Only 30 Books to Go!

As I begin to read The Adventures of Augie March, I realize that I really am on the home stretch right now, with only 30 books, including Augie, to go. I'd like to say I'll be done in a year, but I'm probably going to be close to a year and a half or more.

Regardless of when I end up finishing, the fact remains that I have only 30 books to read. While I was reading American Pastoral, I did manage to amass almost all of the remaining books at one time. I'm not sure why I felt compelled to do this, maybe as a way to see exactly how much I have left to read.

Pictured above are 28 of the remaining 31 books from the list, shelved alphabetically. You'll notice that American Pastoral is included in the picture, as it was the one I was reading at the time. There are also three books missing as well; Loving, White Noise, and At Swim-Two-Birds.

These three are missing, as the library currently doesn't own a copy. However, they do have an ebook version of White Noise, so I'll make that my first and only ebook read of the 100. And I was able to acquire a copy of Loving while in Vancouver last week, which brings my total owned books to 10, six of which I haven't read yet.

That leaves only At Swim-Two-Brids as the only book I haven't been able to get my hands on yet. I'll keep my eyes out at every used bookstore I visit, and worst case scenario, I guess I'll have to buy a new copy sometime next year.

So now I continue my struggle with figuring what order to read these remaining books. As I've always said, I don't want to leave myself with some very long ones at the end. Based on the photo below, which has them arranged from thin to thick, there are some rather hefty reads left.

This picture is a little misleading, as Gravity's Rainbow is some 300 pages longer than White Teeth, but you get the idea. I'll need to mix in the books from the right with the books on the left. The book I'm currently reading is pretty much bang in the middle.

I also took the liberty of sorting them by date, from oldest to newest. I find it interesting to note that I have only five books left that were written in the last 40 years.

If everything goes according to plan, the book on the far right, Never Let Me Go, will be #99, and the book on the far left, A Passage to India, will be #98.

Now the only thing left to do is to get reading.


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