Titles #1-61 (in no particular order) on Create my own list of '100 Books To Read Before You Die'... and read them! on 43 Things

tippytoes is a self-knowing, self-improving tree hugger

Create my own list of '100 Books To Read Before You Die'... and read them! (read all 2 entries…)

Titles #1-61 (in no particular order) 9 months ago

Oh, the wonder of Goodreads.com
I can now track everything I read! Anyway, I’m going to post the books that made my list of “to read before I die”

1) Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go: Reflections on the Teachings of Zen Master Lin Chi (Thich Nhat Hanh)
2) A moveable feast (Ernest Hemingway)
3) 28: Stories of Aids in Africa (Stephanie Nolen)
4) This is your brain on music: the science of a human obsession (Daniel Levithin)
5) Three cups of tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time (Greg Mortenson)
6) Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet (Xinran)
7) The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
8) One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest (Ken Kesey)
9) Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
10) TheGulag Archipelago: Volume 1: An experiment in Literary Investigation (Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn)
11) Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell)
12) Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
13) Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Azar Nafisi)
14) A Short History of Progress (Ronald Wright)
15) New World Order (Ronald Wright)
16) Time Among the Maya: Travels in Belize, Guatemala and Mexico (Ronald Wright)
17) Infinite Jest: A Novel (David Foster Wallace)
18) A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (David Foster Wallace)
19) When You Are Engulfed in Flames (David Sedaris)
20) The White Tiger (Aravind Adiga)
21) Cockroach (Rawi Hage)
22) One Fifth Avenue (Candace Bushnell)
23) The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Alfred W. McCoy)
24) Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom (William Glasser)
25) To Be Human (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
26) To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche (Erich Fromm)
27) The Art of Being (Erich Fromm)
28) The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas (Mahatma Gandhi)
29) The Wisdom of Human Kind (Leo Tolstoy)
30) One, Two, Three…Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (George Gamow)
31) Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Oliver W. Sacks)
32) The Island of the Colorblind (Oliver W. Sacks)
33) Seeing Voices (Oliver W. Sacks)
34) Migraine (Oliver W. Sacks)
35) Freud and the Neurosciences: From Brain Research to the Unconscious (Oliver W. Sacks)
36) The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory (Alexander R. Luria)
37) The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (Steven Weinberg)
38) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick)
39) King Solomon’s Ring (Konrad Lorenz)
40) Identity Crisis (Susan Greenfield)
41) The Leopard (Tomasi di Giuseppe Lampedusa)
42) A Brief Tour of Human Concsciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers (V.S. Ramachandran)
43) The Emerging Mind (V.S. Ramachandran)
44) Art of the Soluble (P.B. Medawar)
45) As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)
46) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll)
47) Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
48) The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
49) David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
50) The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Tom Wolfe)
51) A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
52) Finnegans Wake (James Joyce)
53) The Odyssey (Homer)
54) Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell)
55) William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (Nigel Williams)
56) Les Misérables (Victor Hugo)
57) Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)
58) Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Shunryu Suzuki)
59) Monsignor Quixote (Graham Greene)
60) Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth (Thomas Wolfe)
61) Out of Africa (Isak Dinesen)

Mar 31, 08:48PM PDT

Comments:

Calissa is moving soon.

What a fantastic idea!

I had a lot of fun reading through the list, picking out what I read (and liked and hated), what I’d like to read and what’s already on Mt TBR.

Looking forward to hearing more about how this challenge goes for you.

Mar 31, 10:15PM PDT | Thread | Respond to this

tippytoes is a self-knowing, self-improving tree hugger

Love the feedback, Calissa!

I love it! It’s always interesting to hear what other people thought of the books I read, (or still want to read)... but at the same time, I’m always apprehensive to ask, in case it plants an idea and sabotages the whole experience. Heh…

As for how this wil play out… typically, I buy books (or add books to my ‘TBR’ list) at a much faster rate than I actually read them. I’m a fast reader, but I suffer from book ADD and I normally have about 5 or 6 on the go at any one time.

Apr 01, 03:14PM PDT | Thread | Respond to this 1 cheer

Calissa is moving soon.

You're welcome!

Do you find that the sabotaging of your experiece happens in retrospect? I mean, does it happen after you have read the book, or does it only happen while you are reading the book and have talked to someone about it? Just curious :D

I know what you mean about TBR. I’m currently working on trying to cut mine down in size a little. Yet even though I’m not buying any books myself, it still seems to grow!

Apr 02, 01:10AM PDT | Thread | Respond to this

tippytoes is a self-knowing, self-improving tree hugger

Hmm… I think if I start to read a book and someone tells me they hated it, I will definitely go into it thinking negative thoughts, which means I’m not approaching it in an impartial way and not giving it a chance to be good. I’d be making assumptions.

On the other hand, interestingly enough, someone praising a book rarely means I will like it. Take the celebrated Eat, Pray, Love for example… everyone I know loved it. Everyone was telling me to read it, and what a wonderful book it was. Well, I finally started reading it this January and I hated it!! I hated it so much, in fact, that I stopped reading on page 82 and very nearly threw the thing across the room. (Which rarely happens to me when dealing with books.)
My opinion is very polarized normally: I either love a book and think it’s life changing and amazing, or I hate it and want to destroy it. Not much room for in-betweens, except perhaps scholarly books that I might be indifferent to.

Apr 04, 08:39AM PDT | Thread | Respond to this 1 cheer