Reading List

One of my resolutions this year is to read one classic book per week. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time so when I saw that Lex Fridman shared his reading list, I decided to join in.

I’ve adapted this list with a few books I’ve been interested in reading or re-reading. These books span classic literature, science fiction, dystopian, mystery, fantasy, philosophy, and other works that are highly recommended.

My motivation for taking on this goal is really similar to Lex’s – I’ve been reading mostly work-related nonfiction for the last few years and want to get back into the type of books that had a big impact on my life. I hope to keep evolving this list based on suggestions and discussions.

To help with my writing habit, I’m going to brain dump my thoughts about the book I read that week in the notes section of my blog.

Here’s the list as it currently stands with goal dates:

Jan 8 – 1984 by George Orwell (Notes)
Jan 15 – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Notes)
Jan 22 – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Notes)
Jan 29 – The Stranger by Camus (Notes)
Feb 5 – The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Notes)
Feb 12 – On the Road by Jack Kerouac (Notes)
Feb 19 – Foundation by Isaac Asimov (Notes)
Feb 26 – The Art of War by Sun Tzu (Notes)
Mar 5 – Old Man and The Sea by Hemingway
Mar 12 – The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Mar 19 – Animal Farm by George Orwell
Mar 26 – Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel
Apr 2 – The Giver by Lois Lowry
Apr 9 – Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Apr 16 – The Plague by Camus
Apr 23 – Player of Games by Ian Banks
Apr 30 – Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
May 7 – The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
May 14 – Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
May 21 – Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
May 28 – Dune by Frank Herbert
Jun 4 – Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Jun 11 – The Wealth of Nationsnbsp;by Adam Smith
Jun 18 – The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Jun 25 – Candide by Voltaire
Jul 2 – 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke
Jul 9 – Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Jul 16 – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Jul 23 – The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Jul 30 – Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Aug 6 – Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Aug 13 – The Man in the High Castle by Philip Dick
Aug 20 – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Aug 27 – Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Sep 3 – Don Juan by Molière
Sep 10 – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Sep 17 – The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Sep 24 – Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Oct 1 – Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charles T. Munger
Oct 8 – The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Oct 15 – The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
Oct 22 – The Prince by Machiavelli
Oct 29 – Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Nov 5 – Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
Nov 12 – Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Nov 19 – I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Nov 26 – The Dead by James Joyce
Dec 3 – The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
Dec 10 – Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Dec 17 – A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Dec 24 – The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
Dec 31 – The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

Other books I'm interested in:

The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

Additionally, here are some essays I’d love to read but I’m not sure when I’ll tackle them:

Michel de Montaigne’s library of essays
Paul Graham’s library of essays
How to Travel with a Salmon by Umberto Eco
Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell
The Fourth State of Matter by Jo Ann Beard
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Consider The Lobster by David Foster Wallace
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin