Project Fill-in-the-Gaps

Being fairly new to the whole Blogger thing it has taken me a while to actually read back posts of my favorite blogs. One of my most favs is a blog titled Editorial Ass written by Moonrat. Moonrat snagged a really awesome project from her friend Andromeda Romano-Lax. It is called Project Fill-in-the-Gaps.

It seems that Andromeda collected a list of 100 books that she wanted to have read in her life to fill in some of her reading gaps of classics and great contemporary fiction. She gave herself 5 years to try to get through the list, and gave herself 25% accident forgiveness, meaning if she finishes 75 titles in 5 years, she'll consider herself to have been victorious.

As Moonrat and many others have done I'm copying their rules so my goal will be to finish 75 of these 100 books by Summer 2014.

My list was generated by the following criteria:
-true classics (like the ones we all were supposed to read in high school but managed to escape them one way or another).
-books that I've bought but placed on the shelf, but haven't read because ... well let's face it I either lose interest, change moods, or I find something else to read at the time.
-a few memoirs
-several Pulitzer and National Book Aaward winners
-select recommendations from friends
-some books I've been curious about and keep forgetting to buy/read

I did my best to make this list as diverse as I could hoping that the list will compliment my ever changing reading moods. If I left out a book that you feel I MUST read please comment and let me know. Fill in the Gaps List

Currently being read & Completed

1. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
2. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
3. A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul
4. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
5. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
6. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
7. A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
8. A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
9. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
10. Animal Farm, George Orwell
11. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
12. Beloved, Toni Morrison
13. Between, Georgia, Joshilyn Jackson
14. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
15. Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
16. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
17. Cordelia Underwood, Van Reid
18. Dragon Seed, Pearl S. Buck
19. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, Elizabeth Gilbert
20. Emma, Jane Austen
21. Empire Falls, Richard Russo
22. From Here to Eternity, James Jones
23. Her Last Death: A Memoir, Susanna Sonnenberg
24. House Under Snow, Jill Bialosky
25. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
26. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
27. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
28. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
29. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
30. Love Walked In, Marisa de los Santos
31. Lucy, Ellen Feldman
32. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
33. Magic Hour, Kristin Hannah
34. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
35. Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
36. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor
37. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
38. Nights in Rodanthe, Nicholas Sparks
39. Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult
40. Northern Lights, Philip Pullman
41. Off Season, Anne Rivers Siddons
42. On Beauty, Zadie Smith
43. One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, Jim Fergus
44. Outer Banks, Anne Rivers Siddons
45. Pandora, Anne Rice
46. Rules for a Pretty Woman, Suzette Francis
47. Sail, James Patterson
48. Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever LP, Julia Quinn
49. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
50. She's Not There, Mary-Ann Smith
51. Sophie's Choice, William Styron
52. Still Alice, Lisa Genova
53. Sweetwater Creek, Anne Rivers Siddons
54. Sybil, Benjamin Disraeli
55. The Accidental, Ali Smith
56. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
57. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
58. The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Laurie R. King
59. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
60. The Bonesetter's Daughter, Amy Tan
61. The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly
62. The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
63. The Bright Forever, Lee Martin
64. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
65. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
66. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
67. The Crucible, Arthur Miller
68. The Darkest Evening of the Year, Dean Koontz
69. The Diary of a Nobody, George Grossmith
70. The Glass Castle: A Memoir, Jeannette Walls
71. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
72. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
73. The House Next Door, Anne Rivers Siddons
74. The House of Spirits, Isabel Allende
75. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
76. The Last Girls, Lee Smith
77. The Magic Cottage, James Herbert
78. The Magician's Assistant, Ann Patchett
79. The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington
80. The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards
81. The Mermaid Chair, Sue Monk Kidd
82. The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty
83. The Painted Veil, W. Somerset Maugham
84. The Perfect Summer, Luanne Rice
85. The Pilot's Wife, Anita Shreve
86. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
87. The Second Coming, Walker Percy
88. The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
89. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
90. The Summer of My Greek Taverna : A Memoir, Tom Stone
91. The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield
92. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
93. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
94. Three Little Words: A Memoir, Ashley Rhodes-Courter
95. Utopia, Thomas More
96. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
97. What Was Lost, Catherine O'Flynn
98. White Noise, Don DeLillo
99. Wise Children, Angela Carter
100. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte