Eating My Hat

The Portland Mercury's blog made joking reference to "read War & Peace" and "get six-pack abs" as classic unrealistic New Year's Resolutions. My continuing quest to reach the unreachable star leads us here:

I went around the house on New Year's Day and gathered up all of the books belonging to me & Julia which I haven't finished (or begun) reading. Here now, the list.

1. Abu-Jamal, Mumia - Live from Death Row
2. Aczel, Amir D. - The Mystery of the Aleph
3. Alighieri, Dante - The Divine Comedy
4. Andersen, Hans Christian - The Little Mermaid (ill. by Gfroerer, Julia)
5. Angelou, Maya - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
6. Borges, Jorge Luis - The Book of Imaginary Beings
7. Bronte, Charlotte - (The Illustrated) Jane Eyre (ill. Dame Darcy)
8. Buechner, Georg - Lenz
9. Burgess, Anthony - Little Wilson and Big God: part 1 of the Confessions
10. Burton, Sir Richard - The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights
11. Buzzell, Colby - My War: Killing Time in Iraq
12. Campbell, Joseph - The Hero with a Thousand Faces
13. Campbell, Joseph - Myths to Live By
14. Camus, Albert - Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
15. Camus, Albert - The Stranger
16. Capote, Truman - In Cold Blood
17. Cathcart, Thomas and Klein, Daniel - Plato and a Platypus walk into a Bar...
18. de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote (trans. Edith Grossman)
19. Cheever, John - The Stories of John Cheever
20. Christie, Agatha - Death Comes as The End
21. Coelho, Paulo - Warrior of the Light
22. Coen, Joen & Ethan - Blood Simple
23. Colette - The Other One
24. Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
25. Cortazar, Julio - Hopscotch
26. Dachy, Mark - Dada
27. Desnos, Robert - Selected Poems
28. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Notes from the Underground
29. Eggers, Dave - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
30. Ellsworth, Theo - Capacity
31. Farmer, Philip Jose - Riverworld and Other Stories
32. Field, Syd - Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting
33. Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
34. Fleming, Ian - Goldfinger
35. Fleming, Ian - Moonraker
36. Foner, Eric - The Story of American Freedom
37. Franzen, Jonathan - The Corrections
38. Gaiman, Neil - Neverwhere
39. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel - Love in the Time of Cholera
40. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel - One Hundred Years of Solitude
41. George - What Would Socrates Say?
42. George - The Epic of Gilgamesh
43. Gogol - The Overcoat and other Short Stories
44. Gray, Alasdair - The Book of Prefaces
45. Greene, Graham - The Human Factor
46. Grothe, Dr. Mardy - Oxymoronica
47. Hall, Donald - Breakfast Served Any Time All Day
48. Herbert, Frank - Dune
49. Hesse, Herman - Siddhartha
50. Hiassen, Carl - Basket Case
51. Joyce, James - Dubliners
52. July, Miranda - No one belongs here more than you
53. Kafka, Franz - The Castle
54. Lassky, David - Ulysses
55. Ketcham - James Madison
56. King, Stephen - Danse Macabre
57. King, Stephen - The Shining
58. Leeming - The World of Myth
59. Melville, Herman - Moby-Dick, or The Whale
60. Melville, Herman - Pierre, or The Ambiguities
61. Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita
62. Nietzsche, Friedrich - The Birth of Tragedy
63. Otomo, Katsuhiro - Akira
64. Plato - Great Dialogues of Plato
65. Pynchon, Thomas - Gravity's Rainbow
66. Russell, Bertrand - Why I Am Not a Christian
67. de Sade - Juliette
68. Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
69. Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
70. Sinclair, Upton - Oil!
71. Sontag, Susan - Against Interpretation and Other Essays
72. Sophocles - The Oedipus Cycle
73. Stone, Irving - The Agony and the Ecstasy
74. Stevenson, Robert Louis - The Suicide Club
75. Strunk & White - The Elements of Style
76. Suetonius - The 12 Caesars
77. Sumler - A History of Europe in the 20th Century
78. Swift - Gulliver's Travels
79. Tartt, Donna - The Little Friend
80. Tolstoy, Leo - War & Peace
81. Voltaire - Candide
82. Watts, Alan - The Way of Zen
83. White, T.H. - The Once and Future King
84. Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
85. Welsh, Irvine - Trainspotting (and Filth, not pictured or borrowed)
86. Wolfe, Tom - Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine
87. Yeats, William Butler - Selected Poems and Three Plays
88. Zinn, Howard - A People's History of the United States

For the most part, I didn't count self-help / writing guides / gigantic art books. The Complete Sherlock Holmes and some Jeeves & Wooster didn't make the cut because they all had to fit on one shelf.

Here resolved, I will read each of these books from start to finish, skimming only Dune and probably Siddhartha (with an option to "get the gist of" The Little Friend) and write reviews / responses / &c. in this space. Also, I will get those six-pack abs.