Over the past decade, reading has been one of my biggest hobbies. Even when life’s been at its busiest, I’ve managed to find time to read. Yet, despite 2022 being a relatively quiet year for me, I’ve somehow found myself reading less. In fact, I’ve hardly spent any time reading outside of the occasional article online.
Reading less wouldn’t be a problem if not for my habit of buying books that interest me. Whilst the amount of time I’ve spent reading has dwindled, the number of books I amass has not. I’ve continued picking up interesting books as and when I see them. But instead of reading them, I’ve been stacking them up on my shelf. Since buying them has been a gradual process throughout the year, I’ve only recently realised just how many unread books I’ve acquired.
In an attempt to rectify this, and hopefully rekindle my passion for reading in the process, I’ve decided to set myself a little reading challenge. I browsed through my collection of unread books and compiled a list of the ones I most want to read. I’m challenging myself to read as many of them as I can by the end of the year.
Here’s my list:
- A Life on Our Planet by David Attenborough
- Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
- The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
- Fire Season by Philip Connors
- A Song for the River by Philip Connors
- The Earth is Weeping by Peter Cozzens
- How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates
- Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne
- The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
- Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
- 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
- Black Spartacus by Sudhir Hazareesingh
- Socrates by Paul Johnson
- Lost Japan by Alex Kerr
- How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place by Bjorn Lomborg
- What We Owe the Future by William Macaskill
- Samurai William by Giles Milton
- A Promised Land by Barack Obama
- The State of Affairs by Esther Perel
- The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau
- Educated by Tara Westover
- 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think by Brianna Wiest
- Event by Slavoj Žižek
As of writing this post, there are 112 days left in 2022 and there are 28 books on the list. So, if I want to read all 28, I’ll need to finish a book every 4 days. With that said, I don’t want to fixate on the number of books I read. Whilst I would like to read as many of them as I can, the actual number I manage to read isn’t that important. After all, it’s the quality of the books you read, and the quality with which you read them, that matters more than the number you read. What is important to me is rekindling my passion for reading. I don’t want reading to be something I used to do; I want it to be a lifelong hobby. And that’s why I’m writing this post – as a public commitment to which I can also hold myself accountable.
Aside from just reading the books, I intend to write an update post towards the end of the year (or perhaps early next year) documenting how my reading journey went. If all goes well, not only will I have an interesting update to post but I’ll have also fallen back into the habit of reading regularly.
