Let me starts with the obvious—I will not commit to reading all 1001 of these books. (And actually, if you look at all the iterations of the list, we’d be looking at a total exceeding 1300 titles so far.)
What I do want to commit to, is picking a steady stream of these books to fill out my reading journey. Left to my own devices, I’d follow little rabbit holes in my reading forever and then look back with distaste and the paths I had selected. By picking 6-12 books from this list each year, the hope is to ensure that I maintain some quality bar and experience the most meaningful touchstone books.
There’s a long-running group set up over on Goodreads for people to join in a number of different reading experiences and discuss their respective progress through this corpus. Among those various threads is a monthly reading selection that I have a used a number of times to help me select without thinking too deeply about it. Engagement in the monthly challenge appears to be pretty low, in that very few people seem to interact around the monthly read on the discussion board, but the value seems to be in removing all barriers to just getting on with something.
At some point, I’ll need to take a look at all my logged books to see how far I already am into this challenge, As a lifelong reader and a literature major in college, there’s a quite a few of the books on the list I may have read. As with so many things, however, re-reading has ALWAYS proven to be a different experience, so I generally think that how many I have read doesn’t really matter as much as continually staying in a high-quality headspace with the greatest writers of all time.
I’m going to try post here as I complete books on the list going forward. I’ll put “1001” into the title and tag it as “1001” if you want to follow along and/or pick something that looks interesting to you too.
Eric Frankl.in 