50 Book Challenge & Reading Resolutions

At the beginning of the year, I joined a challenge on the Reading is Sexy Facebook group to read fifty books in one year. I didn't include anything much shorter than the shortest play I read (about seventy pages, I think) or anything I didn't read completely (which is too bad because the Encyclopedia of New York State would have looked amazing on here).

Yesterday, I finished the challenge. Here, purely because I want to see them all together, is my list. Yellow is YA/juvenile/children's lit. Green is fiction. Salmon is poetry. Purple is nonfiction. Blue is drama. The two in black are crossovers (A Book of Ireland is a compilation of Irish writing and Eugene Onegin lives somewhere between poetry and fiction.)

1. The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler


2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald


3. Dubliners by James Joyce


4. Yiddish with Dick and Jane by Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman


5. Earthly Astonishments by Marthe Jocelyn


6. From Fatigued to Fantastic by Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum


7. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris


8. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath


9. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather


10. Some Writers Deserve to Starve: 31 Brutal Truths about the Publishing Industry by Elaura Niles


11. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson


12. The Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge


13. The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith


14. Ireland (LIFE World Library) by Joe McCarthy


15. Healing Stones by Nancy Rue


16. Saints Behaving Badly by Thomas J. Craughwell


17. Villette by Charlotte Bronte


18. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck


19. The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins


20. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience by William Blake


21. Irish Saints by Robert Reilly


22. The Coal Tattoo by Silas House


23. A Book of Ireland edited by Frank O'Connor


24. The Brothers Karamazov by Fydor Dostoyevsky


25. The Pearl by John Steinbeck


26. The Chosen by Chaim Potok


27. Terpin by Tor Seidler


28. How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster


29. World War I and Nationalist Politics in County Louth, 1914-1920 by Donal Hall


30. Carlingford Town by P.F. Gosling


31. The Autobiography of S.S. McClure by S.S. McClure and Willa Cather


32. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner


33. Master Harold... and the "Boys" by Athol Fugard


34. Portuguese Irregular Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith


35. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott


36. The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland by R. F. Foster


37. In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honore


38. Who Let the Blogs Out? A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs by Biz Stone


39. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence


40. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen


41. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin


42. King Lear by William Shakespeare


43. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger


44. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton


45. The Red Pony by John Steinbeck


46. Woman's World by Graham Rawle


47. West Wind: Poetry and Prose Poems by Mary Oliver


48. Praying in Color by Sybil MacBeth


49. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene


50. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis


51. Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang by Mordecai Richler

(If I didn't feel so lazy, I'd have more hyperlinks here.)

About 20 of these come from my favorite Greatest Literature list. About 10 were directly related to research for my book (several more were indirectly related). Perhaps what surprises me the most about this list is the amount of nonfiction I read.

I'm starting the challenge again for 2009, but I don't think I'll be very particular about whether or not I get to fifty next year. I already know I can do it, and right now I'm much more interested in finishing the book I'm writing. I would, however, like to read more poetry and drama this coming year, particularly poetry.