105 Books I Want to Read Before I Die
The Deep End #27
These are 105 books I want to read before I die. The list is in no particular order.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, by Haruki Murakami
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
The Passenger/Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy
Tender is The Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Plague, by Albert Camus
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
The Natural, by Bernard Malamud
The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante
Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
You, by Caroline Kepnes
White Noise, by Don DeLillo
Ulysses, by James Joyce
The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein
Voice of the Fire, by Alan Moore
Jerusalem, by Alan Moore
The Simulacra, by Philip K. Dick
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick
Confessions of a Crap Artist, by Philip K. Dick
Radio Free Albemuth, by Philip K. Dick
A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick
The Divine Invasion, by Philip K. Dick
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, by Philip K. Dick
Galactic Pot-Healer, by Philip K. Dick
Ubik: The Screenplay, by Philip K. Dick
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, by Philip K. Dick
The Poseidon Adventure, by Paul Gallico
Magenta, by Warren Fahy
The Great Train Robbery, by Michael Crichton
Eruption, by Michael Crichton & James Patterson
Eaters if the Dead, by Michael Crichton
Timeline, by Michael Crichton
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
The Prague Cemetery, by Umberto Eco
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
On Writing, by Steven King
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
This is Your Mind on Plants, by Michael Pollan
Stew Leonard My Story, by Stew Leonard
America Before, by Graham Hancock
Visionary, by Graham Hancock
The Cosmic Serpent, by Jeremy Narby
The Road to Eleusis, by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffmann, and Carl Ruck
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, by John M. Allegro
Food of the Gods, by Terence McKenna
Stalking the Wild Pendulum, by Itzhak Bentov
Tides of War, by Steven Pressfield
The Virtues of War, by Steven Pressfield
36 Righteous Men, by Steven Pressfield
The Artist’s Journey, by Steven Pressfield
Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, by Steven Pressfield
Bird By Bird, by Anne Lamott
The Master and His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist
The Hero’s Journey, by Joseph Campbell
The Hermetica, by Hermes Trismegistus
The Way of Zen, by Alan Watts
The Untethered Soul, by Michael Singer
Becoming Supernatural, by Dr. Joe Dispenza
The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle
The Bible, King James Version
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Tao Teh Ching
I Ching
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
Devils, by Fyodor Dostoevksy
The Karamozov Brothers, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill
A Clergyman’s Daughter, by George Orwell
The Managerial Revolution, by James Burnham
The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli
Point Counter-Point, by Aldous Huxley
Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley
World Without Cancer, by G. Edward Griffin
The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus
Don’t Bullshit Yourself, by Jon Taffer
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
Chaos, by Tom O’Neill
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford
The Wager, by David Grann
Mutiny!, by Edmund Fuller
The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben
Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Hike, by Drew Magary
Cosa Nostra, by John Dickie
The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson
Rich Dad Poor Dad, by Robert T. Kiyosaki
The Emperor’s Handbook, by Marcus Aurelius
The Art of Living, by Epictetus
How to Be a Stoic, by Massimo Pigliucci
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig
Zen in the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel
Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankel
Republic, by Plato
Symposium, by Plato
The Iliad, by Homer
The Odyssey, by Homer
How to Die, by Seneca
These are all the books on my shelf that I want to read before I die. Yesterday it hit me that I’d most likely never be able to accomplish this. There are too many books, and the list will only grow from here. Something compelled me to go through all of them and write down the titles. The number of books is 105.
Going through books, jotting down the titles of the ones I want to get to before my life will end brought about strange emotions. I imagine it a lesser feeling than that of writing one’s will, but in the same realm. It wasn’t sad, but surprisingly peaceful. It put things into perspective. Out of these books, which are the ones I need to make sure I read before I die?
It’s the way you should always live your life. The amount of time we have in this world is finite and extremely short. I can feel time sweeping by any time I do anything. Days, months, and years pass. Our loved ones grow older. Friends come and others drift apart. People we hold dear can be gone in the blink of an eye. Things can change at the drop of a hat. We’re here this moment and gone the next. Find out what is important to you. See who you want to see. Do what you want to do. And read what you want to read. We only have so much time.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to share your own list—I could always use a few more book recommendations.
If you enjoyed this post and would like to support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Feeling generous? You can also buy me a coffee (or a book).
A friend of mine had saved up a library of 5000 books to read ‘when I retire’. I pointed out that at one per week, that’d take 100 years. We don’t speak much any more.
Most of those books can be knocked out in a sitting or two, to be honest. I've never taken more than a day to read a Philip K Dick novel, they grab you and then before you have a chance to breathe they're done.
You have a few bricks there that will take some time. The advice I once got about reading the Bible was something like, "Read three chapters of the Old Testament in the morning and one chapter of the New Testament before bed, and you'll be done in a year" so you can do that while reading other books. This list shouldn't take you longer than 5 years.
I force myself to reread books on my shelf and I'm an idiot overly attracted to doorstoppers so the result is that I only have about 40 unread books on my shelf and yet just those 40 will probably take me five or more years. During which, of course, I suspect I'll acquire more........