Earlier this year I finally finished "The List", my multi-year reading project. The List itself was made up of two "100 books" lists, one from the UK and one from the US - there was significant overlap, so it probably amounted to 170 or so books in all, about 30 of which I had read before I formally started. So, at the end of such a project, what are my reflections?
Well, the first of these is that it was an extremely useful source of reading material. Most of the books on The List were quite good, as might be expected, it contained a wide variety of materials, and it therefore served very well to give some structure to my overall reading goals.
On the other hand, there were some real stinkers amongst them, and I don't just mean Dan Brown. The List inevitably included a load of books that were either featured in Oprah or Richard & Judy's Book Clubs, which was a very mixed recommendation, and also a load of books that happened to be popular at the time. It wasn't quite recent enough to include "Twilight", much less "Fifty Shades of Grey", but there were books there that would have stood in the same company.
On the other, other hand, it guided me to some books that I probably would never have heard of, much less read, and some of these were very good indeed - "The Shadow of the Wind", "The Kite Runner", "The Five People You Meet in Heaven", "100 Years of Solitude". These aren't particularly obscure titles, but faced with endless bookshelves in Waterstones, or worse the digital storefront at Amazon, I would be unlikely ever to land on those. So that was good.
And, of course, it meant I tackled a load of the doorstop books ("War and Peace", "Les Miserables", "Atlas Shrugged") and a load of the classics (Dickens, Austen).
It's hard to pick a single best book from The List. I think "Shadow of the Wind" probably edges it. Certainly the funniest moment in all the reading came when I discovered that George Lucas stole a whole section of dialogue from "Gone With the Wind" for use in "The Empire Strikes Back".
Would I do it again? Well, no - it was a massive commitment, and I don't fancy going down that road. (Plus, "Twilight" and "Fifty Shades of Grey"...) On the other hand, I'm glad I've done it once, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it as an approach to someone looking to broaden their horizons.
But don't leave "Atlas Shrugged", "The Fountainhead", and "A Woman of Substance" as your last three - The List did not end on a high.
#20: "The Ink Black Heart", by Robert Galbraith
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