The 2011-12 List:
- Louis Bayard, The School of Night
- Thomas C. Foster, Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America
- Evelyn Waugh, Helena
- Mary Doria Russell, A Thread of Grace
- Iris Murdoch, The Bell
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
- Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
- Arthur Phillips, The Egyptologist
- Laurence Cosse, A Novel Bookstore (Reading List, Part One)
- Ali Smith, The Accidental
- Judith Guest, Ordinary People
- Pearl Abraham, American Taliban
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
- Philip Hensher, The Mulberry Empire
- Tea Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
- Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory
- John Steinbeck, The Pearl
- Euripides, Medea (translated by Diane Arnson Svarlien)
- M.C. Beaton, Introducing Agatha Raisin
- Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
- Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
- David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris
- Pearl Abraham, The Romance Reader
- Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading
- Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
- Glenway Wescott, Apartment in Athens
- Reginald Rose, Twelve Angry Men
- Mary Doria Russell, Children of God
- John Dewey, Experience and Education
- Susan Hill, Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home
- Emma Donoghue, Room
- Margaret Drabble, The Seven Sisters
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
- Rain Mitchell, Tales from the Yoga Studio
- Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector
- Michael Frayn, Copenhagen
- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Lois Lowry, The Giver (Jill’s progress report) (Jill’s final thoughts)
- Lisa Loomer, The Waiting Room
- Aaron Sorkin, The Farnsworth Invention
- Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists
- Bel Kaufman, Up The Down Staircase
- Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age
- Blake Charlton, Spellwright
- Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
- Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers
- William Goldman, Marathon Man
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World
- James Joyce, Dubliners
- Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing
- David Denby, American Sucker
- Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
- Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
- Stewart O’Nan, Last Night at the Lobster
- Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
- Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jill’s review)
- Diana Gabaldon, Outlander (Jill’s early thoughts)
- Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
- Liza Campbell, A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth’s Castle
- Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
- Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden
- Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
- Claire Dederer, Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses
- Zoe Klein, Drawing in the Dust
- Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason
- John Steinbeck, Burning Bright
- T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
- Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten
- Mingmei Yip, Song of the Silk Road
- Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
- Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom
- Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
- Chris Crutcher, Ironman
- Chris Crutcher, King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography
- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
- Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness
- Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn
- Don DeLillo, White Noise
- Diane Schoemperlen, Our Lady of the Lost and Found
- Chris Crutcher, Stotan!
- Dana Reinhardt, The Things a Brother Knows
- Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
- Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
- Matthew Pearl, The Technologists
- Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber (Jill’s initial thoughts) (Jill’s first progress report) (Jill’s final thoughts)
- Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
- Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
- Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur
- Craig M. Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education
- Diana Gabaldon, Voyager
- E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
- Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America
- Diana Gabaldon, Lord John and the Private Matter
- Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
- Amber Dermont, The Starboard Sea
- Michael Downs, The Greatest Show
- Irvin D. Yalom, The Spinoza Problem
- Diana Gabaldon, Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade
- Will Lavender, Obedience
- E.L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey (my essay “The Parallel Lives of Jay and Grey”)
- Yasmina Reza, God of Carnage
- E.L. James, Fifty Shades Darker
- E.L. James, Fifty Shades Freed
- Kurt Vonnegut, Basic Training
- Diana Gabaldon, The Scottish Prisoner
- Howard Fast, The Outsider
- Geraldine Brooks, Caleb’s Crossing
- Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
- Dante, Purgatory (trans. by Anthony Esolen)
- Eric Greitens, The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, The Making of a Navy SEAL
- Mary Doria Russell, Doc
- Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, Inherit the Wind
- Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness
- Jim Harrison, True North
- Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things
- A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok: The End of the Gods
- Katherine Neville, The Fire
- George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman
- Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
- Mark Sundeen, The Man Who Quit Money
- Thrity Umrigar, The World We Found
- Peter Murphy, John the Revelator
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
- Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches
- Larry Watson, Montana 1948
- Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana
- Dave Eggers, Zeitoun
- Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (my review)
And….. DONE!(2011-12 Challenge completed on 5/17/2012)
Postcards From Purgatory 
I just copied and pasted all your books from the past 3 years into a word document. I’m going to go through and mark ones I own and ones I’ve read. Ah, purgatory.
Jill – check out Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz. It will appeal to the part of you that likes Mary Doria Russell (in fact, she wrote the introduction to my edition and identifies it as an influence on her work). One of the best books I’ve read this year – and, again, an example of a book that walks the line between literature and sci-fi. And it does include some priests in space. But only briefly.
I just saw this response to my post. Oops. I guess I didn’t tell the machine to email me when a follow-up comment was posted. I will definitely put the Arthur Miller book in my list. BTW, what did you think of the Hunger Games books? I quite enjoyed them.
I liked the Hunger Games books, but I liked each one a little less than the one before it. When I started the second one, I was pleased because I THOUGHT Collins had sidestepped the tendency in young adult series to write formulaic plots, but then I was really disappointed when Katniss ended up having to go back to the Games. I thought that was a huge mistake on Collins’ part – even though there were certainly changes in the rules of the Games and plenty of surprises in the plot. I didn’t mind the second and third books, but I definitely liked the first one best.
And now I’m having the machine notify me if someone comments here.
I liked the first and second ones pretty equally, but thought the third one was a bit too gloomy. Not that I dislike gloomy books, but it was gloomy in a trying too hard to be gloomy sort of way. I definitely thought it was an interesting story. And anything that gets people reading is good (except those books about the sparkly vampires).