#CBR4 List Selected

I've completed the final list of selections for the Cannonball Read 4. I feel good about it. It's fairly balanced, covers a breadth of genres and authors, includes works both classic and modern, includes fiction and nonfiction, and each of the books appeals to me in some way.

Title	Author
Brave New World	Aldous Huxley
Tigana	Guy Gavriel Kay
Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes
The Prince	Niccolo Machiavelli
The Maltese Falcon	Dashiell Hammett
Unbroken	Laura Hillenbrand
State of Wonder	Ann Patchett
Lolita	Vladimir Nabakov
Ender's Game	Orson Scott Card
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold	John Le Carre
A Wizard of Earthsea	Ursula K. LeGuin
Catch-22	Joseph Heller
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin	Benjamin Franklin
Season of Life: A Football Star, A Boy, A Journey to Manhood	Jeffry Marx
Volt	Alan Heathcock
Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert
2001: A Space Odyssey	Arthur C. Clarke
The Neverending Story	Michael Ende
The Name of the Rose	Umberto Eco
Atlas Shrugged	Ayn Rand
The Art of War	Sun Tzu
The Night Circus	Erin Morgenstern
The Catcher in the Rye	J. D. Salinger
Neuromancer	William Gibson
Slaughterhouse Five	Kurt Vonnegut
Heroes Die	Matthew Woodring Stover
Rumpole of the Bailey	John Mortimer
Someday This Will Be Funny	Lynne Tillman
Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck
The Way of the Superior Man	David Deida
Cyrano de Bergerac	Edmond Restand
Eye of the Needle	Ken Follet
The Anubis Gates	Tim Powers
On the Road	Jack Kerouac
Starship Troopers	Robert Heinlein
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?	Phillip K. Dick
In Search of Lost Time	Marcel Proust
To The Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf
Gaudy Night	Dorothy L. Sayers
There but for the	Ali Smith
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell	Susanna Clarke
The Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka
Blood Meridian	Cormac McCarthy
Elantris	Brandon Sanderson
The Marriage Plot	Jeffrey Eugenides
The Daughter of Time	Josephine Tey
Fletch	Gregory Mcdonald
The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner
Ringworld	Larry Niven
The Day of the Jackal	Frederick Forsyth
Talion: Revenant	Michael Stackpole
For Whom the Bell Tolls	Ernest Hemingway

Where to Begin?

Wow. I'm really intimidated by this Cannonball Read challenge. 52 books seems like a lot. Narrowing down to a list of 52 books seems just as harrowing.

In order to make my task lighter, I thought I'd come up with some rules to help me craft my reading list for #CBR4.

1. I'll select my list from some of the various lists of greatest novels found around the Internet. I'll try to limit these lists to some of the most respectable-seeming. That probably means I'll favor lists presented by a select few educated persons over a "vote for your favorite"-style list.
   
2. No re-reads. If I've read a book already, it doesn't make the list.
3. On a related note, if I've seen the movie already, I can't include the book on the list. I may make exceptions here, though. For instance, I've seen Blade Runner, but I might still read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep because the link between the two is by all reports shaky.
4. On the other hand, I might consider doing a joint book/movie review if I've neither seen nor read either work.
5. CBR has a 100-page minimum for selections to count. I may need to add a maximum limit, too, if I'm going to get through all 52 books in a timely fashion. An 1000+ pager could throw my whole schedule into chaos.
6. ??? I don't know. Do I need more? Maybe this covers it.

Now. To the list!

Coming Soon to this Blog: #CBR4

Let me take a moment to announce that I have signed up to participate in Cannonball Read IV. CRB4 is a reading challenge sponsored by the folks over at Pajiba a delightfully snarky movie and pop-culture review site that I frequent. My goal - the full Cannonball, read and review 52 books in one year.

Seeing as how I have had a rather shaky track record on this blog, wish me luck. Maybe I'll finally get in the writing habit. :-)