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Reading Through the Decades Challenge


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As the name suggests, this is a challenge for reading throught the decades of the 20th century. I've provided a few titles here as a starting point (yes, biased), but this is just an example. Please, provide suggestions, and I'll add them here for everyone to see. Also, if I've gotten something wrong, do say so, and I'll stand corrected. In some decades I was seriously pulling blanks, so help me out, please.

 

1900's

A Room with a View by E. M. Forsters

Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L.Frank Baum

 

 

1910's

Demian by Hermann Hesse

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

Howards End by E. M. Forster

 

 

1920's

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

Lady Chatterly's Lover by D. H. Lawrence

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Age of Innocence byEdith Wharton

 

 

1930's

Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier

The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936)

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

 

 

1940's

1984 by George Orwell

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

The Stranger by Albert Camus

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

 

 

1950's

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricial Highsmith

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

By Love Posessed by James Gould Cozzens

 

 

1960's

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

 

 

1970's

Ragtime by E. L. Doctorov

Sophie's Choice by William Styron

All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

 

 

1980's

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Beloved by Tony Morrison

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie,

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

 

 

1990's

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunninham

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

 

 

Should there be like some rules for this? One book per month? So that'd be ten months. Starting September? I've never posted a challenge before... And I apologise for the typos, I'm at BF's computer, and the letters are all in the wrong place...

Edited by ii
added some books
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I found a nice list of potentials over on Wikipedia if anyone wants to take a look HERE. You can also click on each year to be taken to a longer list for that year and expand your choices even further. :blush:

 

This is a challenge in which I'm seriously interested, but I can't commit to another at the moment - it's taken me about 3 weeks to read I, Claudius, which I rather enjoyed! :D

Edited by Kell
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Thank you, Kell! I did mean to put more effort into this and even had a preliminary list of possible titles but then I forgot it home when we left (of course). I'll take a look at the list you provided and add what seems like interesting later, once I have more time.

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This seems like a really interesting challenge but I don't think I have the time for it just now because I really want to shorten my TBR list at the moment :D

 

A Home at the End of the World was written in 1990. It's a really, really fantastic read but just a little misplaced on the list :blush:

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A Home at the End of the World was written in 1990. It's a really, really fantastic read but just a little misplaced on the list :D

 

You're right. I knew that. Just a slight (80 years!) copy-paste error. So sorry, will fix it right away. Thank you for noticing!

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How are people planning to do this? For instance, does it have to be a fresh book or if we've already read one from a particular decade then does it count?

 

Should we establish some guidelines, or are people going to do their own thing? :D

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Hi,

I just found this thread - it really sounds great and I would love to join but I have a very similar personal challenge at the moment and not yet sure whether this one is colliding or harmonising with it.

 

I'll just add my personal reading challenge idea to this thread. May be you want to add some of those books to your challenge.

 

What I started doing some months ago is reading books from winners of the nobel price of literature. There is quite a good website from the nobel foundation itself: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/index.html

 

So far, I have read books written by:

Doris Lessing

Elfriede Jelinek

G

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Too many poets in the Nobel list. Interesting that there are little bunches together where I've read a few, and then large swathes where I've read none. There's a stretch from '54 to '64 where I've read stuff by seven of them (and bought a book by an eighth before giving it away). But from 64 to 82 I've only read a book by one of them. I wonder if the judges change and go from slightly more populist novelists to obscurants and poets, and then back?

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I would be interested in this challenge. Sounds like fun.

 

Here are a few of my suggestions: The Metamorphosis -Franz Kafka (1915), Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell (1936), Forever Amber -Kathleen Winsor (1944), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey (1962), Peyton Place -Grace Metalious (1956), I'm The King Of the Castle - Susan Hill (1977), The Color Purple - Alice Walker (1982).

 

I've never read any of these, but I think they all sound like good reads.

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Here's what I posted in my thread. :D

 

I'm not 100% sure what other people are planning to do, so I may adapt it, but for now I'm planning to read one book from each decade of the 1900s - not in any particular order - and I may even throw the 1800s in for good measure, if it doesn't prove too tricky!

I'm not going to put myself under pressure by giving myself a timescale - I have to read what I fancy rather than being constrained to what I ought to read. :006:

 

I've started with 1908.

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This definitely sounds like a challenge I will join. It meshes well with my goal to read one-each of every noted American author and I see good books on the list, plus many decades I already have covered, heh heh. If one should be reading previously unread books in the decades I'll gladly sign up for that also. Might I suggest two good reads:

 

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1958)

 

By Love Posessed by James Gould Cozzens (1957)

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If one should be reading previously unread books in the decades I'll gladly sign up for that also.

It's personal choice, I believe, but I'm certainly aiming to read 'new to me' novels. :)

 

I've just looked for By Love Possessed on Amazon, but as it's only available second-hand there is no synopsis. Could you give a bit of a synopsis, please? :)

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I've just looked for By Love Possessed on Amazon, but as it's only available second-hand there is no synopsis. Could you give a bit of a synopsis, please? :)

OK, I'll do that. Give me a bit to scratch my head, or perhaps look up my copy which is around here someplace after just re-reading it recently. :)

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I've just looked for By Love Possessed on Amazon, but as it's only available second-hand there is no synopsis. Could you give a bit of a synopsis, please? :)

 

OK Janet, Actually I didn't much care for the synopsis on the back cover. It's amateurish and makes it sound like a pot-boiler, so I put together a full review which I'm going to put in the Book Review section here. If you'd still like a shorter synopsis, I can do that too. Your call on how you want to handle it.

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Hmm, I'm thinking of joining this challenge. For 1900 I was going to choose Ethan Frome. Then I was drawn to The Secret Garden or The Wizard of Oz. Next I looked at Lucky Jim. :D Then I followed Kelly's link as above and Eureka! :):jump::e010:

I'm going with this one by Anthony Hope "Captain Dieppe" Can't think why :D Like it's not as if it: reminds me of anyone in particular or anything like that ;)

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