Halfway mark...

Well, drat.  Today is my half birthday, which means I should theoretically be through 15 titles as I only have six months to complete my self-imposed challenge. I've (obviously) been slow in posting reviews, but in reality, I've read 10 of these books and I'm in the middle of reading two.

I would, however, like to take this opportunity to note that I AM going to substitute at least one book from the original list. I'm swapping out The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning for The Dark Is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper.  Both of these are big ol' omnibus collections that have been sitting on my shelves for a while and both were recommended by people whose opinions I trust, but since one of my goals for this whole endeavor (definitely not the only but one thing I kept in mind when drafting the list) is to get to books that I "should" read while I'm still "young," then it would probably be more important for me to read a classic young reader series.  I've read the first book in the series but I have four to go.

So here's what I've managed to read and cross off the list:

1. The Iliad - Homer (bonus points for The Odyssey and double bonus points for The Aeneid by Virgil)
2. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (bonus points for Oryx and Crake)
3. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
4. Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
5. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
6. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
7. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
8. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (bonus points for A Light in August)
9. The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
10. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
11. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
12. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
13. The Wings of the Dove - Henry James
14. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
15. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeline L'Engle
16. The Balkan Trilogy - Olivia Manning The Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper (1 out of 5 books read)
17. West With the Night - Beryl Markham
18. 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (bonus points for Love in the Time of Cholera)
19. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
20. The Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller (bonus points for The Tropic of Capricorn)
21. The Women of Brewster Place - Gloria Naylor
22. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
23. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon (the biggest bonus points in the world for Gravity's Rainbow)
24. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
25. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
26. Maus - Art Spiegelman
27. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
28. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (reading now!)
29. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
30. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde