I forget exactly how I ended up there, but I found an interesting-sounding reading challenge called Decades ’08. The point of it all is to read at least 8 books from consecutive decades (below you will find my list of possible reads). The challenge doesn’t start until the first of January, which means that I am currently really, really antsy and want it to begin now. xD

Please keep in mind that I probably won’t read all of these, but they are the options I have chosen so far. Might add on or retract from the list at any time, so it’s by no means a completed thing.

ETA (30 Dec ’07): The bolded titles are my first choices for each decade and the other titles on the list are alternates, in case my first choices don’t grab my attention the way I want a book to for me to keep reading. The list will now not be changed further.

1700s:
1704: A Tale of a Tub; Jonathan Swift — finished on 20th January, 2008

1710s:
Robinson Crusoe; Daniel Defoe
The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Daniel Defoe

1720s:
Gulliver’s Travels; Jonathan Swift
A Journal of the Plague Year; Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders; Daniel Defoe

1730s:
Manon Lescaut; Antoine François Prévost

1740s:
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded; Samuel Richardson
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill; John Cleland

1750s:
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; Laurence Sterne
Candide; Voltaire

1760s:
The Vicar of Wakefield; Oliver Goldsmith
The Castle of Otranto; Horace Walpole

1770s:
The Sorrows of Young Werther; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1780s:
Les Liaisons dangereuses; Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

1790s:
The Mysteries of Udolpho; Ann Radcliffe
Lady Susan; Jane Austen

1800s:
Castle Rackrent; Maria Edgeworth

1810s:
Sense & Sensibility; Jane Austen
Emma; Jane Austen
Rob Roy; Sir Walter Scott
Frankenstein; Mary Shelley

1820s:
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; Thomas de Quincey
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; James Hogg
The Last of the Mohicans; James Fenimore Cooper

1830s:
The Hunchback of Notre Dame; Victor Hugo
A Marriage Contract; Honoré de Balzac
The Pickwick Papers; Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist; Charles Dickens

1840s:
1843: A Christmas Carol; Charles Dickens — finished on 6th June, 2008

1850s:
The Man in the Iron Mask; Alexandre Dumas, père
The Scarlett Letter; Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby Dick or the White Whale; Herman Melville
Bleak House; Charles Dickens
North and South; Elizabeth Gaskell
Madame Bovary; Gustave Flaubert

1860s:
Journey to the Interior of the Earth; Jules Verne
Crime and Punishment; Fyodor Dostoyevsky

1870s:
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; Jules Verne
Carmilla; Joseph Sheridan le Fanu
Around the World in Eighty Days; Jules Verne
A Pair of Blue Eyes; Thomas Hardy
Black Beauty; Anna Sewell
The Return of the Native; Thomas Hardy

1880s:
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Robert Louis Stevenson
Hemsöborna; August Strindberg
The Woodlanders; Thomas Hardy
Three Men in a Boat; Jerome K Jerome

1890s:
The Picture of Dorian Gray; Oscar Wilde
Gösta Berlings saga; Selma Lagerlöf
Tess of the d’Urbervilles; Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure; Thomas Hardy
Dracula; Bram Stoker
The Turn of the Screw; Henry James

1900s:
1902: Heart of Darkness; Joseph Conrad — finished on 25th May, 2008

1910s:
1912: Daddy-Long-Legs; Jean Webster — finished on 20th May, 2008

1920s:
1923: Whose Body?; Dorothy L Sayers — finished 26th January, 2008

1930s:
1933: Murder Must Advertise; Dorothy L Sayers — finished on 15th February, 2008

1940s:
1945: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept; Elizabeth Smart — finished on 17th February, 2008

1950s:
1954: Farlig midsommar; Tove Jansson — finished on 18th May, 2008

1960s:
1967: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead; Tom Stoppard — finished on 24th February, 2008

1970s:
1977: Duktig pojke; Inger Edelfeldt — finished on 22nd January, 2008

1980s:
1981: Flambards Divided; KM Peyton — finished on 5th January, 2008

1990s:
1993: The Giver; Lois Lowry — finished on 29th January, 2008