When I sat down to make a new life plan and bucket list a few weeks ago, I decided to also make a list of books. Like any lifelong bookworm, I have a TBR (to-be-read) pile — or list, at least — a mile long. My GoodReads “want to read” shelf was around 300, I think, before I recently cleaned it up and re-organized a little, and I own a couple boxes’ worth of books purchased on clearance that I never quite got around to reading.

In order to (a) get back to recreational reading on a regular basis post-college, (b) have a measurable, specific way to add “read more books” to aforementioned bucket list, and (c) make my insane TBR built up over the past decade slightly more manageable, I made a list of 100 books.

There’s not really any specific reasoning or theme to the list. It’s just a list of the next 100 books I want to read, before reading anything else. And my goal is to read one each week for the next 100 weeks, finishing the list in just a month shy of two years.

Several of the books on the list I’ve actually already read, but not for years. With my bipolar disorder, anxiety, and PTSD and the medications I’ve taken at different times to manage them, my memory is quite foggy in places. Plus, some of my middle school and early high school favorites I haven’t read in nearly a decade or more! So favorite series like the Hunger Games (incorporated into my first tattoo) or Cidney Swanson’s books are on the list for re-reading, next to classics I missed in school like The Great Gatsby, and random books I always wanted to read but never have, like The Stepsister Scheme. (I saw that one on a babysitting client’s end table once in middle school and the premise just stuck with me for ten years. I googled everything I could remember to track it down and found it thanks to the cover art. Must be worth a read, right?) Other themes include writing and theology.

My 100 books list technically actually has 99 books. That’s because 100 books is more than I realized, and two years is a long time to plan out all my reading material, and by about 92 I was actually struggling to decide which others belonged on the list. So when I hit 99 and still wasn’t sure, I decided to leave one spot open for when a new book or recommendation suddenly strikes me and I just really need go with the spontaneity.

100 Books

Re-reading

• The Hunger Games (finished September 2019)
• Catching Fire (finished September 2019)
• Mockingjay (currently reading)
• The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series (5 books)
• Chronicles of Narnia (7 books)
• The Hybrid Chronicles (3 books — the third one wasn’t out when I read these, so I’m really excited to finish it!)
• The Ripple series (7 books — only three were out when I first read these)
• Saving Mars series (6 books)
• The Frost Chronicles (6 books)

YA novels

• Turtles All the Way Down (currently reading on Audible)
• Gemma Doyle series (3 books)
• Speak
• Delirium series (3 books)
• The Truth About Forever
• If You Could Be Mine
• Thief in Time series (4 books)
• The Phoenix Thief (the author was a friend of mine in high school)
• Becoming the Chateran (same author)
• Cinder (I might finish out the series, but I’m mostly just stubborn about reading this one because I bought it ages ago)

Classics

• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Wide Sargasso Sea
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Frankenstein
• Fahrenheit 451
• Diary of a Young Girl
• The Great Gatsby
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover
• The Handmaid’s Tale
• Utopia
• Dracula
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• Lady Susan
• Mansfield Park
• Northanger Abbey
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Waves
• The Professor
• Villette
• Wives and Daughters
• North and South
• Animal Farm
• 1984
• The Book Thief

Writing

• Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly
• Go Teen Writers (I have an older autographed edition I’ll read)
• Self-Editing for Fiction Writers
• The Elements of Style
• On Writing
• Story Genius
• Bird by Bird
• No Plot? No Problem!

Faith and theology

• Sex God
• Searching for Sunday
• Faith Unraveled
• Don’t Know Much About the Bible: Everything You Need to Know About the Good Book but Never Learned
• Jesus > Religion
• It’s Not What You Think
• How to Be a Bad Christian — And a Better Human Being
• Girl at the End of the World
• The Very Worst Missionary
• Out of Sorts

Random assorted titles

• The Shack (finished August 2019)
• The Stepsister Scheme
• Offbeat Bride (there’s a new version coming out I might get, but I do have the original)
• So You Want to Talk About Race