Back in January, I heard from a book blog that I like to read (Modern Mrs. Darcy) about a woman who had taken on an ambitious reading project: she was going to read one book from each of the last 100 years in 2019.
The idea immediately intrigued me. I started thinking about parameters for my possible project and the books I would choose.
My second thought, after deciding I would take this project on, was that finding the right balance of books would be important. I didn't want to read 90 books by white guys and 10 token books by women and people of color. Pretty much right away, I decided that I would want my 100 books to be equally balanced between women/men and POC/white people.
The woman whose idea this was (I'm assuming, but it's possible she got the idea from someone else) posted her book list and I read through it, looking for ideas. When I saw that she had multiple books by the same authors, I decided I would limit my picks to one book per author. I also saw that she wasn't reading chronologically but rather choosing books based on what she felt like reading next. I decided I would read by decade: start with the 20s and read them all, then reflect on the decade of books before moving onto the next one.
All of this is to say that I did not come up with this idea, but I have made it my own and I am very excited about it.
After a few months of planning, of brainstorming books and making lists of options on my spreadsheet (the lists for some years were long, while for other years I had to scramble to find even one book I wanted to read), I decided to start on April 1. I didn't want to wait until next January, and I'm not giving myself a time constraint of only one year since I am not planning to read these books exclusively (I'm in more than one book club). Since this project is likely to last into 2020, by the end I will have read books from 101 years.
Without further ado, here is my list of books as it now stands:
| 1920 | The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton |
| 1921 | Second April | Edna St. Vincent Millay |
| 1922 | Siddhartha | Herman Hesse |
| 1923 | The Prophet | Kahlil Gibran |
| 1924 | Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair | Pablo Neruda |
| 1925 | Mrs. Dalloway | Virginia Woolf |
| 1926 | The Weary Blues | Langston Hughes |
| 1927 | The Bridge of San Luis Rey | Thornton Wilder |
| 1928 | All Quiet on the Western Front | Erich Maria Remarque |
| 1929 | Doña Bárbara | Romulo Gallegos |
| 1930 | The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett |
| 1931 | The Joy of Cooking | Irma S. Rombauer |
| 1932 | Brave New World | Aldous Huxley |
| 1933 | The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas | Gertrude Stein |
| 1934 | Jonah's Gourd Vine | Zora Neale Hurston |
| 1935 | Gaudy Night | Dorothy Sayers |
| 1936 | How to Win Friends and Influence People | Dale Carnegie |
| 1937 | Out of Africa | Karen Blixen |
| 1938 | Rebecca | Daphne du Maurier |
| 1939 | At Swim-Two-Birds | Flann O'Brien |
| 1940 | The Heart is a Lonely Hunter | Carson McCullers |
| 1941 | Twelve Million Black Voices | Richard Wright |
| 1942 | The Screwtape Letters | C.S. Lewis |
| 1943 | The Fountainhead | Ayn Rand |
| 1944 | The Portable Dorothy Parker | Dorothy Parker |
| 1945 | If He Hollers Let Him Go | Chester Himes |
| 1946 | The Street | Ann Petry |
| 1947 | The Diary of a Young Girl | Anne Frank |
| 1948 | The Heart of the Matter | Graham Greene |
| 1949 | 1984 | George Orwell |
| 1950 | Strangers on a Train | Patricia Highsmith |
| 1951 | The Daughter of Time | Josephine Tey |
| 1952 | Excellent Women | Barbara Pym |
| 1953 | Go Tell it on the Mountain | James Baldwin |
| 1954 | Collected Poems | Wallace Stevens |
| 1955 | A Good Man Is Hard to Find | Flannery O'Connor |
| 1956 | The Temple of the Golden Pavilion | Yukio Mishima |
| 1957 | On the Road | Jack Kerouac |
| 1958 | Exodus | Leon Uris |
| 1959 | The Sirens of Titan | Kurt Vonnegut |
| 1960 | Rabbit, Run | John Updike |
| 1961 | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller |
| 1962 | Silent Spring | Rachel Carson |
| 1963 | The Feminine Mystique | Betty Friedan |
| 1964 | A Single Man | Christopher Isherwood |
| 1965 | Dune | Frank Herbert |
| 1966 | In Cold Blood | Truman Capote |
| 1967 | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
| 1968 | Slouching Towards Bethlehem | Joan Didion |
| 1969 | I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Maya Angelou |
| 1970 | The Third Life of Grange Copeland | Alice Walker |
| 1971 | Open Veins of Latin America | Eduardo Galeano |
| 1972 | Gorilla, My Love | Toni Cade Bambara |
| 1973 | Diving Into the Wreck | Adrienne Rich |
| 1974 | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance | Robert Pirsig |
| 1975 | Corregidora | Gayl Jones |
| 1976 | Woman Warrior | Maxine Hong Kingston |
| 1977 | The Shining | Stephen King |
| 1978 | The World According to Garp | John Irving |
| 1979 | Kindred | Octavia Butler |
| 1980 | The Samurai | Shusaku Endo |
| 1981 | Women Race and Class | Angela Davis |
| 1982 | The House of the Spirits | Isabel Allende |
| 1983 | The Valley | Rolando Hinojosa |
| 1984 | Sister Outsider | Audre Lorde |
| 1985 | Lonesome Dove | Larry McMurtry |
| 1986 | The Progress of Love | Alice Munro |
| 1987 | Beloved | Toni Morrison |
| 1988 | The Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie |
| 1989 | The Joy Luck Club | Amy Tan |
| 1990 | The Piano Lesson | August Wilson |
| 1991 | How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents | Julia Alvarez |
| 1992 | The English Patient | Michael Ondaatje |
| 1993 | A Lesson Before Dying | Ernest Gaines |
| 1994 | What I Lived For | Joyce Carol Oates |
| 1995 | The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle | Haruki Murakami |
| 1996 | Unlocking the Air | Ursula Le Guin |
| 1997 | The God of Small Things | Arundhati Roy |
| 1998 | Almost a Woman | Esmerelda Santiago |
| 1999 | The Coldest Winter Ever | Sister Souljah |
| 2000 | A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius | Dave Eggers |
| 2001 | Bel Canto | Ann Patchett |
| 2002 | The Impressionist | Hari Kunzru |
| 2003 | The Known World | Edward Jones |
| 2004 | Little Scarlet | Walter Mosley |
| 2005 | On Beauty | Zadie Smith |
| 2006 | Everyman | Philip Roth |
| 2007 | Lost City Radio | Daniel Alarcón |
| 2008 | The Plague of Doves | Louise Erdrich |
| 2009 | In Other Rooms, Other Wonders | Daniyal Mueeneddin |
| 2010 | A Visit from the Goon Squad | Jennifer Egan |
| 2011 | Tina's Mouth | Keshni Kashyap |
| 2012 | The Twelve Tribes of Hattie | Ayana Mathis |
| 2013 | Bird of Paradise | Raquel Cepeda |
| 2014 | A Brief History of Seven Killings | Marlon James |
| 2015 | Ordinary Light | Tracy K. Smith |
| 2016 | Born a Crime | Trevor Noah |
| 2017 | Pachinko | Min Jin Lee |
| 2018 | The Poet X | Elizabeth Acevedo |
| 2019 | | |
| 2020 | | |
Really excited to be doing this too! Going to post my list soon—I just got home from the library with my first batch! x
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