I heard about this reading challenge called Fill in the Gaps: 100 Project and thought I would try it out. The challenge encourages you to make a list of 100 books that you want to read in the next 5 years. The woman/author who started it "collected a list of 100 books that she wants to read in her life to fill in some of her reading gaps of classics and great contemporary fiction." Other people joining the challenge have different types of lists: all fiction, all non-fiction, biographies, ABC authors, ABC titles, books already owned, classics, and all sorts of other list types. I decided to try a Prize Winners list. I included books from the past 20 years (1989-2009) that won one or more of the following awards: Man Booker Prize, National Book Award for Fiction, National Book Critics Circle Award, Orange Prize for Fiction, Faulkner Award for Fiction, and/or the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Here's my list:
Reading Challenge: 100 Prize Winners
1. Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
2. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
3. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
4. Europe Central by William T. Vollmann
5. The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck
6. The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
7. Three Junes by Julia Glass
8. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
9. In America by Susan Sontag
10. Waiting by Ha Jin
11. Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
12. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
13. Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett
14. Sabbath's Theater by Phillip Roth
15. A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis
16. The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
17. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
18. Mating by Norman Rush
19. Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
20. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
21. The Gathering by Anne Enright
22. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
23. The Sea by John Banville
24. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
25. Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
26. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
27. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
28. Digrace by JM Coetzee
29. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
30. The God of Small Things by Araundhati Roy
31. Last Orders by Graham Swift
32. The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
33. How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman
34. Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
35. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
36. The Famished Road by Ben Okri
37. Possession by AS Byatt
38. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
39. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
40. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
41. March by Geraldine Brooks
42. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
43. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
44. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
45. Empire Falls by Richard Russo
46. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
47. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
48. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
49. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
50. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
51. Independence Day by Richard Ford
52. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
53. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
54. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
55. Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
56. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
57. The March by EL Doctorow
58. Atonement by Ian McEwan
59. Being Dead by Jim Crace
60. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
61. The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro
62. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
63. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
64. The Road Home by Rose Tremain
65. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
66. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
67. We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver
68. Small Island by Andrea Levy
69. Property by Valerie Martin
70. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
71. The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville
72. When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant
73. A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne
74. Larry's Party by Carol Shields
75. Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
76. A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore
77. Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
78. Everyman by Philip Roth
79. War Trash by Ha Jin
80. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
81. Postcards by E. Annie Proulx
82. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
83. The King's Evil by Will Heinrich
84. The Book of Salt by Monique Truong
85. Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth (co-winner)
86. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
87. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
88. The Early Stories by John Updike
89. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
90. The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
91. Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories by Gina Berriault
92. Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin
93. Billy Bathgate by EL Doctorow
94. Spartina by John Casey
95. Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
96. The Caprices by Sabina Murray
97. The Human Stain by Philip Roth
98. The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor
99. Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
100. The Great Man by Kate Christensen
I might substitute some of these with new prize winners as they come out. I'm starting with #78 Everyman by Philip Roth. From Goodreads:
Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The bestselling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.
The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.
The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.
Do you want to participate in the challenge (using my list or your own)? If you make your own list, post it in the comments. I'll post updates on the challenge as I make progress on the books.
