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.