CHALLENGE: The Book Lovers' Companion

I won this book (The Book Lovers' Companion: What to Read Next) from Book Trib. This book has a list of 200 books, from classics to current bestsellers, that are recommended for book clubs. And I thought that this would make a great challenge! So I am challenging myself to read all 200 of the books listed in this companion.

This is a personal "perpetual" challenge, but anyone else is welcome to join in, if they so desire.

Below is the list of books from the companion. The ones I read are BOLDED, and if I have posted a review, then I will link to it.

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
2. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
3. Brick Lane by Monica Ali
4. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
5. Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
6. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
7. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
8. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
9. Light a Penny Candle by Maeve Binchy
10. Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore
11. Any Human Heart by William Boyd
12. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
13. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
14. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
15. Wise Children by Angela Carter
16. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
17. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
18. What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe
19. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
20. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. The Passage by Justin Cronin
23. Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
24. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
25. Room by Emma Donoghue
26. House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
27. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
28. A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore
29. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
30. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
31. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
32. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
33. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
34. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
35. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
36. Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
37. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
38. Lord of the Flies by William Goldberg
39. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
40. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
41. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton
42. The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
43. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
44. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
45. Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
46. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
47. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
48. Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
49. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
50. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
51. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
52. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
53. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
54. The Girls by Lori Lansens
55. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
56. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
57. Small Island by Andrea Levy
58. Atonement by Ian McEwan
59. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
60. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
61. Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy
62. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
63. Beloved by Toni Morrison
64. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
65. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
66. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
67. Suite Francoise by Irene Nemirovsky
68. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
69. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
70. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
71. The Pact by Jodi Picoult
72. Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
73. Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre
74. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
75. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
76. The Human Stain by Philip Roth
77. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
78. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
79. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
80. Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz
81. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
82. The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
83. Fortune's Rocks by Anita Shreve
84. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
85. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
86. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
87. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
88. Perfume by Patrick Suskind
89. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
90. The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
91. Marrying the Mistress by Joanna Trollope
92. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
93. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
94. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
95. The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
96. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
97. When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman
98. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
99. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruis Zafon
100. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Top Ten British and American Classics

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (optional: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is considered a "prequel") 
4. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (optional: Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman was inspired by this book)
5. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
6. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
7. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
8. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
9. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
10. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Top Ten World Classics

1. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
2. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
3. The Outsider by Albert Camus
4. Cheri by Colette
5. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
6. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
8. Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg
9. Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann
10. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

Top Ten Quick Reads

1. Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand
2. An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge
3. A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
4. The God Boy by Ian Cross
5. The Barrytown Trilogy by Roddy Doyle
6. The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
7. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
8. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
9. Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
10. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Top Ten Challenging Reads

1. Possession by A.S. Byatt
2. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
3. Ulysses by James Joyce
4. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
5. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
6. Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
7. How the Dead Live by Will Self
8. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
9. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
10. Germinal by Emile Zola

Top Ten Books with a Younger Perspective

1.  Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
2. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
4. Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence
5. The  Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
6. His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman
7. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
8. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
9. Holes by Louis Sachar
10. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Top Ten Humorous Reads

1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
2. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
3. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
4. Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor
5. She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
6. The Bad Mother's Handbook by Kate Long
7. Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
8. Anita and Me by Meera Syal
9. My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber (a collection of short stories)
10. Thank You, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (the first full-length Jeeves novel)

Top Ten War Books

1. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
2. The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell
3. Strange Meeting by Susan Hill
4. Dispatches by Michael Herr
5. Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally
6. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
7. The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat
8. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
9. The Memoirs of George Sherston by Siegfried Sassoon
10. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute

 Top Ten Crime Books

1. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
2. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
3. Cruel and Unusual by Patricia Cornwell
4. The Devil's Teardrop by Jeffery Deaver
5. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
6. The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy
7. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
8. A Taste for Death by P.D. James
9. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
10. A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell

Top Ten Gay Reads

1. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
2. Don Juan in the Village by Jane Delynn
3. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
4. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
5. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
6. Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
7. 'Brokeback Mountain', Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx
8. The Story of the Night by Colm Toibin
9. A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White
10. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Top Ten Cult Classics

1. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
2. Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard
3. Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
4. Generation X by Douglas Coupland
5. A Million Little Pieces by James Frey (originally published as non-fiction; the author later was revealed to have fabricated chunks of the text) 
6. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
7. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
8. The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart
9. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
10. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Top Ten Sci-Fi Books

1. The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson
2. Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear
3. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
5. Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
6. The Canopus in Argos series by Doris Lessing
7. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
8. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
9. The Humanoids by Jack Williamson
10. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Top Ten Chilling Reads

1. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
2. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
3. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M.R. James (a collection of short stories)
4. Host by Peter James
5. The Stand by Stephen King
6. Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe (a collection of short stories)
7. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
8. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
9. Dracula by Bram Stoker
10. Ring by Koji Suzuki