50 Book Challenge
I can spend hours in a bookstore; when I am surrounded by books I ignore everything else in the outside world and get wrapped up in all the colorful covers and beautifully stacked shelves of words and knowledge and pictures. Sometimes I’ll read a few pages before I decide on a purchase, others I’ll just grab the cover that catches my attention the most. (I bought Standing Room Only by Eva Rice because the cover was pink – I couldn’t put it down!)
Needless to say, I have bought quite a few books for different reasons over the past year, and sadly they are bored to bits just sitting on my shelves. So, I have decided to start the 50 Books Challenge to keep myself on track and actually read them!
My list:
- Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
- The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffeneger
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger
- Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Germs Guns and Steel by Jared Diamond
- St.Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
- My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- Bitter is the New Black by Jen Lancaster
- Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night by Mark Haddon
- Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
- The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
- Perfume by Patrick Süskind
- The World According to Garp by John Irving
- Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- Franny and Zooey by J.D Salinger
- Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien
- The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien
- The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien
- The Return of the King by J.R.R Tolkien
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- The Magician’s Nephew by C.S Lewis
- Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
- New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
- Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
- Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
- Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
- Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
- This Is Not a Novel by David Markson
- It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be by Paul Arden
[...] trying to get ahead on my 50 Books Challenge (I’ve been bad!) and so I picked up The Bell Jar last week. I finished it in two days but [...]
[...] 50 Book Challenge!> I’ll be using the same list as I slacked off majorly last year (though I started it around September.) I might revise it as well, maybe add 2 and make it the 52 in 52 weeks challenge? Either way, the point is to start reading more; not that I don’t have enough with class reading lists. [...]
[...] a challenge (e.g. 50 Books, 101 in [...]
ooh nice list that’s actually on my 101 things too is to complete 50 new books. Not sure which one but they obviously have to be of literary merit!
Haruki Murakami’s books are wonderful, but be sure to read them when you’re at a stable point in your life; when you’re sure of everything. Trust me, if you read them when you’re depressed or in doubt (or anything else within that category for that matter) it’ll worsen your state.
It’s amazing how the best books in the world are the classics. No one writes anything good anymore.
On that note, Dan Brown has finished his next book, ‘The Lost Symbol’. Perhaps you should add it to your list? (:
♥ Mimi
I’ll be sure to keep that in mind! I’ve never actually read any of Dan Brown’s books :O