In the Beginning...

...there was Joseph Heller's Catch 22, the book that screamed at me from the bookstore shelf begging me to explain myself – "How can you call yourself a book nerd with such a gaping hole in your reading history?"

So here we go, starting now. And we have Joseph Heller to thank or blame in 365 days from now.

As Promised - Ender's Game

It was a friend that recommended reading Ender's Game through chopped statements of "...I know it's SciFi, BUT...". I finally caved one afternoon while taking my nieces on an Aunt Kate Date to Barnes and Noble.

After feeling comfortably sure that the two girls (ages 7 and 4) were settled into a couple of books in the kids section and would refrain from wreaking complete havoc on B&N (The Limited Too had not been so lucky just 20 minutes prior), I took of to the Information desk to have someone direct me to the SciFi section. Uncharted territory for my tastes.

Three minutes I was away from the kids section. Three minutes. I walked back with Ender's Game in my hand and went to collect the girls. "Look what I did, Aunt Kate!" That statement spawns both excitement and utter dread in the gut of an adult responsible for a 4-year-old.

Sure enough, she had found herself a sticker book she had no desire to take home because she had already completed all the stickering. Lucky for me, a B&N employee was hovering nearby and played the omnipotent witness to me telling the 4-year-old we now had to put away the book she wanted to buy and buy the one she vandalized (I used a different word) and the subsequent tears that followed. Hers. Not mine.

The tears did it. I had to get her the Dora book she had her heart set on, but that noisy B&N lady wouldn't walk far enough away for us to make our escape. And given my current financial status, I could not afford to get both the Dora book and the forever-tainted sticker book while also picking up Ender's Game. But just like that 4-year-old, my heart was set on my book. It was already in my hand, and all.

So I did what any former Borders employee would do in a B&N... I took the used sticker book and stuck it behind some large-sized Italian cook books in the bargain book section and got the hell out of dodge.

It was an easy read for the most part, and didn't necessarily feel like SciFi (No Battlestar Gallactic nuances). I could not, however, get over the fact of how young the main characters were!. Ender, one of the youngest, is called on to be the great General Patton of intergalactic warfare while his sister and brother (barely older than he) become the great philosophic talking heads of the international political scene.

This PARTICULARLY kills me because I've written a YA Fiction novel and have gotten feedback from agents rejecting the work with the reason "You said the character was 17... she's 11 for the first 30 pages. Not old enough for YA. No thanks." I want to email these people back and say, "Ummmm... Ender Wiggin was 6 years old when he started his journey to saving the galaxy by age 12!"

Instead I said, "Thank you for your time and feedback!"

In the end, I liked it a lot. Orson Scott Card... ehhhhhhhh. I shuffled through the Internet to get an idea of his background, and although I love me an editor turned writer and a little Mormon to boost... well, from an interview with OSC on ways he procrastinates:

...watching the Fox News Channel (the only news outlet where the commentators aren't all toadies to power or mental slaves to a predetermined orthodoxy)...

Huh... because Rupert Murdoch is without agenda.

Yet his personal belief statement had some nice tidbits of inspiration on art such as...

Art always carries messages, intentional or not. Therefore good artists do their best to sustain that which is good through their art, and to call for the correction of that which is destructive of happiness.

Though it didn't take him long to spout the very agenda Rupert would be proud to hear in that very same Personal Belief Statement, particularly regarding "family values", I guess is the appropriate buzz term.

Oh Orson... you had me at Ender, and lost me at Murdoch.

The Mission

So let me say upfront, I'm a bit of a book nerd. Some women have serious relationships with shoes, I am fully devoted to books, so much so that my brothers refuse to help me move anymore... or at least refuse to carry the mountain of boxes that is my personal library packed away.

Bookstores are my churches, and Strand Bookstore in New York City my Holy Land. 

Now outside of New York City, tucked away in my native land of Michigan, I found myself wandering through Barnes and Noble in Northville the other day, a $20 gift card fresh from Christmas burning a hole in my wallet. As I strolled up and down the fiction stacks looking for my next prey, Catch 22 caught my eye. Although a staple on most High School English Lit reading lists, I've yet to read it. Then Brave New World jumped out me. Then others - voices all calling after me as I was thumbing through the latest from Chabon saying, "What about us, you twit?!"

In high school, I had an alternative class schedule (to say the least) and spent a lot of time in independent studies reading works comfortably excluded from the average lists, and therefore missed out on a lot of classics. And any classics I have read, for the most part, were consumed so long ago I would be lucky to pull the name of a lead character out of my ass in a game of Trivial Pursuit. 

And during the years I had my nose pushed to the galley of art history books or non-fiction collections for undergrad and graduate school, a lot of fantastic modern works have slipped by me. 

I'm an aspiring fiction writer, and this glitch in my intake is ghastly. For years I've heard the shock in people's voices as they say, "You've never read Huckleberry Finn?" "You've never read Lolita?" "You've never read..." ad nauseam. 

So, in an effort to rectify this and hopefully open the gates for the masters' talents to somehow be imbedded within my own writing (and to finally win at Trivial Pursuit), I am giving myself this challenge for 2010: To read my way through The Strand 80, a list of the best 80 books ever according to fellow Strand worshippers in honor of Strand's 80th birthday. 

The Mission: 365 days. 80 books. 

The Books:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

3. Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

4. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

5. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

6. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

7. Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

9. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

10. Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone by J. K. Rowling

11. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

12. 1984 by Geore Orwell

13. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

14. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

15. Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

16. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Yowzah!)

17. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

18. Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut

19. Ulysses by James Joyce (yikes!)

20. Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

21. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

22. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

23. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

24. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

25. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

26. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

27. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows by J. K. Rowling

28. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

29. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

30. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

31. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

32. Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

33. Stranger by Albert Camus

34. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

35. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

36. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

37. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (now I'm rethinking this...)

38. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

39. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

40. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

41. Anthem by Ayn Rand

42. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

43. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

44. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

45. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

46. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

47. The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery

48. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

49. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

50. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

51. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

52. The World According to Garp by John Irving

53. Middlemarch by George Eliot

54. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

55. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

56. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling

57. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling

58. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

59. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

60. Bleak House by Charles Dickens

61. Beloved by Toni Morrison

62. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

63. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

64. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

65. The Sound and Fury by William Faulkner

66. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolfe

67. The Giver Lois Lowry

68. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

69. Blindness by Jose Saramago

70. Life of Pi by Martel Yann

71. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

72. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

73. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

74. Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis

   The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis

   The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis

   The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis

   The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis

   The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis (I think this may be cheating)

75. The Odyssey by Homer

76. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

77. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger

78. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

79. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

80(a). The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

80(b). The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Rules: 

#1. I have exactly one year to read all of these, with one exception. Just a week ago I finished Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card prior to having this wacky idea, whereas others on this list that I've already read have blurred with time. So since, if you notice, there are FAR more than 80 books on this list given that they split #80 to accommodate some crowd pleasers and since #44 consists of the entire Chronicles of Narnia (by the way, I'm feeling like a real twit for having never read any of them), I think it's fair to let Ender's Game slide. However, I do promise to do an entry on it because it was a fantastic book.

#2. No shortcuts. Films, Spark Notes or any other offshoots of the novels themselves may only be used in order to add a little flava' to the entries or gain perspective on the writers themselves. No skipping, no skimming... no cutting corners.

#3. Even if I've read it before, it must be read again. The only exception to this rule (because I say so) is Ender's Game. 

#4. When I get pissed off at Ulysses, I cannot use it as a weapon against myself or others. 

So there we have it. 365 Days. 80+ books. 

...someone put on a pot of coffee.