by PaulRobinson | 2026-02-09 09:12:33+00:00
PSA: 99.999% of people should ignore most of the entries on lists like this.

I devour reading material. I love books - fiction, non-fiction, audio books, trade paperbacks, newly minted hardbacks, old musty stuff in a basement, all of it - and subscribe to Literary Review and Granta, and check in on London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement when I can. I subscribe to quality newspapers and periodicals, and I'd rather spend an evening in a bookshop with late opening hours than a nightclub. Reading is great. Everyone should do a lot more of it - it's food for the soul.

But reading lists put together by other people aren't good for you. If anything, they get in the way of you figuring out what you want to read.

Here's some simple maths: life expectancy in my home country is 83 years for females, 79 years for males. I am male, have multiple (not imminently life-threatening), health conditions, and so with a little maths I can expect to live perhaps 25 more years. Sobering. But it is reality.

If I read a book a week (which is way higher a rate than the average reading rate, and slow for a fan of reading - but I like to absorb books a little more slowly), I am going to max out at 1,300 books in the rest of my life.

Most people read a few books a year. At that rate I'd have just 75-100 books to read in the rest of my time alive. If that were my number, I should probably make each one of those books count in some way.

You should do this maths yourself, and across a few dimensions. You only have so many books, films, music gigs, vacations/holidays, restaurant visits, whatever left in your life.

As an aside, you only have so many side projects, business ideas you'll get a chance to build and test in the market, and opportunities to invest in somebody else's ideas. You should do those maths too: figure out what your error bars could look like. They're probably not as optimistic as you'd hope for.

At first, this might feel terrifying. I prefer to see it as "focusing".

Do you really want to read all 842 of the books on that list? Is this the oeuvre you want to invest a sizeable chunk of your remaining life in? Are you confident this will make you feel whole, that you will get to the end and have no regrets about making this your mission? If you yes to all these questions, and are sure: brilliant, you have found a purpose in life few others ever will. Godspeed and good luck!

For most people though, lists like this are just another todo list that create a sense of inadequacy, FOMO or regret.

In 1880, the designer William Morris said "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful".

Apply this to your reading lists[0]. Curate. Edit. Find what makes your heart sing or your brain grow, and dive in.

Do not worry about what other people think you "should" read. Do not read "the great classics" if they do not interest you. Safely ignore award winning writers - from Nobel laureates, to Pulitzer Prize winners, to Booker short-listed authors - unless something about that book speaks to you and you almost yearn for it.

Because when you do that, you'll realise a) most books are junk to you (but might be great for someone else), and b) that as you start to develop the habit of reading the things that you genuinely want to, it becomes a healthy, mind-nourishing obsession.

Come on in, the pages are lovely.

[0] Actually, apply this rule to everything you can in your life. It can be hard to start, but worthwhile.