30 Books to Read Before You Die (Pt. 23)

I am not going to lie to you, I have to delve deeper into my brain now to try and remember all the books I’ve read and all the ones I want to share with you. There are still many, many more to go, but on Part 23, I can bet you are probably getting sick of me talking about books, so instead I’m going to talk to you about how reading has impacted my own life through the years.

Well, I started reading for entertainment when I was very young—starting off with the Dr. Seuss books, then moving on to the Harry Potter Series (what was out of them back then!). When I hit my teen years, they were the most important years for my reading. Why? Well because I didn’t have a whole lot of friends. I wasn’t very popular, which most people would say is pretty horrible, but, in reality, I just got more time to read. I never had to tell anyone what I was reading or why I was reading it. I just got on with my own reading and did it the way I wanted to do it; I read what I wanted to read. The problem arose when I was 13 and my parents found out I wasn’t really a sociable child.

According to my diary entries from just over ten years ago, my parents tried to ban me from books for the summer of when I was 13. This went down horribly and I ended up reading anyways because come on, it’s really all I did. I may not have socialised with people, but I was socialising with my book. I loved reading and I had no idea where it came from because I was so incredibly young when the feeling began.

Now that I’m getting on in life, through my 20s I have read so many interesting books so far, and I hope to read more in the seven years of the decade I have left. Hopefully I’ll still be going with these lists as well because come on, who else makes a list this long and doesn’t hope it goes on forever? I definitely want to do this for as long as possible because I love sharing what I’m reading with other people.

Well, if you’re new here, let me explain something to you. If you’re reading this list, I want you to know that I’ll never put anything in the article that I haven’t read myself. I will talk about some of the books with meaningful experiences behind them and I’ll mark my favourites with a (*). So, I hope you can sit back and enjoy Part 23, and let us begin to go through numbers 661 through to 690. Thank you for reading these lists!

661-670

661. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

662. Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

663. Arthur and George by Julian Barnes*

Probably my favourite book by Julian Barnes, this was also the first book I ever read by him completely by accident. I needed something to read and I found it on sale in a bookshop at about 18 or 19 years old. The story is beautiful and is all about human relations, human contact and what it really means to be a human being. I find this to be the most philosophical and political of Barnes’ novels, and it is also one of his most emotional. I love this book quite a bit, so if you’re only just getting into Julian Barnes, then I would highly recommend Arthur and George; it’s such an emotional and relevant novel. Barnes is a great storyteller.

664. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

665. Room by Emma Donoghue

666. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James*

667. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh*

668. His Bloody Project by GM Burnet

669. The Sellout by Paul Beatty

670. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders*

671-680

671. A History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

672. Autumn by Ali Smith

673. Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll*

674. The Penguin Portable Emerson*

I was only recently reading this, maybe in the last few months or so. The thing about Emerson is that I’d always tried to read him but I couldn’t. His poetry had no context to me, and I couldn’t connect with it on any level—it seemed too distant from me emotionally and philosophically. Then I read this book here. This book is organised by giving us the criticisms by Emerson to begin with and his essays, lectures, etc. This was so important to me because then, when I got on to his poetry, I could open up those pages like I had never been able to before. This is really the quintessential Emerson text.

675. The English Ghost by Peter Ackroyd

676. Me and a Guy Named Elvis by Jerry Schilling

677. The Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov

678. Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick*

679. Elvis Presley: The Stories Behind the Songs V.1 by Matt Shepherd

680. The Selected Tales by Nikolai Gogol

681-690

681. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

682. A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin

683. Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

684. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin*

685. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

686. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

687. Ulysses by James Joyce

688. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler

689. Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

690. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James