The full list of novels can be found here. These are the titles which have been banned or challenged, and the novels I’ve read are crossed off.

I added this task to my list because I’ve already read many of the books on the ALA list, and they’re some of the awesomest (shut up, it is a word) novels I’ve ever come across. You’ll have a hell of a lot more fun reading The Catcher in the Rye than trying to slog through Twilight (I gave up after 50 pages, breaking my previous Peter-Carey-induced record). Hell, I’d recommend American Psycho to schoolkids before I’d let them get their paws on anything Stephenie Meyer has shat out.

Although, I’d recommend American Psycho to everyone, just for the chapter-length discussions of the discography of various eighties pop singers. It seriously broadened my appreciation of Phil Collins.

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
38. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
48. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
66. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike

I’m planning to work through the books roughly in numerical order, depending on what the library has on shelf - so The Great Gatsby is first on my list. I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank my high school English teacher for assigning us Brave New World (instead of the infinitely superior 1984) in Year 11, so now I don’t have to waste time reading the damn thing again.

There are around 35 unread novels on the list as I write this. I have 30 months to complete my list before I turn 25, so my goal is two per month (since I’m also planning to work my way through the Booker-prize-winning novels).

I realise this may sound ambitious, but hear ye: I EAT BOOKS. I can read 1000 pages in a day (especially if they’re Stephen King pages. No, I have no shame). If reading were a career option, I would be on the Fortune 500. I FEAR NO READING LIST, particularly this one, with its admirable lack of Peter Carey doorstops novels.

Seriously, fuck Peter Carey.