1. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
2. 1984 – George Orwell
3. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
4. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
5. Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens
6. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
7. A Song of Ice and Fire – George R.R. Martin
8. Dune – Frank Herbert
9. The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
10. Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari
11. Educated – Tara Westover
12. All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr
13. The Nightingale – Kristin Hannah
14. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
15. Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn
16. Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
17. Atomic Habits – James Clear
18. The Fault in Our Stars – John Green
19. The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
Must reads apparently. I've read the bolded ones, they are good.
I've read six of the top 10. The ones I've missed are 3/4/5 and #9. I have read another of Le Guin's books,
The Dispossessed.
From 11-19, the only one I've read is
The Hunger Games.
For those who have not read
Sapiens, I highly recommend it. Back when I still talked about politics online, I often highlighted the power of myths... Which rankled people because I'd talk about things they hold dear and refer to them as myths--even things that objectively exist such as money/currency. Money/currency exists, but the only reason that anyone will accept it for goods or services is the myth that society all agrees that it's got value and OTHER people will accept it for goods or services. The first half of the book is about sort of the history of homo sapiens outcompeting neanderthals largely due to things like cooking food, which made food easier to digest, which means we had more energy to go into our brains. But the second half talks more about modern society and how our ability as a species to embrace myths is a tremendous underpinning of being able to have a society at all.
I've heard good things about
Atomic Habits, but haven't read it myself. One of the key tenets as described by someone who HAS read it is the idea that
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." It's one of the reasons that when it comes to my fitness journey over the last few years, I haven't really set "goals" for specific
results. Not a number on a scale, or a waist measurement, or a specific amount of weight lifted or an output achieved on the Peloton. What I've done is committed to what inputs I'm going to put in, and the results will be what they'll be. Setting "goals" can be demoralizing if you don't achieve them. Creating a system of what you're going to do, on the other hand, is within your control to fulfill. If you are fulfilling that and the results aren't satisfying, you need to change your system, not beat yourself up for failing to hit some metric.
