I have a new goal, which for me is actually quite a challenge. It’s something close to things already on my list, but this one has a definite end date and is actually manageable.
Thirty Books Everyone Should Read Before They’re Thirty
So, in the order of the list, here are the books. The books I have read are in dark green type.
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- 1984 by George Orwell
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Rights of Man by Tom Paine
- The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
- The Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton
- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkein
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau
- The Republic by Plato
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Getting Things Done by David Allen
- How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulakov
- BONUS: How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
- BONUS: Honeymoon with My Brother by Franz Wisner
So, as anyone can see, I have a bit to go on this list. Some of these I haven’t ever heard of (Wisdom in the Desert, The Master and the Margarita), while others I’ve avoided because of their style (anything by Charles Dickens or Charles Darwin or Ernest Hemingway, more by Steinbeck; I feel reading A Separate Peace four times in high school and Great Expectations three times has put me off of that almost lumbering and depressing storytelling). I also, as you may have guessed, don’t especially like older American literature. I’m a fan of the more modern “literary fiction,” which is on the rung above romance novels and Twilight, but doesn’t have the prestige of the “greats” like Dickens. Others on this list I’ve avoided because of the story, like Clockwork Orange and Lord of the Flies. While I love the film of CO, my mental theatre is quite imaginary, and somehow I find the words and suggestion more influential and uncomfortable than the screen imagery.
I have a lot on this list to do, and after I finish my Isabel Allende/Spanish kick, I may read these. This will be a challenge, but reading is supposed to inform and sometimes entertain. Hey, I got through my high school readings just fine, and this time, I have medieval texts to balance it out…
Also on the topic of books, I turn my attention to the declining sale of hard, feel-them-in-your-hands books. Beloved Barnes and Noble has put itself up for sale and Kindles are being snatched up as fast as Amazon can produce them. I stumbled upon this post by another WordPress blogger with an amazing quote from a Wall Street Journal writer. The blogger does not, I repeat DOES NOT lament the change from physical books to electronic, and maintains that readership of literature will still be big in this digital age. From what I was able to read from the WSJ article (I couldn’t read the entire thing, as I have not paid for a subscription, alas!), the author (like me) feels a loss and sadness about the replacement of books.
Brightly flashing screens have not only replaced letters and face-to-face contact, but have begun to replace the one material thing I value above all others: books. I cannot believe that this is just the next step to a civilized and technology-filled society and that “it’s proven to be one of the best things that can happen to something we love.” Can you imagine as a child snuggling up to your mom or dad to read a story from a Kindle or Nook? Would you want to teach your kid to read on a screen? If you went on a trip or got lost on an island, what would you read once the power went out? As a student at university or of life, how will you remember passages from books that have touched your soul when you only have a screen?
Another challenge for me is to find a way to help people to respect the written word and the various forms in which it comes. While I appreciate any medium that helps people to read and to expand their minds, I cannot help but think of the books that could have been picked up and appreciated in their dust jacketed glory.