A Reading Project: “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die,” Peter Boxall

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.

1001: “Forest of the Hanged,” Liviu Rebreanu

I recently finished “Forest of the Hanged,” a book included on Boxall’s “1001 Books you Must Read Before You Die.”

Stylistically, I found the book modern. It reads like a blend between “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Catch-22” but it’s artful psychological arc really sets it apart.

The story centers around Apostol Bologa, a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army, who eventually is forced to choose whether or not to fight against his fellow countrymen as World War I engulfs his Romanian homeland.

His journey from certainty in the righteousness of his cause, swings 180 degrees throughout the course of the book, embodied by his decision early on to hang a deserter and eventually <SPOILER ALERT> …

Continue reading →

2022: My Year in Books

I love this feature from Goodreads. 2022 looks to be the year I finished the fewest books in a long time, but I’m pleased with the quality of what I read, and think that the dense nearly 3k page monster from Dr. Iain McGilchrist can be at least partially held responsible for the lower than normal count. That one took several months of late-night reading sessions.

3 surprises on the up-side in 2022 are:

“Something To Do with Paying Attention,” by David Foster Wallace – If you told me I’d be reading a portion of a larger unfinished work (this is a portion of “The Pale King”), that the subject matter was. young man going into the IRS, and that this would somehow turn out to be a tale of everyday heroism, I think I would have stronly doubted you. This novella is a perfect little jewel though. I loved it.
“The Matter With Things,” by Dr. Iain McGilchrist. This is a masterwork on a level that is hard to explain. IIRC, the first several hundred pages are literally just catalogs of scientific findings that build the basis for what comes later. When this moves on to the large philosophical work, it is jaw-droppingly insightful. It’s intimidating to think about re-reading this one, but I need to go back through and do a better job of extracting and organizing the insights. It will happen. Probably not in 2023.
“The Ministry for the Future,” by Kim Stanley Robinson. Why is this one on my surprise list? Everyone said it was good, right? It’s a surprise for me because I have read Kim Stanley Robinson several times before and never fully enjoyed the experience. While I appreciate the scope and detail of his thinking, I have found the plots too calculated and lacking humanity. While this book doesn’t necessarily solve for those issues, I loved the passion with which Robinson goes after climate change and think the scale of his thinking is exactly what we need to spark conversation about actual solutions to our presence here.

On the downside, these are books I will not be recommending:

” A Place of my Own,” by Michael Pollan. “How to Change Your Mind” is one of my favorite books of the last several years so I was hoping to find something as enlightening and engrossing here. I did not. Architecture enamors me, but this book felt like I was reading a tedious journal of carpentry.
” A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” by David Eggers. It’s clear that Eggers understands the faults of this book work as he calls them out explicitly in the foreword. I think you should follow his advice and only read the entry novella. Once he moves to the Bay Area, it’s over-the-top treatment of self as protagonist is really hard to enjoy.