So my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow will be related to one of the things I love....books, lots and lots of books....
Last year, a friend of mine gave me an excel version of the "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" and I have decided to make this my goal....well, not really the 1001 books...I have to draw the line somewhere. I have heard time and again that the best objectives are those that are actually achievable and this feat of mine should be no different. So, here is my goal, "To have read 151 books from the list by December 2011"
Here are my statistics: I have read 55 books from the list so far which leaves 96 books to be read in 1 Year, 4 Months, 1 Week and 5 Days. I had no clear criteria when I selected the 96 books. Given my leanings towards the literature from 1970 onwards, I just tried to make it a mix between contemporary and the classic. I also included books that I never would have read otherwise like "The Island of Dr. Moreau". Of course, I also took into consideration that it must be available in English. I don't want to add the complication of learning a new language. In terms of length, it is ranging from 2666 and Les Miserables (Thank God I have already finished War and Peace before I attempted this) to Notes from the Underground.
Books I have read so far:
| 1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz |
| 2. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai |
| 3. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri |
| 4. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami |
| 5. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen |
| 6. The Devil and Miss Prym by Paulo Coelho |
| 7. Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho |
| 8. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy |
| 9. Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald |
| 10. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink |
| 11. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides |
| 12. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel |
| 13. Watchmen by Alan Moore |
| 14. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez |
| 15. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera |
| 16. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco |
| 17. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams |
| 18. The Shining by Stephen King |
| 19. Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice |
| 20. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison |
| 21. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut |
| 22. The Godfather by Mario Puzo |
| 23. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez |
| 24. No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel García Márquez |
| 25. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller |
| 26. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe |
| 27. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien |
| 28. Foundation by Isaac Asimov |
| 29. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger |
| 30. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov |
| 31. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell |
| 32. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
| 33. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse |
| 34. Rashomon by Akutagawa Ryunosuke |
| 35. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan |
| 36. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence |
| 37. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann |
| 38. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton |
| 39. Howards End by E.M. Forster |
| 40. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad |
| 41. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells |
| 42. Dracula by Bram Stoker |
| 43. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells |
| 44. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde |
| 45. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson |
| 46. Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant |
| 47. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy |
| 48. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne |
| 49. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy |
| 50. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott |
| 51. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| 52. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll |
| 53. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo |
| 54. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley |
| 55. Oroonoko by Aphra Behn |
Books I have to finish:
| 1. Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery |
| 2. Invisible by Paul Auster |
| 3. American Rust by Philipp Meyer |
| 4. The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck |
| 5. Falling Man by Don DeLillo |
| 6. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
| 7. Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon |
| 8. Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland |
| 9. The Sea by John Banville |
| 10. The Accidental by Ali Smith |
| 11. 2666 by Roberto Bolano |
| 12. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer |
| 13. Life of Pi by Yann Martel |
| 14. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald |
| 15. Atonement by Ian McEwan |
| 16. The Human Stain by Philip Roth |
| 17. The Hours by Michael Cunningham |
| 18. Underworld by Don DeLillo |
| 19. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry |
| 20. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami |
| 21. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth |
| 22. The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte |
| 23. Mao II by Don DeLillo |
| 24. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis |
| 25. Vertigo by W.G. Sebald |
| 26. The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai |
| 27. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco |
| 28. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie |
| 29. The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy |
| 30. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe |
| 31. Beloved by Toni Morrison |
| 32. The Cider House Rules by John Irving |
| 33. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood |
| 34. White Noise by Don DeLillo |
| 35. Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard |
| 36. Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally |
| 37. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera |
| 38. Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr. |
| 39. Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez |
| 40. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon |
| 41. The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow |
| 42. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov |
| 43. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon |
| 44. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote |
| 45. Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe |
| 46. V. by Thomas Pynchon |
| 47. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath |
| 48. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess |
| 49. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee |
| 50. Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote |
| 51. The Bell by Iris Murdoch |
| 52. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith |
| 53. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov |
| 54. The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzákis |
| 55. Lord of the Flies by William Golding |
| 56. A Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata |
| 57. The Plague by Albert Camus |
| 58. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway |
| 59. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce |
| 60. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck |
| 61. On the Edge of Reason by Miroslav Krleza |
| 62. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck |
| 63. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston |
| 64. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien |
| 65. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway |
| 66. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence |
| 67. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust |
| 68. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway |
| 69. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| 70. The Trial by Franz Kafka |
| 71. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster |
| 72. Ulysses by James Joyce |
| 73. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton |
| 74. The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore |
| 75. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce |
| 76. The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence |
| 77. A Room With a View by E.M. Forster |
| 78. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton |
| 79. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad |
| 80. The Ambassadors by Henry James |
| 81. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle |
| 82. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells |
| 83. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy |
| 84. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James |
| 85. Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace |
| 86. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy |
| 87. Middlemarch by George Eliot |
| 88. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| 89. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo |
| 90. Silas Marner by George Eliot |
| 91. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert |
| 92. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| 93. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë |
| 94. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray |
| 95. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen |
| 96. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen |
So here's to having goals and achieving them....
No comments:
Post a Comment