it’s better to read 100 books 10 times than 1,000 books once
I don’t know who originated this concept. I’ve heard it said by Naval. the idea is to go deep on a narrower slice of possible books than to be spread so thin. this isn’t so much an algorithm as a heuristic, a tactic for filtering the kinds of books you read, and also a way to measure your own growth over time. I’ve had the experience of getting something different from reading the same book at different points in my life. deliberately checking in with different books regularly over time is a good way to get an informative but different perspective on your own mentality.
this is my list. I’ll be short of 100 for a while, the point is to make a tangible artifact out of it, and update it over time. let me know if you have or make a similar list and I’ll add a link to your list here.
update 2/24
since I created the 100 books page and started shaping my reading around it, I have reached 100 books, and now in order to add one to the list I must first evict one already on the list.
I have also encountered a different way to refer to this project, and sharper take on what I’m doing. it comes from an author with one book on my list already and more likely to come, Italo Calvino. his essay “Why Read the Classics?” is a quick read, and well worth it.
first, he defines “classic” to mean any book that once read, you return to again and again, and continue finding new takes, new value, fresh perspectives on. actually he lists many criteria, but that’s roughly what it boils down to, books that have meaning to you, which you read repeatedly at different stages in your life, a through-line to return to.
The ranks of the old titles have been decimated, while new ones have proliferated in all modern literatures and cultures. There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries.
consider any of these books a welcomed topic of conversation.
| Title | Author | Genre |
|---|---|---|
| “The Myth of Sisyphus” | Albert Camus | philosophy |
| “Brave New World” | Aldous Huxley | distopian science fiction |
| “The Doors of Perception” | Aldous Huxley | non-fiction |
| “The Civil War Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce” | Ambrose Bierce | supernatural horror |
| “The Little Prince” | Antoine De Saint Exuprey | children’s |
| “Nichomachean Ethics” | Aristotle | philosophy |
| “Rendezvous With Rama” | Arthur C Clarke | science fiction |
| “Atlas Shrugged” | Ayn Rand | fiction |
| “The Fountainhead” | Ayn Rand | fiction |
| “The Conquest of New Spain” | Bernal Diaz | non-fiction |
| “The History of Western Philosophy” | Betrand Russell | philosophy |
| “Four Archetypes: Mother/Rebirth/Spirit/Trickster” | Carl Jung | philosophy |
| “The Undiscovered Self” | Carl Jung | philosophy |
| “Roadside Geology of Missouri” | Charles Spencer | non-fiction |
| “A Pattern Language” | Christopher Alexander | non-fiction |
| “On the Good Life” | Cicero | philosophy |
| “All the Pretty Horses” | Cormac McCarthy | fiction |
| “Blood Meridian” | Cormac McCarthy | fiction |
| “No Country for Old Men” | Cormac McCarthy | fiction |
| “Stella Maris” | Cormac McCarthy | fiction |
| “the crossing” | Cormac McCarthy | fiction |
| “The Passenger” | Cormac McCarthy | fiction |
| “The Road” | Cormac McCarthy | fiction |
| “Flowers for Algernon” | Daniel Keyes | fiction |
| “The Beginning of Infinity” | David Deutsch | non-fiction |
| “Forty Tales From the Afterlives” | David Eagleman | magical realism |
| “Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World” | David Easley and John Kleinberg | non-fiction |
| “We Are Legion [We Are Bob]” | Dennis Taylor | science fiction |
| “Godel, Escher, Bach” | Douglas Hofstadter | philosophy |
| “The Discourses” | Epictetus | philosophy |
| “The Revelations” | Erik Hoel | fiction |
| “The World Behind the World” | Erik Hoel | philosophy |
| “Kafka the Complete Stories” | Franz Kafka | fiction |
| “Thus Spake Zarathustra” | Friedrich Nietzsche | philosophy |
| “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers” | Geoffrey A. Moore | non-fiction |
| “Nineteen Eighty-Four” | George Orwell | distopian science fiction |
| “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” | George Saunders | literature |
| “Eon” | Greg Bear | science fiction |
| “On Bullshit” | Harry G Frankfurt | philosophy |
| “Walden and Other Writings” | Henry David Thoreau | non-fiction |
| “Moby Dick” | Herman Melville | fiction |
| “Siddhartha” | Hermann Hesse | philosophy |
| “I, Roboot” | Isaac Asimov | science fiction |
| “The Foundation” | Isaac Asimov | science fiction |
| “The Naked Sun” | Isaac Asimov | science fiction |
| “The Proper Study of Mankind” | Isaiah Berlin | philosophy |
| “Invisible Cities” | Italo Calvino | magical realism |
| “The Perigrine” | J A Baker | non-fiction |
| “Chaos: Making a New Science” | James Gleick | non-fiction |
| “Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility” | James P. Carse | philosophy |
| “Fancies and Goodnights” | John Collier | fantasy |
| “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” | John Koenig | fiction |
| “Annals of the Former World: " | John McPhee | non-fiction |
| “Collected Fictions” | Jorge Luis Borges | fantasy |
| “Hero With a Thousand Faces: The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell” | Joseph Campbell | philosophy |
| “Heart of Darkness” | Joseph Conrad | fiction |
| “The Death of Ivan Illych and Other Stories” | Leo Tolstoy | literature |
| “The Mandibles” | Lionel Schriver | fiction |
| “A Wrinkle in Time” | Madeleine L’Engle | young adult |
| “M.C. Escher: His Life and Complete Graphic Work” | many | non-fiction |
| “Meditations” | Marcus Aurelius | philosophy |
| “Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters” | Matt Ridley | science |
| “Prey” | Michael Crichton | science fiction |
| “Sphere” | Michael Crichton | fiction |
| “Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy” | Michael Polanyi | philosophy |
| “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience: Steps Toward Enhancing the Quality of Life” | Mihaly Csikszentmihaly | non-fiction |
| “The Epic of Gilgamesh” | N. K. Sandars | legendary fiction |
| “An Introduction to Population Genetics” | Nielson and Slatkin | non-fiction |
| “Ender’s Game” | Orson Scott Card | science fiction |
| “Alas Babylon” | Pat Frank | science fiction |
| “Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age” | Paul Graham | non-fiction |
| “The Alchemist” | Paulo Coelho | magical realism |
| “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” | Philip K Dick | science fiction |
| “The Collected Stories of Philip K Dick Volume 5” | Philip K Dick | science fiction |
| “The Trial and Death of Socrates” | Plato | philosophy |
| “The Soundscape” | R. Murray Schafer | non-fiction |
| “Dandelion Wine” | Ray Bradbury | fiction |
| “Fahrenheit 451” | Ray Bradbury | fiction |
| “Something Wicked This Way Comes” | Ray Bradbury | fiction |
| “The Martian Chronicles” | Ray Bradbury | science fiction |
| “The Selfish Gene” | Richard Dawkins | non-fiction |
| “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman” | Richard Feynman | biography |
| “The Creative Act: A Way of Living” | Rick Rubin | self-help |
| “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values” | Robert Persig | fiction |
| “Letters From a Stoic” | Seneca | philosophy |
| “The Art of Living” | Sharon Lebell | philosophy |
| “The Dark Tower” | Stephen King | fiction |
| “Piranesi” | Susanna Clarke | magical realism |
| “Stories of Your Life and Others” | Ted Chiang | science fiction |
| “the structure of scientific revolutions” | Thomas Kuhn | non-fiction |
| “Common Sense” | Thomas Paine | philosophy |
| “The Kon-Tiki Expedition: A Raft Across the South Seas” | Thor Heyerdahl | non-fiction |
| “The Right Stuff” | Tom Wolf | historic fiction |
| “True Names: and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier” | Vernor Vinge | cyberpunk |
| “Man’s Search for Meaning” | Viktor Frankl | philosophy |
| “The Shape of Things” | Vilem Flusser | non-fiction |
| “The Twilight World” | Werner Herzog | historic fiction |
| “Neuromancer” | William Gibson | cyberpunk |