Sunday, April 12, 2009

The Fill in the Gaps Project



I know I said I wasn't going to participate in any challenges this year, but The Fill in the Gaps Project sounds too good to pass up.

The object is to take up to five years to fill in the gaps in one's individual reading from a list of 100 books. A reader is to consider the project a success if she reads 75 percent of the books on her list.

I fudged my list a bit, making it a list of 100 authors instead of books. I listed the classics first, ones owned and left idle on the shelves, then added oh, say a fifth of all those other stockpiled books that I feel especially guilty for not having gotten around to yet. (I may be returning a lot of unread library books next week while the guilt lasts.)

I'm going to give the following list a prominent position on my other blog and bold the books as I complete them.

To be read by April 12, 2014:

Poppy Adams
The Behavior of the Moths
Grant Allen
The Woman Who Did
Isabel Allende
The House of the Spirits
Majgul Axelsson
April Witch
Honore de Balzac
Cousin Betty
Nicola Barker
Darkmans
Sybille Bedford
A Favourite of the Gods
Rosalind Belben
Hound Music
Marcel Benabou
Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books
Caroline Blackwood
Great Granny Webster
Mikhail Bulgakov
The Fatal Eggs
The Master and Margarita
Italo Calvino
if on a winter's night a traveler
Willa Cather
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Anton Chekhov
Collected Stories
Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White
Ivy Compton-Burnett
The House and Its Head
Manservant and Maidservant
Joseph Conrad
The Secret Agent
Jim Crace
The Pesthouse
Richmal Crompton
The Family Roundabout
Ingri and Edgar Perin D'Aulaire
Book of Norse Myths
Robertson Davies
The Cornish Trilogy
Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Demons
The Eternal Husband
The Idiot
Theodore Drieser
Sister Carrie
Alexandre Dumas
The Three Musketeers
Daphne Du Maurier
Don't Look Now
Rebecca
George Eliot
Felix Holt
Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man
William Faulkner
Go Down, Moses
The Snopes Trilogy
Rachel Ferguson
Alas, Poor Lady
E.M. Forster
Aspects of the Novel
William Gaddis
The Recognitions
Elizabeth Gaskell
North and South
Amitar Ghosh
Sea of Poppies
George Gissing
Born in Exile
In the Year of Jubilee
Sleeping Fires
etc.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Graham Greene
The Quiet American
George Grossman
The Diary of a Nobody
Patrick Hamilton
The Slaves of Solitude
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
Thomas Hardy
Far From the Madding Crowd
The Mayor of Casterbridge
The Woodlanders
L.P. Hartley
The Go-Between
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Blithedale Romance
Shirley Hazzard
Transit of Venus
Herodotus
The Histories
Janet Hobhouse
The Furies
Vere Hodgson
Few Eggs and No Oranges
Richard Hughes
The Fox in the Attic
In Hazard
The Wooden Shepherdess
Henry James
The Ambassadors
James Joyce
Dubliners
Ulysses
Heinrich von Kleist
The Marquise of O-
D.H. Lawrence
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Women in Love
Halldor Laxness
Independent People
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Left Hand of Darkness
Doris Lessing
The Sweetest Dream
Naguib Mahfouz
Palace Walk
Thomas Mann
Death in Venice
Doctor Faustus
Katherine Mansfield
Collected Stories
Peter Matthiessen
Shadow Country
W. Somerset Maugham
The Magician
The Painted Veil
David McCullough
John Adams
Herman Melville
The Confidence Man
The Piazza Tales
John Milton
Paradise Lost
Drusilla Modjeska
The Orchard
Iris Murdoch
The Book and the Brotherhood
Nuns and Soldiers
The Unicorn
etc.
Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire
Irene Nemirovsky
Suite Francaise
Flannery O'Connor
The Habit of Being
Tim O'Brien
The Things They Carried
Ovid
The Metamorphoses
Amos Oz
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Dawn Powell
A Time to Be Born
Francine Prose
Goldengrove
Marcel Proust
The Guermantes Way
Thomas Pynchon
The Crying of Lot 49
Ron Rash
Serena
Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses
Peter Rushforth
Kindergarten
Vita Sackville-West
All Passion Spent
Mary Lee Settle
Know Nothing
William Shakespeare
Henry V
Othello
Richard III
Ali Smith
The First Person
Girl Meets Boy
The Whole Story and Other Stories
Emma Smith
The Far Cry
Susan Sontag
In America
Christina Stead
House of All Nations
Letty Fox
Salzburg Tales
etc.
Wallace Stegner
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
Stendhal
Charterhouse of Parma
William Styron
Sophie's Choice
Betsy Tobin
Ice Land
Anthony Trollope
Bertrams
The Vicar of Bullhampton
The Way We Live Now
etc.
Sigrd Undset
Kristin Lavransdatter
Nathaniel West
The Day of the Locust
Rebecca West
This Real Night
Cousin Rosamund
Edith Wharton
The Old Maid
The Reef
Dorothy Whipple
Someone at a Distance
John Williams
Stoner
Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward Angel
Viginia Woolf
Night and Day
Orlando
The Waves
John Wyndam
The Chrysalids
Emile Zola
Germinal
Stefan Zweig
Beware of Pity
Marie Antoinette

6 comments:

  1. I had no idea you had another blog! This sounds interesting. You get to make your own list? I may have to consider this one (since I am always making lists), but do I stick to them is the problem.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's just a blog of reading lists--see the comprehensive reading link near the top of the sidebar.

    Yes, you get to make your own list. And the best part is if you don't stick to it, you don't have to worry about it for five whole years. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wow! A five-year reading challenge. That sounds pretty daunting. I'd try this, but like Danielle, I doubt if I'd stick to it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. If I can manage 15-20 books off the list between now and the end of the year then I'm going to think I have a shot. The key is to quit getting sidetracked by the library books.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Five years sounds almost doable, but I would probably procrastinate and would definitely be sidetracked by library books. Curse those libraries ;)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Do you have a copy of Letty Fox? I'll send you mine...I'm going home for a brief visit in 2 months & I could mail from there to save on postage. Let me know via email.

    I've got the Balzac on my TBR. Patrick Hamilton on the wishlist.

    Yes to Mansfield! The Blithedale Romance didn't float my boat, but it's not very long...maybe I'd like it better now, but no going back.

    ReplyDelete

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