Time for the 2008 book challenges to start popping up and getting organized. This is Decades ’08: Eight books from eight consecutive decades. That’s the minimum, and I can change my list at any time. The following is a tentative list which is subject to change at any time, and I’ve just named a couple books I’d like to read for most of the decades. I really only intend to read one from each.

1810’s:
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

1820’s:
Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

1830’s:
Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Pushkin

1840’s:
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

1850’s:
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Bleakhouse by Charles Dickens

1860’s:
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

1870’s:
Far From the Maddening Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Middlemarch by George Eliot

1880’s:
The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

1890’s:
Tess of the Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

1900’s:
Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery
Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

1910’s:
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
Summer by Edith Wharton
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

1920’s:
My Sister Life by Boris Pasternak
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

1930’s:
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

1940’s:
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

1950’s:
Casino Royale by Ian Flemming
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (unfinished)

1960’s:
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

1970’s:
Humbolt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

1980’s:
The Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

1990’s:
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy