The Great Book Challenge Commences!

Well, the New Year has rolled in and so too has the (insane?) desire to set myself some exciting challenges!

I've always loved reading, but thought it was time to swap my usual book choices (thrillers, crime novels, chick-lit etc.) for some serious literary classics. After much research (and hours of help from my 'Ginger Genius' friend) I have created my own version of the BBC's 100 Must Read books. My hybrid list includes several of the BBC's choices; although I've swapped some of them (mainly the children's books and the ones I’ve already read) for some future classics.

The challenge is two-pronged; firstly to work my way through the list at a sufficiently reasonable pace that ensures I finish it before I turn grey/ blind, and secondly to use this opportunity to improve my English vocabulary. I will write reviews on each of the books as I finish them and will also share any fabulous new words I learned whilst reading the books. The Road to Self Improvement here I come! Wish me luck - I think I may need it!!!!

(Insanity must be contagious, as a few of my friends have agreed to join me in my challenge! I’ll be asking them to contribute their reviews on the books too. And if any of you lovely readers out there would like to join us on our quest to literary accomplishment then please do. You’d be very welcome to submit your reviews too.)

Without further ado, here is the 100 Must Read Books List:

1.    The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

2.    Angela’s Ashes - Frank McCourt

3.    Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

4.    Atonement, Ian McEwan

5.    The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

6.    A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul

7.    Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks

8.    Bleak House – Charles Dickens

9.    Breakfast at Tiffany’s - Truman Capote

10.  Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

11.  Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres

12.  Catch-22, Joseph Heller

13.  The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger 

14.  The Constant Gardener - John le Carre

15.  The Count of Monte Christo – Alexandre Dumas

16.  A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

17.  Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

18.  The Color Purple – Alice Walker

19.  Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

20.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon

21.  David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

22.  The Divine Comedy – Alighiere Dante

23.  Emma, Jane Austen

24.  Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy

25.  A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

26.  The Five People you Meet in Heaven- Mitch Albom

27.  Flowers In The Attic, Virginia Andrews

28.  Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

29.  Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

30.  The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck

31.  Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

32.  The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald

33.  Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

34.  Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling

35.  Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

36.  His Dark Materials Trilogy, Philip Pullman

37.  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

38.  Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

39.  The Inferno – Dante

40.  Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

41.  Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach

42.  Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

43.  To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

44.  The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

45.  Lady Chatterley’s Lover - David Herbert Lawrence

46.  Life of Pi – Yann Martel

47.  Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

48.  Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

49.  Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

50.  Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

51.  The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

52.  Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

53.  The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka

54.  Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

55.  Men Without Women – Earnest Hemingway

56.  Middlemarch – George Eliot

57.  Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

58.  My Antonia – Willa Cather

59.  1984 – George Orwell

60.  One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

61.  One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

62.  Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

63.  Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

64.  One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

65.  No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

66.  Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson

67.  Papillon, Henri Charriere

68.  A Passage to India – E.M. Forster

69.  Persuasion, Jane Austen

70.  The Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde

71.  The Pillars of The Earth, Ken Follett

72.  Possession – AS Byatt

73.  A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving

74.  Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

75.  The Power Of One, Bryce Courtenay

76.  Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

77.  The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

78.  Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe

79.  The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson

80.  The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd

81.  Skeleton Key, Anthony Horowitz

82.  Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

83.  A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

84.  Sons And Lovers, D. H. Lawrence

85.  A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

86.  Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

87.  Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

88.  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – David Mitchell

89.  A thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

90.  The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

91.  To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

92.  Travels – Michael Crichton

93.  Ulysses, James Joyce

94.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

95.  Veronica Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho

96.  War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

97.  The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

98.  Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak

99.  Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

100. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte