jessicawest's 999 challenge

I've decided to go with award winners as my topics. I have wanted to read many of these award winning books, and I guess this will sort of force me. :) I am listing the most recent winners for each book, unless I've already read it, in which case I will leave it out of the list and choose the next most recent winner. The same rule applies for duplicate titles. And with series titles, if the award winner was not the first in the series.
Here goes (categories are in no particular order):

Pulitzer Prize Winners
1.The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
2.The Road by Cormac McCarthy
3.The Known World by Edward P. Jones
4.Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
5.Empire Falls by Richard Russo
6.The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
7.Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
8.The Hours by Michael Cunningham
9.American Pastoral by Philip Roth

National Book Award Winners
1.The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
2.Europe Central by William T. Vollmann
3.The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck
4.The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
5.Three Junes by Julia Glass
6.In America by Susan Sontag
7.Waiting by Ha Jin
8.Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
9.Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett

Man Booker Prize
1.The Gathering by Anne Enright
2.The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
3.The Sea by John Banville
4.The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
5.Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
6.Life of Pi by Yann Martel
7.True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
8.Disgrace by J. M Coetzee
9.Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Hugo Awards
1.Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
2.Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
3.A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
4.Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer
5.American Gods by Neil Gaiman
6.A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
7.To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
8.Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman
9.The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Nebula Awards
1.Seeker by Jack McDevitt
2.Camouflage by Joe Haldeman
3.The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
4.Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
5.Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear
6.The Moon and the Sun by Vonda N. McIntyre
7.Slow River by Nicola Griffith
8.The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer
9.Moving Mars by Greg Bear

National Book Award for Non-Fiction
1.Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner
2.The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
3.The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
4.Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle
5.Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos M. N. Eire
6.Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro
7.The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon
8.In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
9.Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower

Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction
1.The Years of Extermination by Saul Friedlander
2.The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
3.Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins
4.Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll
5.Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum
6.A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power
7.Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution by Diane McWhorter
8.Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix
9.The Annals of the Former World by John McPhee

National Book Award for Young People's Literature
1.The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party by M. T. Anderson
2.The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy by Jeanne Birdsall
3.Godless by Pete Hautman
4.The Canning Season by Polly Horvath
5.The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
6.Dancing on the Edge by Han Nolan
7.Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan
8.When Zachary Beaver Came To Town by Kimberly Willis Holt
9.Holes by Louis Sachar

National Book Critics Circle Award
1.The March by E. L. Doctorow
2.Atonement by Ian McEwan
3.Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
4.Being Dead by Jim Crace
5.Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
6.The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro
7.The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
8.Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories by Gina Berriault
9.Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin

Jessica - what a wonderful idea...I'm going to keep an eye on your list and add many of these to my tbr pile. I have an awards category, but that only gave me 9 books. These look fantastic. Look forward to your reviews.

Ditto what tututhefirst said! I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this thread as it will be a great way to get recommendations.

That is a wonderful list - I will be watching too!

Wow, ambitious plan! I don't think I could ever manage to follow such a rigid list.

This is a real challenge, what great books you have lined up to read. I'll be following your reviews as well. I want to read The Blue Flower, still tracking down a copy so will be interested in how you find it.

I had one category of Book Awards this year and have absolutely adored it so far.

As _Zoe_ says, very ambitious. Good luck and have fun!

thanks for all of the well-wishes! now that i have the list, i feel i'm a bit over my head. oh well! should be fun. i guess i shouldn't hope to be done by 9/9/09. :P
once the new year starts, you can keep track of it on my blog, i will add the label "999 challenge". and i will post periodic updates here.
http://jeskareads.blogspot.com

Great lists! I want to read The Sea, The Road and The Blue Flower myself. Good luck!

Okay, I have my first post up for the challenge!! Its for Life of Pi by Yann Martel. The post can be found at: http://jeskareads.blogspot.com/2009/01/life-of-pi-by-yann-martel.html.
I decided that I will edit my list as I post reviews, by making the books that I have read bold. I think that I will post when I begin a category and when I finish one. In the meantime, you can follow on my blog by searching for the label "999 Challenge". So I have now begun the Man Booker Prize category!

You have a real challenge in front of you! I'm impressed. Off to check out your review of Life of Pi, which is in my (much less ambitious) challenge, too...

I'm very impressed by your list! I have one Pulitzer-winner category, and that will be hard enough for me to stick to! I find it amusing that none of the books I'm thinking about for that category are on your list. :)

Second read done! I read The News From Paraguay for the National Book Award Winners category - it won in 2004. The post about this one can be found at: http://jeskareads.blogspot.com/2009/01/news-from-paraguay-by-lily-tuck.html
Also, I have discovered the blog for this group! So I will be duplicating all of my posts there, and just doing updates here, as I stated in an earlier comment.

Oooh - Vernon God Little - I really did enjoy this one. I know that there were a lot of folks that didn't, but I thought that the characters were very authentic. Yes, rough and not as sympathetic as one would hope to find - but that was the point!

Another category begun! I read my first book from the Hugo Award Winners - Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Here is the link to my review - http://jeskareads.blogspot.com/2009/04/rainbows-end-by-vernor-vinge.html.

The first book for my National Book Award for Non-Fiction category has been reviewed. It is The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. My post is here - http://jeskareads.blogspot.com/2009/04/worst-hard-time-by-timothy-egan.html.

I have begun reading for the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction. The first one I read was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. My review is here: http://jeskareads.blogspot.com/2009/04/brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-by.html.

Jessica === thanks for a great review...the Diaz book looks like one I would like. Have you ever read Confederacy of Dunces ? Oscar sounds like he could be an Ignatius..the central character in Dunces, which also won the Pulitzer by the way. I must get my hands on this new one to see if they are similar.

I have not read Confederacy of Dunces tutu - I guess that's another one to add to the tbr pile. :) Let me know what you think if you read Oscar Wao.
And I also should post that I read my first NBA for young people's literature book: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party by MT Anderson. My review is here: http://jeskareads.blogspot.com/2009/05/astonishing-life-of-octavian-nothing.html.

I must make a change to my list, as I discovered that one of my Hugo Award winners was in a series. So I am switching from Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold to A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Also I posted a review for Hominids - here's the link: http://jeskareads.blogspot.com/2009/05/hominids-by-robert-j-sawyer.html.

I got some ideas from these books too. Some nice looking non-fiction on here that's new to me.