So what are these 35, life and perspective changing novels I'll be reading this year you ask? Good question... The good news is that there are lots of publications that have attempted to sort through the 129,864,880 (thanks Google) books that have ever been published...And, that's also the bad news...Where to start???

I scoured the web and reviewed dozens of lists. I asked my friends and family what their favorite novels were. In the end, the one that felt most authentic was Marie Claire's Books To Read Before You Die. I don't care for the morbidity of the title, but I really liked that it had such a variety of novels - classics like "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Jane Eyre" next to modern literature like "Beautiful Ruins" and "The Shining." It also felt like a little bit of fate that it happened to have exactly 35 books on the list.

I did want to customize the list a bit, so I incorporated feedback from others as well as from Time Magazines All-TIME 100 Novels, New York Times 100 Greatest Novels and Amazon's 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime.

Below, in no particular order, is my starting list of the 35 stories I'll let lead me through my 35th year...

1. 1984 - George Orwell
2. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
3. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R Tolkien
4. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
6. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
7. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
8. How to be a Woman - Caitlin Moran
9. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
10. Ulysses - James Joyce
11. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
12. Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler
13. Sons & Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
14. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
15. To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dolloway (TBD) - Virginia Woolf
16. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
17. Beloved - Toni Morrison
18. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
19. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
20. Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson
21. The Shining - Stephen King
22. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
23. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
24. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
25. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
26. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
27. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
28. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
29. One Day - David Nicholls
30. Alias Grace or The Blind Assassin (TBD) - Margaret Atwood
31. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
32. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
33. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
34. Are You There God? It's me Margaret - Judy Bloom
35. In Cold Blood or Breakfast at Tiffany's (TBD) - Truman Copote

I'm off now, but tomorrow is the big day! My 35th Birthday!