30-to-30 Check-In

Sooooo, my birthday was June 1st and a few people have suggested that I should consider this challenge to extend throughout my 30th year.  That's code for I didn't make it.  

While I do still intend to read all the titles that I did not get to this past year, I can accept my failure on finishing up my self-challenged 30-to-30 list.  I got to 23.  And a half.

Moral: setting a specific reading list is hard, particularly when I was the only one holding myself to it and I refused to approach any book with a heavy heart.  If I wasn't feeling it, I waited until I was or, well, I hit 30 and hadn't read it yet.  For many (*cough* Faulkner *cough*), the simple fact remained that I didn't want to read it and putting it on this list (or swapping for another Faulkner title people assured me would be more reader-friendly) didn't seem to induce me to pick it up.  Others, like the Donna Tartt, remain on this weird "oooh, I want to be able to power through so I need a whole weekend" level where I really want to read it and yet want the circumstances to be right.  Ultimately, though, aren't the "right circumstances" just you wanting to read it?  Come on, subconscious, loosen up and let me get at this one. Most, however, were on the "oh right, that one" level, where I have a vague interest, but never overpowering enough to make it the book I picked up when I looked around me for the next thing to read.

Like I said, though. I'll power through and keep on going, but in the meantime, you can also expect a 35-to-35 list coming soon.  (Because it's not like being behind on one thing will keep me from starting something else.)

1. The Iliad - Homer
2. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood 
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 swapped for A Light in August by William Faulkner
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 (reading aloud now)
15. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeline L'Engle 
16. The Balkan Trilogy - Olivia Manning replaced by The Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
17. West With the Night - Beryl Markham
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
19. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
20. The Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller (reading now)
21. The Women of Brewster Place - Gloria Naylor
22. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
23. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
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
29. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut 
30. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde