2017 Beat the Backlist

    Okay, it's been a while but I'm back!  I fell a bit behind with the holidays.  It seems like every year I decide to hand knit/crochet a few Christmas presents and then wait until the last possible minute to finish them.  I hope you had a happy holiday season, I'm looking forward to a nice clean slate in 2017.

    One of the things I'd like to do this year is to work on making this blog successful.  As I was scrolling around Pinterest today I found a pin detailing various 2017 reading challenges.  One of them was the 2017 Beat the Backlist challenge at Novel Knight.  The challenge is simple:  either make a list of books you'd like to read this year or pick a number of books you'd like to read.  All books must have been published prior to 2017, so new releases do not count.  Since this blog is about my journey through the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die I figured this would be the perfect challenge for me.  Here's my list:

1.  Dracula by Bram Stoker
2.  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
4.  All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
5.  Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
6.  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
7.  At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft
8.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
9.  Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
10.  The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
11.  The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
12.  Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
13.  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
14.  The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
15.  Emma by Jane Austen
16.  Pride and Predjudice by Jane Austen
17.  Life of Pi by Yann Martel
18.  The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
19.  The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe
20.  Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
21.  The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
22.  Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
23.  The Color Purple by Alice Walker
24.  Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice
25.  Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
26.  Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot
27.  Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
28.  Blindness by Henry Green
29.  The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
30.  Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith

    So wish me luck!  I've flipped through my copy of 1001 Books... and picked 29 at random.  Dracula, which I had been planning to read next, makes 30!  I'm off to get started, have a safe and happy New Year!

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