Goals and obsessions

If you read back to the earliest posts on this blog (which I hope you don't because, frankly, they're crap), you will see that one of the inspirations for this was Julie Powell's book, Julie and Julia. It's a fun book and I recommend it for some light reading. But what really drew me to that book was that Julie Powell had a mission. Hers was to cook every recipe out of Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking cookbook. Well, I like to cook, but I don't like french food (or, frankly, Julia Child all that much), so obviously I needed to find a new quest. Besides, when you go on a quest, you'd like it to be unique.

A while ago, my friends and I stumbled across a list of "the 1001 books to read before you die." Shortly thereafter, my one friend--the Good Doctor--started giving us copies of the very heavy book by the same title and, luckily, same list. So, I sat down and figured out which ones I had read and, low and behold, I've read 5.99% of them. Yes, for someone who loves to read, I've only read 60 of these books!

So, there is my mission...to read all these books before I die. If nothing else, it will ensure a very long life. And it will give me much to complain about...I'm already mystified as to why The Shining and Interview with the Vampire are on the list, but not a single Harry Potter book is there. And is Salman Rushdie such a great writer that ALL of his books are listed? Not even Dickens can claim that.

Anyway, here is where I am now...below are the 60 books I've just read.
Voltaire by Candide
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (A favorite!)
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Villette by Charlotte Bronte
Shirley by Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (A favorite!)
The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
Germinal by Emile Zola
Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Bronte (A favorite!)
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Emma by Jane Austen
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (at this point, I need to add that most of these Jane Austen books were read under duress during my college years. The truth is that I hate Jane Austen novels!)
The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (ugh!)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (A favorite!)
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (A VERY favorite!)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Tess of the D'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (pure agony)
The Little Prince by Antone de Saint-Exupery (in French, no less!)
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (good book, dumb movie)
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence (didn't live up to the hype)
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
Howards End by E.M. Forster
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (A favorite!)
Animal Farm by George Orwell
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (A VERY favorite!)
The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguru
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tail by Margaret Atwood
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Atonement by Ian McEwen
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (A favorite!)
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (A favorite!)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguru (I just finished this one on Friday--I recommend it but I will warn readers that it is not what you would expect!)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Life of Pi by Yann Martel

So, only a little less than 941 books to go (I'm about 20 pages into Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald). If you are interested, you can google this list and it will come up...or you can buy the book....or you can email me for my marked up list. And, if you want to buy me a gift, I'm putting all the books I haven't read (that are in print) in my amazon wish list!