Fill in the Gaps

The fill-in-the-gaps challenge is pretty straightforward: pick 100 books you’ve always meant to get around to, and read them within 5 years of your start date.  The books can be anything: stuff that’s been sitting untouched on your bookshelf, classics you’ve always wanted to read, etc.  At least 75% completion = challenge success.

My list is made up of a variety of titles I’ve been meaning to read for years: books I’m ashamed I’ve never read even though I was an English major, women’s studies classics, animal rights classics, the Russians, books that have been sitting on my shelves forever. Several of the books coincide with the 1001 books and Pulitzer challenges.  And, of course, what kind of feminist would I be if I didn’t strive for some gender equity?  About half of the books on this list were written by women, and a number of them are written by people of color.

My start date: 6.6.10

Current status: 23/100 

1. Adams, Carol J. – The Pornography of Meat
2. Adams, Douglas – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
3. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi – Half of a Yellow Sun
4. Adiga, Aravind – The White Tiger
5. Alcott, Louisa May – Little Women
6. Alexie, Sherman – The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian
7. Allende, Isabel – The House of the Spirits
8. Alvarez, Julia – How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
9. Alvarez, Julia – In the Time of the Butterflies
10. Angelou, Maya – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
11. Asimov, Isaac – I, Robot
12. Atwood, Margaret – The Blind Assassin
13. Atwood, Margaret – The Handmaid’s Tale
14. Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
15. Bradbury, Ray – Fahrenheit 451
16. Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
17. Buck, Pearl S. – The Good Earth
18. Camus, Albert – The Stranger
19. Capote, Truman – In Cold Blood
20. Cervantes – Don Quixote
21. Chabon, Michael – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
22. Chbosky, Stephen – The Perks of Being a Wallflower
23. Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
24. Cunningham, Michael – The Hours
25. Danticat, Edwidge – Brother, I’m Dying
26. de Beauvior, Simone – The Second Sex
27. DeLillo, Don – Underworld
28. Diamant, Anita – The Red Tent
29. Diaz, Junot – Drown
30. Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
31. Dostoevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
32. Dostoevsky, Fyodor – The Brothers Karamazov
33. Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
34. Esquivel, Laura – Like Water for Chocolate
35. Eugenides, Jeffrey – The Virgin Suicides
36. Faludi, Susan – Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
37. Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
38. Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
39. Forster, E.M. – Maurice
40. Frazier, Charles – Cold Mountain
41. Friedan, Betty – The Feminine Mystique
42. Gogol, Nikolai – Dead Souls
43. Greer, Germaine – The Female Eunuch
44. Heller, Joseph – Catch-22
45. Hemingway, Ernest – For Whom the Bell Tolls
46. Hesse, Herman – Siddhartha
47. Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
48. Hugo, Victor – Les Miserables
49. Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
50. Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
51. Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
52. Jelinek, Elfriede – The Piano Teacher
53. Kincaid, Jamaica – My Brother
54. Kundera, Milan – The Unbearable Lightness of Being
55. L’Engle, Madeleine – A Wrinkle in Time
56. Larsen, Nella – Passing
57. Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
58. Lewycka, Marina – A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
59. MacDonald, Anne-Marie – The Way the Crow Flies
60. Martell, Yann – Life of Pi
61. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – Love in the Time of Cholera
62. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – One Hundred Years of Solitude
63. Mistry, Rohinton – A Fine Balance
64. Morrison, Toni – Beloved
65. Morrison, Toni – Song of Solomon
66. Murdoch, Iris – The Sea, The Sea
67. Nabokov, Vladimir – Lolita
68. Nemirovsky, Irene – Suite Francaise
69. Oates, Joyce Carol – Blonde
70. Ovid – Metamorphoses
71. Pamuk, Orhan – Snow
72. Paz, Octavio – The Labyrinth of Solitude
73. Perkins Gilman, Charlotte – Herland
74. Roth, Philip – American Pastoral
75. Rushdie, Salman – The Satanic Verses
76. Salinger, J.D. – Catcher in the Rye
77. Saramago, Jose – Blindness
78. Schlosser, Eric – Reefer Madness
79. Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
80. Sinclair, Upton – The Jungle
81. Singer, Peter – Animal Liberation
82. Smith, Zadie – On Beauty
83. Smith, Zadie – White Teeth
84. Steinbeck, John – East of Eden
85. Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
86. Steinbeck, John – Of Mice and Men
87. Stoker, Bram – Dracula
88. Tan, Amy – The Joy Luck Club
89. Tolkien, J.R.R. – The Lord of the Rings
90. Tolstoy, Leo – Anna Karenina
91. Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
92. Toole, John Kennedy – Confederacy of Dunces
93. Urrea, Luis Alberto – The Devil’s Highway
94. Vonnegut Jr., Kurt – Slaughterhouse Five
95. Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
96. Wolf, Naomi – The Beauty Myth
97. Wollstonecraft, Mary – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
98. Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
99. Wright, Richard – Native Son
100. Zusak, Mark – The Book Thief