To gobble
About the 130 Challenge
Hi there! This is the list of 130 books that I will be reading and reviewing in 2014 (phew!). A couple of these I have read before, and some I have started but never finished. Not anymore. This year, I solemnly swear to devour each one thoroughly and (hopefully) live to tell the tale.
So there you go.. Here’s the list in no particular order (here’s a nice story behind the compilation of this list).
Books that I have read will be striked-through like this.
Books that I haven’t found anywhere or haven’t bought, will be in black.
Books that I have with me (and currently reading) will be in green.
All book titles link to their page on Goodreads, so that you dear reader, can check them out too (you’re welcome :P).
Foundation and Empire (Foundation, #2) |
| Second Foundation (Foundation, #3) |
| Foundation’s Edge (Foundation, #4) |
| Foundation and Earth (Foundation, #5) |
| One Hundred Years of Solitude |
Brave New World |
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker’s Guide, #1) |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray |
| Catch-22 (Catch-22, #1) |
A Thousand Splendid Suns |
A Brief History of Time |
| Kane and Abel (Kane and Abel, #1) |
| Where the Sidewalk Ends |
| The Great Gatsby |
Of Mice and Men |
| Slaughterhouse-Five |
Heidi |
Coraline |
| The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
| Jane Eyre |
| Wuthering Heights |
Lord of the Flies |
| Sense and Sensibility |
| The Hunchback of Notre-Dame |
| Everybody Out of the Laundromat, I Need to Think! |
| The Hobbit |
| Crime and Punishment |
| The Iliad |
| The Metamorphosis |
| The Sun Also Rises |
Riot |
The Time Machine |
Kim |
| The Brothers Karamazov |
| Uncle Tom’s Cabin |
| Atlas Shrugged |
The Sense of an Ending |
The Fault in Our Stars |
| Fight Club |
| Norwegian Wood |
| And Then There Were None |
| The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Hercule Poirot #1) |
| The Black Dahlia (L.A. Quartet, #1) |
| A Time to Kill (Jake Brigance, #1) |
| The Name of the Rose |
| The Pelican Brief |
| No Country for Old Men |
| The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency #1) |
| The Wasp Factory |
| Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies |
| Swimming Home |
| His Majesty’s Dragon (Temeraire, #1) |
| No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam |
The Creation of Wealth: The Tatas from the 19th to the 21st Century |
| Under the Tuscan Sun |
| Love in the Time of Cholera |
| City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi |
A Woman of No Importance |
| Tell Me Your Dreams |
| Lady Windermere’s Fan |
The Importance of Being Earnest |
| Industrial Society and Its Future |
Sin City, Vol. 1: The Hard Goodbye (Sin City, #1) |
| Selected Tales |
| The Yoga Sutras |
| The Hungry Tide |
| The Inner Courtyard: Stories By Indian Women |
Em and The Big Hoom |
The Guide |
| The Inscrutable Americans |
| To Mock a Mockingbird: And Other Logic Puzzles |
| The Bastard of Istanbul |
| Tank Girl (Tank Girl, #1) |
Outliers: The Story of Success |
Good Night, Mr. Tom |
| The Girl in Blue |
| I, Claudius (Claudius, #1) |
| City of Thieves |
| Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? |
| The Golden Gate |
Fowler’s End |
| Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking |
| Flowers for Algernon |
| The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell 1914-44 |
| House of Leaves |
| V for Vendetta |
| And the Mountains Echoed |
| The Prophet |
| Omerta |
| The Class |
| The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic |
Habu Ki Aag And Other Stories |
Beyond The Last Blue Mountain: A Life Of J. R. D. Tata |
| Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata |
The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity |
| India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy |
| The Man-Eater of Malgudi |
| The Body |
| The Pregnant King |
| Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Freakonomics, #1) |
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland |
| War and Peace |
| The Gun Seller |
| The Handmaid’s Tale |
| Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West |
| The Color Purple |
| The Remains of the Day |
| Oranges are Not the Only Fruit |
Johnny Gone Down |
Jonathan Livingston Seagull |
Solo |
| Ender’s Game (The Ender Quintet, #1) |
| Honour |
| The Emperor of All Maladies |
| The Golem and the Jinni |
| The Ocean at the End of the Lane |
| The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1) |
Oranges for Christmas |
| The Little Prince |
The Accidental Prime Minister : The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh |
| Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anything |
| Kafka on the Shore |
The Stranger |
| Fahrenheit 451 |
The Call of Cthulhu |
| Nine Princes in Amber (Amber Chronicles, #1) |
| Full Dark, No Stars |
The Trial |
| India’s Struggle for Independence |
Foucault’s Pendulum |
That’s it. 130 books y’all!
Aamil Syed 
I wish I could say “Race you there, mate” but I can’t :-(
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Do you specifically want physical copies? Looking through your list I noticed there were a lot of classic which are freely available on http://www.gutenberg.org/ . (Its a website that allows free download of all the out of copyright books they’ve managed to type up, over 42,000 of them in fact). Hope that helps!
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Edit: classics
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Thanks Zoe! That will surely help me a lot :)
I read ebooks from project gutenberg, so yeah that’s there. But I prefer hard copies. Better feel to them :)
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Impressive list – good luck! You have a few short novels/quick reads that should hopefully you make up for time when you’re reading some of those big ones. I can’t believe you’re going to read Vanity Fair and War and Peace in the same year! I really hope you make it!
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Thank you very much, Jen!
That was the idea, to have short books to make up for time lost on big books. It’s going to be an uphill task. Hope to see you around when I do it :)
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Good luck to you…been checking in daily, not sure if you’re too busy reading to update or if you’re too busy to read…hope it’s going well!
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Hey Justin! Thank you very much. I’ve been caught up in a lot of work and couldn’t concentrate on reading. Doing light reading until this passes and then I’ll storm through them books :P
Review of The Trial by Franz Kafka coming soon (spoiler: totally bizarre book).
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Hello! Finished my 5th book today. Here’s the review for The Trial
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Awesome, great review…it’s on my ever growing list now!
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Wow – very impressive list. War and Peace is going to take some getting through! I managed to read it once when I did a lot of commuting by train. Good luck :)
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Thank you! My strategy is to finish light books on commutes and to spend my weekends and other long holidays with the big ones.
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I may possibly be the only person you know who owns a copy of Indian Courtyard (in fact my copy is nicked from my grandpa! ;) ). Rare to find and extremely difficult to put down! So, I lend it to you under the condition that I get it back as soon as you’re done, please?! :D
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Of course! I treat books like my babies. And I had listed that book to read only because you spoke so highly of it. So, it is your responsibility to get me that copy. When will you give it to me? September?
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September it is! :-D
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Great!
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You should put in saying what book has been replaced by what! I know it is difficult, but that would be a good record to keep.
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I thought of that, but by then, I had already changed the books and now I don’t have any record of which books they were. Sorry.
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Darn.
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I think it is time you started Kane and Abel. And never keep it down. You’re saying you’ll read only #1, but I would suggest you read #2 right after. I blows up in your face. Avoid #3. Not related.
Before I oversell this, I should make a convenient exit. READ IT!
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Wow, impressive list, with many classics :)
I too love reading classics. I mostly download them from Feedbooks.
I wanted to contact you about review of my latest novel Lemon Girl. But seems like your time is already full! Still, if you are interested, do drop me a line at write2jyoti@jyotiarora.com
You can check out the book here:: http://jyotiarora.com/lemon-girl
Thanks.
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Hi Jyoti!
Thanks for stopping by. I would have loved to review your book. But as you can see I’m already swamped. All the best!
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Yes, I can see that. It’s a long list, and with books like War and Peace and Hunchback of Notre-Dame, it’s heavy too!
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Those books I’ll be reading next year. This year, I shall wrap up with light titles. Around 52 books I’ll finish I guess.
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