50 Books for 50 States.

Something I always wanted to do was to read a book from each of the states in the U.S. I never did because 1. It’s time consuming and 2. I didn’t want to take the time look up books for each of the 50 states. Even as the bookworm that I am, I can be quite the lazy procrastinator (is that like a double negative? I don’t know…)

Well, I finally decided to Google it and Business Insider has a nice little article called “The Most Famous Book That Takes Place in Every State.” I thought that this might be a good place to start in my quest to read every state. I’m going to list the books and authors here if anybody’s interested, but click on the link if you want to know more about them. Or go buy the books themselves and find out on your reading time. It looks like some of the books I’ve read, but a lot of them I haven’t, so that will be fun to read (and maybe even re-read).

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Alabama)
2. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (Alaska)
3. The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (Arizona)
4. A Painted House by John Grisham (Arkansas)
5. East of Eden by John Steinbeck (California)
6. The Shining by Stephen King (Colorado)
7. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (Connecticut)
8. The Saint of Lost Things by Christopher Castellini (Delaware)
9. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway (Florida)
10. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (Georgia)
11. Hawaii by James Michener (Hawaii)
12. Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson (Idaho)
13. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (Illinois)
14. The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (Indiana)
15. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (Iowa)
16. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (Kansas)
17. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (Kentucky)
18. Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice (Louisiana)
19. Carrie by Stephen King (Maine)
20. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler (Maryland)
21. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (Massachusetts)
22. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides (Michigan)
23. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (Minnesota)
24. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (Mississippi)
25. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (Missouri)
26. A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean (Montana)
27. My Antonia by Willa Cather (Nebraska)
28. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (Nevada)
29. The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving (New Hampshire)
30. Drown by Junot Diaz (New Jersey)
31. Red Sky At Morning by Richard Bradford (New Mexico)
32. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York)
33. A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks (North Carolina)
34. The Round House by Louise Erdich (North Dakota)
35. The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace (Ohio)
36. Paradise by Toni Morrison (Oklahoma)
37. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (Oregon)
38. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (Pennsylvania)
39. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult (Rhode Island)
40. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (South Carolina)
41. A Long Way From Home by Tom Brokaw (South Dakota)
42. The Client by John Grisham (Tennessee)
43. No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (Texas)
44. The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff (Utah)
45. Pollyana by Eleanor H Porter (Vermont)
46. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson (Virginia)
47. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (Washington)
48. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (Washington, D.C.) – I’m taking this is a bonus book?
49. Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (West Virginia)
50. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Wisconsin)
51. The Laramie Project by Moises Kauffman (Wyoming)