Last year was the first year that I decided to do reading challenges beyond the basic "read x books" and I loved it. I read more books in 2014 than I ever have before, so I'm going to stick with it for 2015.
First up is the challenge I created all on my own. When I was a precocious youngster, I was obsessed with reading "the best" books. Now I've learned the importance of reading things you enjoy, but I've read a lot of classics and tend to enjoy them, so I spent way to much time compiling various "best of" lists and made one master list of best novels. For 2015, I plan to read 50 of the 100 best (that I haven't already read). Below is the list, with the ones I read linked to my Goodreads review.
Progress: 10 of 50
Next up, I'm going to stick with finishing series this year, but this year I'm going to try to finish 5 series.
Progress: 8 of 5
And my final goal is to again read 50 books I own. We'll see how close I get this time.
Progress: 24 of 50
First up is the challenge I created all on my own. When I was a precocious youngster, I was obsessed with reading "the best" books. Now I've learned the importance of reading things you enjoy, but I've read a lot of classics and tend to enjoy them, so I spent way to much time compiling various "best of" lists and made one master list of best novels. For 2015, I plan to read 50 of the 100 best (that I haven't already read). Below is the list, with the ones I read linked to my Goodreads review.
Progress: 10 of 50
| Achebe, Chinua | Things Fall Apart |
| Aligheri Dante | The Divine Comedy |
| Anonymous | One Thousand and One Nights |
| Atwood, Margaret | The Handmaid's Tale |
| Austen, Jane | Emma |
| Austen, Jane | Persuasion |
| Baldwin, James | Go Tell It On the Mountain |
| Burgess, Anthony | A Clockwork Orange |
| Burroughs, William S. | Naked Lunch |
| Camus, Albert | The Stranger |
| Cather, Willa | My Antonia |
| Cervantes, Miguel de | Don Quixote |
| Chandler, Raymond | The Big Sleep |
| Chekhov, Anton | The Stories of |
| Coetzee, J. M. | Disgrace |
| Conrad, Joseph | Heart of Darkness |
| Conrad, Joseph | Nostromo |
| Crane, Stephen | The Red Badge of Courage |
| Defoe, Daniel | Robinson Crusoe |
| Dickens, Charles | Great Expectations |
| Dickens, Charles | Bleak House |
| DosPassos, John | U.S.A. (trilogy) |
| Dostoevsky, Feodor | Crime and Punishment |
| Dostoevsky, Feodor | The Brothers Karamazov |
| Dreiser, Theodore | An American Tragedy |
| Dumas, Alexandre | The Three Musketeers |
| Eliot, George | Middlemarch |
| Ellison, Ralph | Invisible Man |
| Faulkner, William | Sound and the Fury |
| Faulkner, William | Absalom, Absalom! |
| Faulkner, William | As I Lay Dying |
| Faulkner, William | A Light In August |
| Fielding, Henry | Tom Jones |
| Fitzgerald, F. Scott | Tender Is the Night |
| Ford, Ford Maddox | The Good Soldier |
| Forster, E. M. | A Passage to India |
| Forster, E. M. | Howard's End |
| Gogol, Nikolai | Dead Souls |
| Grass, Gunter | The Tin Drum |
| Hardy, Thomas | Tess of D'Ubervilles |
| Hardy, Thomas | Jude the Obscure |
| Hemingway, Ernest | A Farewell to Arms |
| Hemingway, Ernest | For Whom the Bell Tolls |
| Hemingway, Ernest | The Old Man and the Sea |
| Homer | Odyssey |
| Hugo, Victor | Les Miserables |
| Hurston, Zora Neale | Their Eyes Were Watching God |
| Huxley, Aldous | Brave New World |
| Irving, John | The World According to Garp |
| James, Henry | Portrait of a Lady |
| James, Henry | The Ambassadors |
| Joyce, James | Ulysses |
| Joyce, James | Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man |
| Joyce, James | Finnegan's Wake |
| Kafka, Franz | The Trial |
| Kerouac, Jack | On the Road |
| Kesey, Ken | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest |
| King, Stephen | The Stand |
| Lawrence, D. H. | Women in Love |
| Lawrence, D. H. | The Rainbow |
| Lawrence, D. H. | Sons & Lovers |
| Lessing, Doris | The Golden Notebook |
| London, Jack | The Call of the Wild |
| Lowry, Malcolm | Under the Volcano |
| Marquez, Gabriel Garcia | One Hundred Years of Solitude |
| McCarthy, Cormac | The Road |
| Miller, Henry | Tropic of Cancer |
| Mitchell, Margaret | Gone With the Wind |
| Morrison, Toni | Beloved |
| Morrison, Toni | Song of Solomon |
| Nabokov, Vladimir | Pale Fire |
| Naipaul, V. S. | A Bend in the River |
| Proust, Marcel | In Search of Lost Time |
| Rand, Ayn | Atlas Shrugged |
| Rand, Ayn | The Fountainhead |
| Rhys, Jean | Wide Sargasso Sea |
| Richardson, Samuel | Clarissa |
| Roth, Henry | Call It Sleep |
| Rushdie, Salman | Midnight's Children |
| Salinger, J. D. | Catcher in the Rye |
| Sebald, W. G. | Austerlitz |
| Spark, Muriel | The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie |
| Steinbeck, John | Of Mice and Men |
| Stendhal | The Red and the Black |
| Stendhal | The Charterhouse of Parma |
| Sterne, Laurence | Tristram Shandy |
| Styron, William | Sophie's Choice |
| Swift, Jonathan | Gulliver's Travels |
| Tolkein, J. R. R. | The Lord of the Rings (Trilogy) |
| Tolstoy, Leo | War and Peace |
| Updike, John | Rabbit, Run (series) |
| Vonnegut, Kurt | Slaughterhouse-Five |
| Walker, Alice | The Color Purple |
| Warren, Robert Penn | All the King's Men |
| Waugh, Evelyn | Brideshead Revisited |
| Wharton, Edith | The Age of Innocence |
| Wharton, Edith | The House of Mirth |
| Woolf, Virginia | To the Lighthouse |
| Woolf, Virginia | Mrs. Dalloway |
| Wright, Richard | Native Son |
Next up, I'm going to stick with finishing series this year, but this year I'm going to try to finish 5 series.
Progress: 8 of 5
- Anna and the French Kiss Trilogy by Stephanie Perkins
- Stargirl Duology by Jerry Spinelli
- Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater (Book 4 expected in 2016)
- Sinners On Tour by Olivia Cunning
- Throne of Glass Series by Sarah J. Maas (book 5 expected in 2016)
- Don Tillman Series by Graeme Simsion
- The Selection Series by Kiera Cass (book 5 expected in 2016)
- The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson (book 2 expected in 2016, maybe)
And my final goal is to again read 50 books I own. We'll see how close I get this time.
Progress: 24 of 50
- The Tyrant's Daughter by J. C. Carleson
- Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
- Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (reread)
- Living a Life That Matters by Ben Lesser
- The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
- Thomas & Friends Story Time Collection by Rev W Awdry (I generally don't include picture books, but this is a 320 page collection of 13 stories)
- Rotters by Daniel Kraus
- Tales From a Not-So-Talented Pop Star by Rachel Rene Russo
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (reread)
- Lover Unbound by J. R. Ward
- Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose
- The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
- Shanna by Kathleen Woodiwiss
- While the World Watched by Carolyn Maull McKinstry
- Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
- The Mysterious Howling by Maryrose Wood
- Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (reread)
- Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier (reread)
- A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty
- Dracula by Bram Stoker (reread)
- A History of Glitter and Blood by Hannah Moskowitz
- Reasons My Kid Is Crying by Greg Pembroke
- The Best Yes: Making Wise Decision in the Midst of Endless Demands by Lysa TerKeurst
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