30 Books to Read Before You Die (Pt. 16)

There's something really nice about having a good book to read and, when I'm not listening to rockabilly or my favourite podcasts, I love to read a book (needless to say I normally read whilst listening to music). I have to be perfectly honest, I don't get to read as much as I would like to (I want to start a baking business so, I'm doing all of that at the moment) and so, I fall behind with my reading goals by a slight bit. I still love to read though and I'm sure that you are here because you do too!

I think that reading is highly underrated as a pastime. People always think because you read lots of books that you must be the smartest person on the planet. Someone may watch a lot of television and it doesn't mean they know all there is to know about making and creating television shows. Yet, people put bookworms on some sort of pedestal. People have been guilty of doing this to me, I'm not actually as smart as everyone makes me out to be and I've told people many times—but it's "You read lots of books you must be smart." No, please shut up. Reading for me is like watching television for you—a pastime that I enjoy doing and I wish I could do it more often. The main reason I can't is because people always want to "create conversation"—I don't care for conversations with real people, they're far too boring and are just waiting for their turn to speak. They can talk to a damn wall for all I care, books are my friends, not people. Books are far better friends, there's nothing to maintain!

As we've always done, we're going to go through the list numbers 451 to 480 and I'll mark my personal favourites with a (*) and speak of some intermittently. I never ever put books I haven't read on the lists and so you'll only have books I have read myself. Let's get on with it then!

451 to 460

451. Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant

452. Life, Letters and Poetry by Michelangelo

453. Persian Letters by Montesquieu

454. Fasti by Ovid

455. Rights of Man by Thomas Paine*

456. Pindar's Odes

457. Republic by Plato

458. Greek Lives by Plutarch

459. Selected Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

460. The Vampyre by John Polidori

461 to 470

461. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

462. The Italian by Ann Radcliffe

463. Collected Poems by Arthur Rimbaud*

464. 'Reveries of a Solitary Walker' by Jean-Jacques Rousseau*

This is one of those books I read whilst in university, just because I found it in the library and needed something to read. Really, I absolutely adore this book because it tells you exactly why life itself is a prison. Now, if you know me, you know that I make a lot of jokes about life being the ultimate prison, but really it isn't a joke. Reveries of a Solitary Walker is the ultimate Byronic existentialism, experience without meaning and walking somewhere but going nowhere. It's a lovely book about the human condition and how everyone is imprisoned in their own lifestyles even if they think they're free. Rousseau's thinking was seriously ahead of his time.

465. The Masnavi by Rumi

466. Justine by the Marquis de Sade

467. The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics by Arthur Schopenhauer

468. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

469. Dialogues and Essays by Seneca

470. Henry V by William Shakespeare*

471 to 480

471. Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare*

472. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

473. The Major Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson

474. Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray*

475. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

476. The Lives of Artists by Giorgio Vasari

477. The Selected Poetry of Paul Verlaine*

478. Letters Concerning the English Nation by Voltaire

479. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells

480. Greek Lyric Poetry by ML West