To begin at the beginning...

I just joined librarything.com, on a recommendation from a friend. Immediately, my competitve eye was drawn to the 999 challenge - read nine books each in nine different categories by the end of 2009. How can I resist? And, being the egotistical techno-generation self-publicist that I am, I must of course have a blog. 

This, in case you hadn't guessed, is that blog.

My nine categories will be literary prizes, and I'll aim to read nine of the winners of each prize I've chosen, sharing with you my priceless insights on each one as we go along.

So, here's my idealistic and wildly unreasonable list of books to read over the next nine months:

 

-- The Man Booker --

Bernice Rubens – The Elected Member

Anne Enright – The Gathering

Alan Hollinghurst – The Line of Beauty

Margaret Atwood – The Blind Assassin

Ian McEwan – Amsterdam

James Kelman – How Late it Was, How Late

Kingsley Amis – The Old Devils

Thomas Keneally – Schindler’s Ark

Iris Murdoch – The Sea, The Sea

 

-- Nobel Laureates --

Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook

Jose Saramago – The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Rudyard Kipling – Kim

Rabindranath Tagore – Short Stories

Sinclair Lewis – Babbit

Pearl Buck – The Good Earth

Hermann Hesse – Steppenwolf

Saul Bellow – Mr Sammler’s Planet

Kenzaburo Oe - Seventeen

-- The Eisner Award --

From Hell

Concrete

Fables

Sandman

Top 10

Grendel: War Child

Batman: The Killing Joke

Y: The Last Man

Acme Novelty Library

 

-- Jewish Book Council Awards --

Dara Horn – The World to Come

Michael Chabon – The Final Solution

Philip Roth – The Human Stain

Jonathan Safran Foer – Everything is Illuminated

A. B. Yehoshua – Mr. Mani

Arnost Lustig – The Unloved

Daniel Fuchs – Apathetic Bookie Joint

Charles Reznikoff – By the Waters of Manhattan

Isaac Bashevis Singer – The Slave

 

-- The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry --

What's O'Clock by Amy Lowell

Lord Weary's Castle by Robert Lowell

The Waking by Theodore Roethke

77 Dream Songs by John Berryman

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery

The Morning of the Poem by James Schuyler

The Dream of the Unified Field by Jorie Graham

Strange Holiness by Robert P.T. Coffin

Poems - North & South by Elizabeth Bishop

  

-- Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize –

Patrick Ness – The Knife of Never Letting Go

K. M. Peyton – Flambards

Richard Adams – Watership Down

Diana Wynne Jones – Charmed Life

Meg Rosoff – How I Live Now

Kevin Crossley-Holland – The Seeing Stone

Melvin Burgess – Junk

Hilary McKay – The Exiles

Jacqueline Wilson – The Illustrated Mum

 

-- Prix Goncourt --

Jonathan Littell – The Kindly Ones

Andre Malraux – La Condition Humaine

Beatrix Beck – Leon Morin, Pretre (The Priest)

Andre Schwartz-Bart – The Last of the Just

Michel Tournier – Le Roi des Aulnes (The Ogre/TheErl-King)

Vintila Horia – God Was Born in Exile

Pascal Laine – La Dentelliere (The Lacemaker)

Emile Ajar – La vie devant soi (Momo/The Life Before Us)

Jean Echenoz – Je m’en vais

 

-- The Gold Dagger --

Jean Le Carre – The Spy Who Came In From the Cold

Sara Paretsky – Blacklist

Minette Walters – Fox Evil

Ian Rankin – Black and Blue

Michael Dibdin – Ratking

Martin Cruz Smith – Gorky Park

Nicholas Meyer – The Seven-Per-Cent Solution

Lionel Davidson – A Long Way to Shiloh

H. R. F. Keating – The Perfect Murder

 

-- The Nebula --

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge

Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer