For 2008 I read 118 books, so for 2009 I hope to read at least 130. As always I try to check as many titles as I can off of both the Top 100 Modern Library Fiction and the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die lists. The Spring Challenge is helping me knock off some of the books on my home shelves which is just an on-going goal.

I'll post here each month's list at the end of each month.

January:
1. Diary of a Blood Donor, Mati Unt.
2. East Wind West Wind, Pearl S. Buck.
3. The Night of January 16th, Ayn Rand.
4. Wanderlust A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit.
5. On the Road, Jack Kerouac.
6. The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli.
7. Fields of Light A Son Remembers His Heroic Father, Joseph Hurka.
8. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie.
9. Harry, Revised, Mark Sarvas.
10. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe.
11. The Club of Angels, Luis Fernando Verissimo.
12. Holy Silence The Gift Of Quaker Spirituality, J. Brent Bill.
13. Boundaries of Love And Other Stories, Henry H. Roth.
14. The Informer, Liam O'Flaherty.
15. Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe, James J. Sheehan.
16. No Longer at Ease, Chinua Achebe.
17. The Romance of Tristan The Tale of Tristan's Madness, Beroul.
18. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison.
19. The House of Sleep, Jonathan Coe.
20. Buddha's Little Finger, Victor Pelevin.

February:
1. Pinkerton's Secret A Novel, Eric Lerner.
2. The Body of Jonah Boyd, David Leavitt.
3. The Ice Museum In Search of the Lost Land of Thule, Joanna Kavenna.
4. Looking for Mr Goodbar, Judith Rossner.
5. Frida's Bed, Slavenka Drakulic.
6. Emma, Jane Austen.
7. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen.
8. Persuasion, Jane Austen.
9. Watchmen, Alan Moore.
10. The Man Who Was Thursday A Nightmare, G.K. Chesterton.

March:
1. Opposing Shore, Julien Gracq.
2. Mendel's Dwarf, Simon Mawer.
3. The Cubs and Other Stories, Mario Vargas Llosa.
4. The Names of the Dead, Stewart O'Nan.
5. Ungrateful Daughters The Stuart Princesses Who Stole Their Father's Crown, Maureen Waller.
6. The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle.
7. Light in the Forest, Conrad Richter.
8. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde.
9. Coraline, Neil Gaiman.
10. Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin.
11. 84, Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff.
12. Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, Osip Mandelstam.
13. Cancer Ward, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn.
14. The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever.
15. Persian Letters, Montesquieu.

TOTAL BOOKS TO DATE: 45/130.

April:
1. The Museum of Hoaxes, Alex Boese.
2. Three Lives, Louis Auchincloss.
3. The Four Chambered Heart, Anais Nin.
4. Five Dialogues, Plato.
5. In the Beginning Was the Ghetto Notebooks from Lodz, Oskar Rosenfeld.
6. Priestblock 25487 A Memoir of Dachau, Jean Bernard.
7. Child Across the Sky, Jonathan Carroll.
8. Fly Away Peter, David Malouf.
9. Evolution's Captain The Story of the Kidnapping That Led to Charles Darwin's Voyage Aboard the Beagle, Peter Nichols.
10. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
11. The Road, Cormac McCarthy.
12. The Golem, Gustav Meyrink.
13. The Path of Thunder, Peter Abrahams.
14. The Answer / La Respuesta, Including a Selection of Poems, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.
15. A Garden of Earthly Delights, Joyce Carol Oates.

TOTAL BOOKS TO DATE: 60/130.

Great lists! Almost half way there...incredible!! :-)

May:
1. The Barrens, Rosamund Smith (pseudonym of Joyce Carol Oates).
2. Voss, Patrick White.
3. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier.
4. Cash The Autobiography, Johnny Cash.
5. Hypatia of Alexandria, Maria Dzielska.
6. The Moon Is Down, John Steinbeck.
7. Residence on Earth/Residencia en la Tierra, Pablo Neruda.
8. An Account of Corsica, the Journal of a Tour to That Island; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli, James Boswell.
9. Timbuktu A Novel, Paul Auster.
10. Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe.
11. Flannery A Life of Flannery O'Connor, Brad Gooch.

TOTAL BOOKS TO DATE: 71/130.

June:
1. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith.
2. Best Russian Short Stories, ed. Thomas Seltzer.
3. Waitress Was New, Dominique Fabre.
4. The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin.
5. Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler.
6. Otto of the Silver Hand, Howard Pyle.
7. The Spectator Bird, Wallace Stegner.
8. Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O'Nan.
9. Mirage, Bandula Chandraratna.
10. A Conspiracy of Paper, David Liss.
11. The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, Manuel Munoz.
12. Death in Venice and Other Tales, Thomas Mann.

TOTAL BOOKS TO DATE: 83/130.

I was out of town at the end of July and wasn't able to update, so...

July:
1. Jazz, Toni Morrison.
2. Kidnapped Child Abduction in America, Paula S. Fass.
3. Sanin A Novel, Mikhail Artzibashev.
4. The City, Not Long After, Pat Murphy.
5. Life and Times of Michael K, J.M. Coetzee.
6. The River Ki, Sawako Ariyoshi.
7. The House by the Medlar Tree, Giovanni Verga.
8. Medea and Other Plays, Euripides.
9. A Life The Humble Truth, Guy de Maupassant.
10. The Story of Lucy Gault, William Trevor.
11. Jason & Medeia, John Gardner.
12. Uncle Silas, J.S. LeFanu.
13. The Commitments, Roddy Doyle.
14. The Good Wife A Novel, Stewart O'Nan.
15. Strand of a Thousand Pearls A Novel, Dorit Rabinyan.

TOTAL BOOKS TO DATE: 98/130.

Wow! What an impressive list! :)

August:
1. Freddy and Fredericka, Mark Helprin.
2. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess.
3. The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett.
4. Bonjour Tristesse, Francoise Sagan.
5. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy.
6. Exodus, Leon Uris.
7. Diary of an Unknown, Jean Cocteau.

TOTAL BOOKS TO DATE: 105/130.

September:
1. Three Apples Fell From Heaven, Micheline Aharonian Marcom.
2. The House on the Strand, Daphne du Maurier.
3. In a Country of Mothers, A.M. Homes.
4. Pilate's Wife, H.D.
5. Letters of William James, ed. Henry James.
6. Alice James, her brothers--her journal, Alice James.
7. Castorp, Pawel Huelle.
8. Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie.
9. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, Dinaw Mengestu.
10. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto, Dawid Sierakowiak.
11. The Nigger of the Narcissus, Joseph Conrad.
12. Work A Story of Experience, Louisa May Alcott.
13. Island, Aldous Huxley.
14. Ice Palace, Edna Ferber.
15. None Shall Look Back, Caroline Gordon.
16. The Haunting of L, Howard Norman.
17. The Autumn People, Ray Bradbury.
18. The Bell Witch An American Haunting, Brent Monahan.
19. The Doctor's Wife, Sawako Ariyoshi.
20. The Information, Martin Amis.
21. House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday.
22. How German Is It = Wie Deutsch Ist Es A Novel, Walter Abish.
23. Oracle Night, Paul Auster.
24. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick.
25. Isla Negra A Notebook / A Bilingual Edition, Pablo Neruda.

TOTAL BOOKS TO DATE: 130/130.


Crap. I accomplished my goal. Now what?

October:
1. The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood.
2. Jacob's Hands A Fable, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood.
3. To Myself Notes on Life, Art and Artists, Odilon Redon.
4. The Children's Hospital, Chris Adrian.
5. The Diamond Age Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, Neal Stephenson.
6. Sea Of Grass, Conrad Richter.
7. Derby Girl, Shauna Cross.
8. Xenophon's March Into the Lair of the Persian Lion, John Prevas.
9. So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell.
10. Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm.
11. Two Novels Jealousy and In, the Labyrinth, Alain Robbe-Grillet.
12. Dark Horse The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield, Kenneth D. Ackerman.
13. The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall.
14. The Cat's Pajamas Stories, Ray Bradbury.
15. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey.
16. Stover at Yale, Owen Johnson.

TOTAL BOOKS TO DATE: 146.

"I accomplished my goal--now what?"

Re-read some of your list more slowly and savor them perhaps?

Vickie wrote: "Re-read some of your list more slowly and savor them perhaps?"

I savored them all the first time around, but thanks for the suggestion.