black Boy, Richard Wright
70. What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, Dave Eggers
71. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
72. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
73. Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell
74. My Misspent Youth: Essays, Meghan Daum
75. The Fish Can Sing, Halldor Laxness
76. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope, William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
77. The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future, Robert Darnton
78. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, Ammon Shea
79. Language in Thought and Action, S. I. Hayakawa
80. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson and Reg Keeland
81. The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
82. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
83. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryann Wolf
84. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
85. The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
86. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Barbara Kingsolver
87-96. The Little House series (again), Laura Ingalls Wilder
97. A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn
98. Solomon Gursky Was Here, Mordecai Richler
99. The Rules of Attraction, Bret Easton Ellis
100. Hatchet, Gary Paulsen

So, now that I've got a 100 overall list I felt I also needed to put together a solely YA/children's list. This one I'm going to narrow down to 25 and hope I can get through this list in 2 years. Also listed in no particular order.

1. Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
2. Wintergirls, Laurie Halse Anderson
3. Looking for Alaska, John Green
4. The Pigman, Paul Zindel
5. The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier
6. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
7. A Northern Light, Jennifer Donnelly
8. The Thief Lord, Cornelia Funke
9. Life As We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer
10. Marked, P.C. and Kristin Cast
11. The Mysterious Benedict Society, Trenton Lee Steward
12. The Goose Girl, Shannon Hale
13. Maximum Ride, James Patterson
14. Green Glass Sea, Ellen Klages
15. Bunnicula, Deborah and James Howe Read June 2010
16. Along for the Ride, Sarah Dessen Read June 2010
17. The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan
18. Uglies, Scott Westerfeld
19. Blue Bloods, Melissa De La Cruz
20. Waiting for Normal, Leslie Connor
21. The Luxe, Anna Godbersen
22. Eighth Grade Bites, Heather Brewer
23. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart
24. Suite Scarlett, Maureen Johnson
25. The Giver, Lois Lowry