TBR Pile Challenge 2011

I am participating in the Roof Beam Reader Challenge 2011, sponsored by Adam at Roof Beam Reader blog, which I found via an article by Laura Miller at Salon. The rules are simple:

1. You must complete twelve books by December 31, 2011 that have been on your "To Be Read" pile for more than one year at the start of the challenge. Apparently, you are allowed to select books that you have just wanted to read since the end of 2009; that is not anal enough for me, so I'm only including books that I have owned for more than a year. The books can be read in any order. Non-fiction is allowed, but I selected all fiction for consistency.

2. You can't have read any of the books before.

3. Two alternate books should be selected, in case you stall out on any of your other dozen.

My books are:

• Cat's Eye — Margaret Atwood
• Independent People — Halldór Laxness
• Cloud Atlas — David Mitchell
• Justine — Lawrence Durrell
• The Blue Flower — Penelope Fitzgerald
• The Old Wives' Tale — Arnold Bennett
• Omensetter's Luck — William H. Gass
• A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens
• The Street of Crocodiles — Bruno Schulz
• The Feast of the Goat — Mario Vargas Llosa
• An Armful of Warm Girl — W.M. Spackman
• A Legacy — Sybille Bedford

Alternates:

• Our Man in Havana — Graham Greene
• Washington Square — Henry James