My 100-Book Resolution

This year, instead of making resolutions about reading, I'm just going to build a list of 100 books I'd like to read. When I finish or DNF the book, I'll highlight it in red.

At the end of the year, I'll compare this list with the list I actually read.

And laugh.

In no particular order:

1. Caroline: Little House Revisited - Sarah Miller (fiction)

2. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (fiction)

3. Helter Skelter - Vincent Bugliosi (nonfiction)

4. Songs for the Missing - Stewart O'Nan (fiction)

5. The Cooler King - Patrick Bishop (nonfiction)

6. Ride the Pink Horse - Dorothy B. Hughes (fiction)

7. Pachinko - Min Jin Lee (fiction)

8. Our Souls at Night - Kent Haruf (fiction)

9. The Witches - Stacy Schiff (nonfiction)

10. The Great Influenza - John M. Barry (nonfiction)

11. The Nix - Nathan Hill (fiction)

12. Unfamiliar Fishes - Sarah Vowell (nonfiction)

13. Drama - John Lithgow (nonfiction)

14. I'll Be Right There - Kyung-Sook Shin (fiction)

15. The Aquariums of Pyongyang - Kang Chol-Hwan (nonfiction)

16. Testament of Youth - Vera Brittain (nonfiction)

17. Gilligan's Wake - Tom Carson (fiction)

18. Vein of Iron - Ellen Glasgow (fiction) DNF almost right out of the gate. The writing style jarred. It seemed cloying and overly dramatic.

19. None But the Lonely Heart - Richard Llewellyn (fiction)

20. Underground - Haruki Murakami (nonfiction)

21. Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink - Elvis Costello (nonfiction)

22. Upstairs Girls - Michael Rutter (nonfiction)

23. Wishful Drinking - Carrie Fisher (nonfiction)

24. The Sellout - Paul Beatty (fiction)

25. White Trash - Nancy Isenberg (nonfiction)

26. Earth - Emile Zola (fiction)

27. From Scratch: Inside the Food Network - Allen Salkin (nonfiction)

28. A Taste for War: The Culinary History of the Blue and the Gray - William C. Davis (nonfiction)

29. M Train - Patti Smith (nonfiction)

30. Clockers - Richard Price (fiction)

31. Bust Hell Wide Open: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest - Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. (nonfiction)

32. Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard (nonfiction)

33. The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock (fiction)

34. Saint Mazie - Jami Attenberg (fiction)

35. The Letter - Kathryn Hughes (fiction)

36. The Woman in Cabin 10 - Ruth Ware (fiction)

37. All the Missing Girls - Megan Miranda (fiction)

38. LaRose - Louise Erdrich (fiction)

39. The Dead Republic - Roddy Doyle (fiction)

40. Pox - Michael Willrich (nonfiction)

41. The Orchardist - Amanda Coplin (fiction)

42. Soaring with Vultures - Dan Kelly (fiction)

43. The Essex Serpent - Sarah Perry (fiction)

44. The Living - Annie Dillard (fiction)

45. The Tree of Man - Patrick White (fiction)

46. Heads in Beds - Jacob Tomsky (nonfiction)

47. Rainbow's End - James M. Cain (fiction)

48. What Happened - Hillary Rodham Clinton (nonfiction)

49. The Hard Blue Sky - Shirley Ann Grau (fiction)

50. October, 1964 - David Halberstam (nonfiction)

51. A Mother's Reckoning - Sue Klebold (nonfiction)

52. James Baldwin: A Biography - David Leeming (nonfiction)

53. West with the Night - Beryl Markham (nonfiction)

54. The Getting of Wisdom - Henry Handel Richardson (fiction)

55. The Nutmeg Tree - Margery Sharp (fiction)

56. No Sweat - Michelle Segar (nonfiction)

57. Mary Olivier: A Life - May Sinclair (fiction)

58. All the Rage - Courtney Summers (fiction)

59. The Art of Discarding - Nagisa Tatsumi (nonfiction)

60. The Warmth of Other Suns - Isabel Wilkerson (nonfiction)

61. Traveling Sprinkler - Nicholson Baker (fiction) DNF. Got halfway through this short novel and had to quit. Blather.

62. Three Many Cooks - Pam Anderson, Maggy Keet, Sharon Damelio (nonfiction)

63. The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead (fiction)

64. The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen (fiction)

65. All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr (fiction)

66. Martin Dressler - Stephen Millhauser (fiction)

67. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love - Oscar Hijuelos (fiction)

68. Elbow Room - James Alan McPherson (fiction)

69. The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty (fiction)

70. The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron (fiction)

71. All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren (fiction)

72. Journey in the Dark - Martin Flavin (fiction)

73. In This Our Life - Ellen Glasgow (fiction)

74. Years of Grace - Margaret Barnes (fiction)

75. Scarlet Sister Mary - Julia Peterkin (fiction)

76. One of Ours - Willa Cather (fiction)

77. Mary Poppins - Travers (fiction)

78. 101 Dalmatians - Dodie Smith (fiction)

79. My Brilliant Career - Miles Franklin (fiction)

80. Ironweed - William Kennedy (fiction)

81. Hard Times - Studs Terkel (nonfiction)

82. The Group - Mary McCarthy (fiction)

83. Turtles All the Way Down - John Green (fiction)

84. Loving Robert Lowell - Author??? (nonfiction)

85. The Wine Lover's Daughter - Anne Fadiman (nonfiction)

86. Home - Marilynne Robinson (fiction)

87. A Storm of Swords - George R.R. Martin (fiction)

88. The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo - Amy Schumer (nonfiction)

89. Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen (nonfiction)

90. The Letters of Sylvia Plath - Sylvia Plath (nonfiction)

91. The Forsyte Saga - John Galsworthy (fiction)

92. The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning - Margareta Magnusson (nonfiction)

93. Coming To My Senses - Alice Waters (nonfiction)

94. Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray - Adam Federman (nonfiction)

95. The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters - Laura Thompson (nonfiction)

96. Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell - David Yaffe (nonfiction) DNF. Found the book overwritten which seemed to distance the reader from the subject. I wish that JM had written her own memoir.

97. The Reporter Who Knew Too Much - Mark Shaw (nonfiction)

98. Home is Burning - Dan Marshall (nonfiction)

99. The Lost Art of Housecleaning - Jan Dougherty (nonfiction)

100. Pippi Longstocking - Astrid Lindgren (fiction)

Get Outta Town

Overall, I love my life in Korea, but sometimes it has a way of bringing me to my knees and seriously messing with my private view of myself as an international woman of mystery.

I found out recently that I can't just blithely sashay into Immigration and ask to have my E-2 visa with my current/almost former university extended until I can get a new visa with Erewhon University. This was my plan, though. But 10 days before my visa was to expire, I found out that Immigration needs 30 days' notice for a visa extension. Whoops. Rewind to December 31st? Uh-uh.

As a result, I must leave the country, come back in on a tourist visa, then arrange to get a new work visa. What fun.

I've decided to use the time and opportunity to go to the United States, visit my family, do some shopping, eat Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and hopefully, hit a couple of bookstores. I can only stay for a short time because I've got to come back, do all of the aforementioned, move all my stuff to Erewhon, and be ready to report for work on March 2nd. It's doable.

With the new year approaching, things will be quiet until I fly on Saturday. I'll use that time to pack, organize my stuff, write a few blog posts, finish the kimchi in the refrigerator and try to patch up my international woman of mystery self-image. That last will take some doing. I feel like a dunce for not seeing to things in a timely manner. I had all the scraps of information at my disposal and didn't put them together intelligently.

But on to more important things: I must figure out what I'm going to read on the plane! There's also a 4-hour layover in Tokyo and if I'm slightly unlucky and miss my connection from Dallas to Kansas City, there'll be another layover.

Here are my ideas:

1. The 3 books for the Well-Seasoned Reader Challenge: Fried Eggs With Chopsticks, Consider the Oyster and Let's Eat Korean Food.

2. Manhunt (the book about the search for Abraham Lincoln's killer)

3. Something from the Pulitzer shelf. Possibilities are: The Age of Innocence, Beloved, Interpreter of Maladies, American Pastoral, A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain and Martin Dressler. Also, maybe Lonesome Dove. I'm hoping to find a copy before I fly away.

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4. Go on an Anne of Green Gables binge and finish the series.

5. Something else. The international bookworm of mystery is taking suggestions.

Who I HAVE read

More and more lately I've been smashing up against who I HAVEN'T read, and it has rocked my bookworm confidence quite a bit. I couldn't believe it; I was saying no no no over and over like some Bizzaro World Molly Bloom. I started to think: Just what the hell have I been up to all these years? To bolster this shaken confidence and account for some of what I have been up to, I'll list several authors I've read more than once:

Bess Streeter Aldrich - 2 novels
Margaret Atwood - 6 novels and 1 book of short stories
Jane Austen - complete canon, including the juvenile writing
Nicholson Baker - 4 novels
Judy Blume - 4 novels
Charlotte Bronte - 2 novels
Bill Bryson - 4 books
James M. Cain - 5 novels
Taylor Caldwell - 3 novels
Raymond Carver - 2 short story collections and 1 book of essays
Joyce Cary - 3 novels
Michael Chabon - 2 novels
Charles Dickens - 2 novels
Roddy Doyle - 5 novels
Theodore Dreiser - 3 novels
George Eliot - 2 novels
William Faulkner - 2 novels
F. Scott Fitzgerald - 2 novels
Thomas Hardy - 2 novels
Ernest Hemingway - 4 novels and several short stories
John Irving - 3 novels
Shirley Jackson - 4 novels, 2 memoirs and 1 short story collection
Tracy Kidder - 5 nonfiction
Stephen King - 8 novels, 4 novellas and 1 nonfiction
Barbara Kingsolver - 4 novels
C.S. Lewis - 2 novels
Sinclair Lewis - 4 novels
Maud Hart Lovelace - 10 novels
Larry McMurtry - 18 novels and 1 book of essays
Herman Melville - 3 novels
Lorrie Moore - 2 novels, 2 books of short stories
John O'Hara - 2 novels
George Orwell - 2 novels, 1 nonfiction
Chuck Palahniuk - 3 novels
Harvey Pekar - 2 comic anthologies and 2 graphic novels
Sylvia Plath - 1 novel, 1 book of short stories and 4 books of poems
Conrad Richter - 4 novels
Don Robertson - 7 novels
Philip Roth - 4 novels
J.K. Rowling - 5 novels
William Shakespeare - 12 plays
John Steinbeck - 8 novels and 1 book of letters
Mark Twain - 2 novels
Anne Tyler - All of her novels
John Updike - 10 novels, 1 novella and 1 memoir
Alice Walker - 1 novel and 1 book of short stories
Laura Ingalls Wilder - All of her novels
Virginia Woolf - 3 novels
Richard Yates - 3 novels

This isn't a complete list, but that's OK. I'm starting to feel a little more like a real bookworm again. Whew.