Year of Books: Day One

ON YOUR MARKS!

GET SET!

Time to carefully open your books and start reading!


That's right folks, it's time to read.  I have had it in my mind for the last few months to start reading more often and so to help promote that ideal, I have decided to read 52 books in the course of a year.

After a massive casting call for any and all book suggestions, I compiled a great list of over 120 books that seemed interesting and/or important enough for me to have read.  After much deliberation (seriously, this took me like three weeks to decide on) I have come up with my ultimate list of books.

I start today with "The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.  For some reason I never read this book in grade school, so now is my chance to finally find out what all the fuss is about (if there be any).

How it's going to work is:
I will start reading a new book each Monday.  By Sunday night, if I haven't finished the book, that's okay - but I must post something about the book by Monday morning.  If I choose to finish the book I can, but a new book will be started the following week.  I'm not really concerned about finishing, I hope to finish each one - but I know that's not a practicality.  My reviews will be short and sweet so as to not give me a stress bomb in my brain.  They will consist of whatever impressions I get from the writing or maybe some thoughts on theme, character, prose or the like.

I will also be posting my thoughts on Goodreads.  You are welcome to join me there to discuss it or leave comments on the blog posts.

So here's the list:

1. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
2. The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Nivven and Jerry Pournelle
3. Bone by Jeff Smith
4. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
5. Rejected by Jon Friedman
6. Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose
7. Fade In: From Idea to Final Draft by Michael Piller
8. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
9. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
10. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
11. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
12. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
13. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
14. Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn
15. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
16. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
17. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
18. Tales from the Script by Peter Hanson and Paul Robert Herman
19. Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
20. Night by Elie Wiesel
21. Coming Up for Air by George Orwell
22. Believing Christ by Stephen Robinson
23. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre
24. Akira: Volume One by Katsuhiro Otomo
25. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
26. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer
27. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
28. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
29. If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino
30. The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
31. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
32. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
33. Watership Down by Richard Adams
34. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
35. The Giver by Lois Lowry
36. Einstein's Dream by Alan Lightman
37. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
38. The Divine Comedy by Dante
39. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
40. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
41. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
42. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
43. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
44. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet
45. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
46. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
47. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
48. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
49. Watchmen by Alan Moore
50. The Plague by Albert Camus
51. The Analyst by John Katzenbach
52. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Later I will post some of the other books that were suggested that I wanted to read but didn't add to my list.

To the books!