30 Books to Read Before You Die (Pt. 24)

Yes, I'm still going but that's not the point. It really doesn't matter whether you've been keeping up with the reading or whether you've just read one or two texts from the entire collection we've been through so far.

At this current moment in time whilst I'm writing this, it is about 6 AM and I'm sitting at the kitchen table with my cup of coffee and my book beside me. Currently, I am reading Horace's works and well, though I think reading classics and the classical is important, I also think that having a wide range of literature under your belt is also very important. To be honest, there are far more people I have met that enjoy reading everything, not just enjoy reading one or two specific genres. You never know, you could actually end up enjoying something you thought you wouldn't like.

For example: I thought that I didn't like Romantic Comedy until I read Hannah Rothschild's The Improbability of Love. That book really made it possible for me to enjoy a good Romantic Comedy because it had so many sub-plots and was very well-written.

So, what we're going to go through now are numbers 691 through to 720. I hope you're enjoying these lists so far and remember, my favourites will be marked with a (*) and I will talk about some of the books with memorable experiences behind them.

691-700

691. The Histories by Herodotus

692. 'Meditations' by Marcus Aurelius*

This book actually really helps if you have anxiety. It talks about how you need to not worry if you come to any emotional harm because the harm you think is harm is only harm because you believe it to be. Yeah, I know right. Anyways here's an example. If someone has insulted you, you shouldn't get upset about it because that means that you see it as emotional harm and therefore acknowledge what the other person is trying to do. Basically Marcus Aurelius was the first guy to really say "ignore the bullies because if you meditate on the emotional harm, then the acknowledgement may allow them to pursue this further." It makes a lot of sense is what I'm trying to say.

693. The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

694. The 12 Caesars by Suetonius

695. The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus

696. The Satyricon by Petronius

697. The Politics by Aristotle*

698. Electra by Euripides*

699. Daphnis and Chloe by Longus

700. The Trial and Death of Socrates by Plato*

701-710

701. The Complete Poems of Catullus

702. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca the Younger

703. The Conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar

704. The Selected Works of Cicero*

There's something about reading some of the greatest political speeches in human history that is quite overwhelming. Cicero's selected works includes a wide array of his texts but the speeches have to be my favourite. I read this some time last year and I thought that thought Cicero's language may have been convoluted and sometimes difficult to understand fully, but there was something really cool about reading speeches from so long ago about trials, political upheavals etc. that really colours the scene of the time in which Cicero lived.

705. The History of Alexander by Quintus Curtius Rufus

706. The Life of Alexander the Great by Plutarch*

707. The Early History of Rome by Livy

708. The Georgics by Virgil

709. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan*

710. Territory of Light by Yuko Tshushima

711-720

711. An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction by Paul Salzman

712. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

713. The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal*

714. After Alice by Gregory Maguire

715. Shylock is My Name by Howard Jacobson*

716. Travelling to Infinity by Jane Hawking

717. The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami*

718. The Imago Sequence by Laird Barron

719. Alice by Christina Henry

720. The Grown Up by Gillian Flynn