A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? October Report

In January, I foolishly decided to join Simon Thomas’s Century of Book Challenge, even though I knew that reading 100 books, one for each year in a century, from 1925-2024, would be tough because last year I only read 169. So, how am I doing?

Here are the holes in my project with the books listed for this month below. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.

• 1925-1934: entries needed for 1928
• 1935-1944: entry needed for 1939
• 1945-1954: entries needed for 1948 and 1950
• 1955-1964: entries needed for 1955, 1957, 1960, and 1964
• 1965-1974: entries needed for 1969 and 1973
• 1975-1984: entries needed for all years except 1975, 1976, 1978, and 1980
• 1985-1994: entries needed for all years except 1987, 1988, 1989, and 1992
• 1995–2004: entries needed for all years except 1998, 1999, and 2004
• 2005-2014: entries needed for all years except 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2014
• 2015-2024: complete!

This month my reading was slowed down by a couple of big honkers, especially The Possessed or Devils by Dostoevsky, which is too early to qualify for my project. However, as you can see, I really buckled down trying to fill the holes in my project. Since September 25, I read the following books. As we’re closing in on the end of the year, I decided to mark the ones that fill one of my holes in bold from now on:

• Devils (The Possessed) by Fyodor Dostoevsky from 1873 (too early)
• The Camomile by Catherine Carwell from 1922 (too early for this project)
• The Islandman by Tomás O’Crohan from 1929
• Highland Fling by Nancy Mitford from 1931
• Young Man with a Horn by Dorothy Baker from 1938
• Sparkling Cyanide by Agatha Christie from 1945
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith from 1949
• School for Love by Olivia Manning from 1951
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath from 1963
• Picnic at Hanging Rock by John Lindsay from 1967
• The Home by Penelope Mortimer from 1971
• Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba from 2008
• The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King from 2012
• Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton from 2016
• The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes by Lyndsay Faye from 2017
• Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage that Shook Europe by John Guy and Julia Fox from 2023