I love to read and have decided to push myself to read some different things this year. Books that mean something to other people and might not be something I would normally choose. Always good to expand our horizons, right?

Original post laying out the challenge

So the master list from the original 451 Challenge is below, and I’ve marked it as so:

• Link on name goes to my review post once read.
• Bold means I read it before starting this challenge. (Interesting look into my normal habits and education.)
• Asterisk means ones I’m shooting for reading this year. Tried to randomly pick just up and down the list. 43 total.

451 Master Reading List

* 1984 – George Orwell
A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
* A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
A Confederacy of Dunces – John O’Toole (One of my all-time favorite books!!!!)
A Solitary Blue – Cynthia Voigt
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
* A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
* Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
* Ashes in the Wind – Kathleen E. Woodiwiss
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Black Beauty – Anna Sewell
Blake’s Poetry & Designs – William Blake
Blindness – Jose Saramago
Call It Sleep – Henry Roth
Calvin and Hobbes – Bill Watterson (Doesn’t get better.)
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (Uggh.)
Centennial – James Michener
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
* Collected Poems – Robert Frost
Collected Poems – William Butler Yeats
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
* Cry, The Beloved Country – Alan Paton
Demonology – Rick Moody
* Devil in the White City – Erik Larsen
Diaries of Anais Nin – Anais Nin
Different Seasons – Stephen King
Dr. Seuss’s ABC – Dr. Seuss
Dr. Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card (Another all-time favorite!)
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
* Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise – Ruth Reichel
* Geek Love – Katherine Dunne
Going After Cacciato – Tim O’Brien
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Greengage Summer – Rumer Godden
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – J.K. Rowling
* I Am America and So Can You! – Stephen Colbert
I Am David – Ann Holm
* In This House of Brede – Rumer Godden
Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice
Islandia – Austin Tappan Wright
Izzy Willy Nilly – Cynthia Voigt
* Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Jitterbug Perfume – Tom Robbins
Julius Ceasar – William Shakespeare
* Just So Stories – Rudyard Kipling
Legends of Pensam – Mamang Dai
* Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Little Boy Lost – Marghanita Laski
Little Women – Louise May Alcott
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Long Day’s Journey Into Night – Eugene O’Neill
Love You Forever – Robert Munsch
Macbeth – William Shakespeare
* Mary Poppins – P.L. Travers
Maus – Art Spiegelman
Maus II – Art Spiegelman
Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
Middlemarch – George Eliot
* My Invented Country – Isabel Allende
Night – Elie Wiesel
* Night at the Circus – Angela Carter
Nursery Rhymes – Mother Goose
Out of the Silent Planet – C.S. Lewis
* Paco’s Story – Larry Heinemann
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Parthian Stations – John Ash
Peace Like a River – Leif Enger
Perfume – Patrick Suskind
* Persuasion – Jane Austen
Piercing the Darkness – Frank Peretti
Pitch Dark – Renata Adler
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Quarantine – Jim Crace
Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
Rasero – Francisco Rebolledo
* River’s End – Nora Roberts
Roots – Alex Haley
Sam Bangs and Moonshine – Evaline Ness
* Sea Glass – Anita Shreve
Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 – Nathaniel Philbrick
Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts
* Silence – Shusaku Endo
Small Gods – Terry Pratchett
South Riding – Winifred Holtby
* St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves – Karen Russell
Summer of my German Soldier – Bette Green
Ten Tales Tall and True – Alasdair Gray
* Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights
The Autograph Man – Zadie Smith
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
* The Bean Trees – Barbara Kingsolver
The Beginning and the End – Naguib Mahfouz
* The Best Christmas Pageant Ever – Barbara Robinson
The Blindfold – Siri Hustvedt
The Blue Castle – L.M. Montgomery
* The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Complete Works of Shakespeare – William Shakespeare
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexander Dumas
* The Courage of Their Convictions: Sixteen Americans Who Fought Their Way to the Supreme Court – Peter Irons
The Double Helix – James D. Watson
The Dragonridgers of Pern – Anne McCaffrey (First fantasy series I ever read.)
The Family from One End Street – Eve Garnett
The Far Pavilions – M.M. Kaye
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
The Giver – Lois Lowry
The Giving Tree – Shel Silverstein
* The Golems of Gotham – Thane Rosenbaum
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (Steinbeck’s a genius, but whew.)
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Harry Potter Series – J.K. Rowling
The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
The Hiding Place – Corrie ten Boom
* The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkein
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
* The Iliad – Homer
The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan
The Joy of Cooking – Rombauer, Becker, and Becker
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
* The Lions of Al-Rassan – Guy Gavriel Kay
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkein
The Love of a Good Woman – Alice Munro
* The Magic of Ordinary Days – Ann Howard Creel
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
The Phantom of the Opera – Gaston Leroux
* The Phantom Tollbooth – Norton Juster
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
The Ring and the Book – Robert Browning
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 – Sue Townsend
* The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
* The Sleep Book – Dr. Seuss
The Stand – Stephen King
The Story Girl – L.M. Montgomery
The Story of a Mariage – Andrew Sean Greer
The Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu
* The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffinegger
The Way of Herbs – Michael Tierra
The Worst Hard Time – Timothy Egan
* The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – Michael Chabon
This Present Darkness – Frank Peretti
Time and Again – Jack Finney
* To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen
* We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver
We the Living – Ayn Rand
* We Were the Mulvaneys – Joyce Carol Oates
Where the Sidewalk Ends – Shel Silverstein
Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
* Women in the Wall – Julia O’Faolian
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig