second only to my love of bookshelves, is my love of books.

which is why it pains me i'm not better at updating my virtual bookshelf on facebook. but whatever.

anyway, tonight i ate hamburgers which meant that when i got home i didn't have to make dinner. which is awesome: more internet time.

which is how i got to reading other people's blogs and deciding that i want to show off my literary knowledge. sort of anyway. you see there is some book about the 1001 books you must read before you die. no doubt there are hundreds of blogs dedicated to how the list is wrong. and you know, it is (no judy blume for example), but frankly i have taken it as a challenge. and so has 3m (not the company) and others. so i'm reading ten books in ten months to take myself from being 5% well read to 6% well read. you too can join the challenge here. where you will also find the full list.

and just so you know, my baseline is

3. On Beauty – Zadie Smith
19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
43. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
54. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
63. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
76. The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
93. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
147. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
165. Wild Swans – Jung Chang
272. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
312. The Shining – Stephen King
340. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
358. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
367. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
375. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
408. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
434. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
450. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
451. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
456. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
467. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
484. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
496. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (sort of)
499. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
529. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
563. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
574. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
603. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
639. Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse (probably)
649. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
675. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
686. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
698. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
714. The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
726. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
761. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
799. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
804. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
863. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
888. Hard Times – Charles Dickens
901. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
902. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
903. Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
904. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
932. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
933. Persuasion – Jane Austen
936. Emma – Jane Austen
937. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
938. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
940. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen