Reading Through the Decades Challenge

[ii]

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...

[Kell]

I found a nice list of potentials over on Wikipedia if anyone wants to take a look HERE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_years_in_literature). You can also click on each year to be taken to a longer list for that year and expand your choices even further. :)

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! :lol:

[ii]

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.

[frankie]

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 :roll:

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 :)

[ii]

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 :)

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!

[kb.marsh]

I like the sound of this challenge, when my TBR list goes down I may join in :mrgreen:

[Janet]

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? :)

[ii]

I guess we should get some guidelines, yes. I'm flying back home today, so I can focus more on it then. What kinds of things do you usually have?

[Janet]

I'm not sure - I've not taken part in any challenges before.

[phoenix]

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
Günter Grass
Heinrich Böll
Samuel Beckett
Hermann Hesse
Thomas Mann
Knut Hamsun

So, you see, I have still quite a lot to read for this challenge - but yours is really tempting.
May be I'll wait for the rules to see whether I can manag this in addition :roll:

A day should really have more hours for reading...

[Freewheeling Andy]

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?

[kelly2008]

I'd love to join in this challenge :) I don't have any suggestions for other books though :(

[nursenblack]

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.

[kelly2008]

To help me find books for each decade I'm going to use http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/most-popular/?year=1900&genre=

I just typed in the year 1900 and loads of books have come up so hopefully I'll find a good one.

Are we starting this now? and is it one decade/book per month?

[Janet]

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

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. :)

I've started with 1908.

[kelly2008]

Thanks. Yeah I don't think I'll put a time scale on it, although I will try to read atleast one a month. I think I'm going to try and read in order so I can keep track :) I'll see what happens and it also depends in what books I am able to get. :)

[ii]

I added some books to the list in the original post, quite at random, I must say.

[Paul]

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)

[Janet]

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? :)

[Paul]

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. :)

[Paul]

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.

[kernow_reader]

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. :10_confused: Then I followed Kelly's link as above and Eureka! :woohoo::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 ;)