Rex & Jake's 50-Book Reading Challenge

Many of you know Rex. If you don't, you should. He's a terrific individual.

But he's also a son of a bitch.

When he heard (from me) that I had an ongoing list of books I wanted to read before I die (Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, etc), Rex announced that he could and would read them all before I did. This would explain the week we spent in Mexico with Rex referencing "Ulysses by The James Joyce." As of this writing, he has read less than 40 pages of it (which beats my total page count of 0), but the challenge still loomed. Soon enough (as in just last week), the ante was upped when it was proposed that we challenge each other to the 100 books every person should read, made up by some blog/newspaper/thing. Realizing that we didn't care about half the books (fuck you, Scarlet Letter), we decided to make our own (surprisingly well-rounded) list of 50 books that neither of us have previously read and then "race" to finish the collection. We don't know what the prize will be yet, and this is going to take us years, but, as of September 1st, this is the our 50-book reading challenge list:

1. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
2. Foundation And Empire by Isaac Asimov
3. Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
4. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
5. Fool by Christopher Buckley
6. Women by Charles Bukowski
7. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
8. The Stranger by Albert Camus
9. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
10. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
11. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
12. Absolutions by Patrick DeWitt
13. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
14. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
15. I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan
16. The Beautiful And The Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
17. Stardust by Neil Gaiman
18. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
19. To Have And Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
20. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
21. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
22. Nobody Move by Denis Johnson
23. Ulysses by The James Joyce
24. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
25. Immortality by Milan Kundera
26. The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin
27. The Farthest Shore by Ursula Le Guin
28. Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin
29. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
30. Life Of Pi by Yann Martel
31. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
32. Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann
33. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
34. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
35. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
36. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
37. Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
38. Half Asleep In Frog’s Pajamas by Tom Robbins
39. Skinny Legs And All by Tom Robbins
40. The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
41. Barrel Fever by David Sedaris
42. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
43. Anthem by Neal Stephenson
44. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
45. Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
46. Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
47. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
48. Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
49. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
50. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

First person to finish the list wins.

Let's do this.