1,001 Books to Read Before You Die Challenge

Today, I finished reading Junky by William S. Burroughs. I did not realize when I started reading it that this book is on the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. Most book bloggers are probably familiar with the infamous: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. I picked up a copy of this compilation a few years ago, and I have been plugging away at the list ever since. As I am getting close to scratching off my first set of "100 completed," I thought I would compile and post my list in an easily accessible place. Each time I scratch out another 100 books, starting with this first 100, I will offer up a Giveaway - deal?!

Also, a lot of these books are great, obviously, and could be interesting conversation starters. Is anyone else out there battling their way through this massive list? Thoughts/ideas? How is your own progress - and how do you keep track of it? I have tried to keep these books in roughly the order they appear in the book (by century).

My List (Progress: 118 of 1,001)

2000s

19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon

33. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides

49. Life of Pi – Yann Martel

54. White Teeth – Zadie Smith

1900s

87. Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis

97. Jack Maggs – Peter Carey

116. The Reader – Bernhard Schlink

180. The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

183. Possession – A.S. Byatt

195. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel

201. The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
242. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
246. Queer - William S. Burroughs
254. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

256. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera

271. A Boy’s Own Story – Edmund White

276. The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende

288. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

301. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

303. The World According to Garp – John Irving

335. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow

340. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

360. The Wild Boys – William S. Burroughs

375. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

411. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

413. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

427. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

433. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

436. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

437. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

445. Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger

452. The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor

456. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

461. Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs

469. Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe

477. The Once and Future King – T.H. White

484. On the Road – Jack Kerouac

494. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien

508. Lord of the Flies – William Golding

515. Junkie – William S. Burroughs

516. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow

521. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway

529. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

547. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

563. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

564. Animal Farm – George Orwell

574. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

587. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

589. The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene

592. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

608. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

609. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

610. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
619. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell

623. At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft

629. The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen

636. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

638. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald

643. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein

663. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway

667. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque

671. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

673. Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe

686. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

689. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

741. Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham

750. Death in Venice – Thomas Mann

752. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton

768. Young Törless – Robert Musil

780. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

784. Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser

1800s

788. The Awakening – Kate Chopin

790. The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells

794. Dracula - Bram Stoker

801. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
804. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

809. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

820. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson

821. The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy

825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

829. The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy

840. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

846. Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

857. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

861. The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky

866. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne

868. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

876. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

879. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
880. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

883. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

889. Walden – Henry David Thoreau

894. The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne

896. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville

897. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

902. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë

904. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë

905. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

911. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe

913. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

916. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe

931. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

932. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen

938. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

1700s

959. The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

970. Candide – Voltaire

987. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe

Pre-1700

994. Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit – John Lyly