I've been reading from my list for 6 weeks and have made progress mainly by making a pile of books and reading a few pages from each.  Have decided to dig in with Stendhal first. My reading around also led to several revisions to my original list. I guess I don't want to read Jane Austen, Simone de Beauvoir or Montesquieu after all.

1. The Red and the Black, Stendhal
2. Montaigne's essays -- the 20 in How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, Sarah Blakewell
3. Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
4. The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder
5. Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
6. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche
7. Candide, Voltaire
8. Tartuffe, Moliere
9. Something by Montesquieu Common Sense, Thomas Paine
10. Germinal, Emil Zola
11. The Chouans, Honore Balzac
12. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. The Reivers, William Faulkner
14. Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert
15. Emma The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton
16. House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
17. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
18. Quick Service, P. G. Wodehouse
19. Breakfast at Tiffany's Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote
20. The Thurber Carnival, James Thurber
21. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
22. Silas Marner, George Eliot
23. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
24. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
25. Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
26. Paul's Letters, New Testament
27. Augustine's writing
28. Sappho Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Sojourner Truth
29. Euripedes Medea
30. Plutarch's Lives
31. Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, Rachel Field
32. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
33. Complete Stories, Dorothy Parker, edited by Colleen Breese
34. Simone de Beauvoir A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
35. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
36. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
37. Fifth Business, Robertson Davies
38. Confucius
39. The Charioteer, Mary Renault
40. Palace Walk, Nahguib Mahfouz
41. The Adventures of Augie March  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
42. Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis
43. Trinity, Leon Uris
44. An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope
45. The Tale of Genji
46. Studs Lonigan  Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
47. Working Division Street, Studs Terkel
48. The Water's Wide To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
49. Jerry Engels The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
50. The Tastemakers Manon Lescaut, Antoine Francois Prevost...after all, I named this blog after her.