Read these books!

Or at least, read the list. The book, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, was published a few years ago. I am always drawn to it when book browsing, but then I talk myself out of it - why do I need to spend my time reading about reading books . . . wouldn't it be better spent reading actual books?

Then I found a neat little tool. Someone called Arukiyomi has created a spreadsheet that you can use to track your progress through the list. I spent about 5 minutes filling it out for myself. I have read 80 of the listed books, or about 8%. According to the spreadsheet, that means if I die at the average age of a female (provided by the spreadsheet), I have to read 19 of these a year for the rest of my life to finish the list!!

OK, that's stressful. But the really cool part of filling out the spreadsheet? A total of 21 of those books, I'd read in book club. At our current rate of about 2 per year, that means in another 500 years we'll have the list completed!

Here are the book club books on the list, in reverse chronological order:

Middlesex
Atonement
Life of Pi
White Teeth
The Blind Assassin
The Poisonwood Bible
The God of Small Things
Alias Grace
A Fine Balance
Corelli's Mandolin
Cat's Eye
Beloved
The Handmaid's Tale
A Confederacy of Dunces
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Lolita
Tender is the Night
The Awakening
The Portrait of a Lady
Anna Karenina
Jane Eyre

All I have to say, is good thing we read all those Margaret Atwood books!