“100 Books To Read Before You Die” …
By: Oliver Paoliang
Tags: Reading, Readinglist, Reading Challenge, Book Recommendations, Books

2020 has been one whole involuntary roller-coaster ride. I kind of saw it coming, when the Chinese speaking online community started hypothesizing about the occurrence of a “SARS 2.0” in late January. Back then, I already fantasized about how big of a deal it could become later down the line.

What I never expected however, was for it to turn into a pandemic.

Due to the pandemic, the majority of mankind spent its days at home this year. It’s quite probable that due to a combination of hard lock-downs and curfews, in some countries, more man-hours have been spent at home this year, than in any previous year. This was done in order to prevent the transmission rate of the Coronavirus from growing exponential. In other words, people were battling the virus by staying at home. A lot of things that were part of our ordinary lives like meeting up with our group of friends, having dinner or even the daily commute just faded away. Realistically speaking though, most people were battling boredom more than the virus. And I was no exempt from this. Overwhelmed with this new downtime and the simultaneous restrictions on how this downtime can be utilized I had to find something to do. Quick.

During the first wave around April 2020, the first thing that came to my mind were the virtual realms of video games. Without much hesitation I went on eBay to order a complete PS2 set, a modchip, some old games and went on try to recapture the experience of gaming as a careless young kid during the mid-2000s. It quickly dawned on me however, that playing video games merely due to the fact that I had no other options of using my prime time was only going to lead to me being miserable. Instead I had to find something more produce, something that tingled my brain and wouldn’t turn me into a vegetable of what now turned out to be the course of the year (and possibly the first quarter of the coming year).

And so, the searching continued. I was pacing up and down my living room one day, when the solution to my dilemma appeared (quite literally) right in front of my face. On top of my book drawer, the lay a pile of books I had bought over the last 3 months that I had placed there, ready to be read at my signal. That signal never came however, and the books ended up staying up there for months. I am sure you know exactly what it’s like, as this seems to a more widespread “problem”.

The Japanese in fact already had a word for what I unwittingly practiced: 積ん読 (Tsu-n-doku). 積ん読 is made up of 積んでおく(Tsu-ndeoku), which means to pile something up for later and 読書(Doku-sho) which simply means to read books.

It seems like it took something drastic, like a lockdown for me to finally break the cycle of Tsundoku and finally get to read these books… there was no way I could put it off any further. I didn’t expect to go through those books as fast as I did, nor did expect that I would develop of a habit of reading whenever I had more than five minutes to spare. More. I had to find more books. But where to start?

Then it came to me, I could look up one of those “100 Books to read before you DIE” lists and go through those too… but simultaneously, I remembered the near 100 books in the “saved for later” list of my online bookstore account. The time was ripe, so I thought, for me to read through all the books I held an interest in reading over the past years, but never go to for some reason. So I decided to compile my own list

Without further ado, here’s the list I compiled:

As you might have noticed, this list is an eclectic mix of genres, time periods and languages and this reflects the way I have compiled this list. All of these books either

were on another “100 Books to Read before you Die” list I found online,

were on my To Read list already,

were recommended to me by my friends,

books I’ve read a long ago and simply want to read again

or were lifted out of the reading lists of some of my colleagues

I highly encourage you to read as much as you can this year, if you haven’t already done so (I’m only 25% through the list and I hope be by 33% by the next year). Who knows, it’s quite possible that your newly acquired knowledge will come in handy by the time the world goes back to normal…Feel free to use this list just as it is or make a couple re-adjustments. The ordering, a random mapping from (1…100) to (1…100) isn’t my recommended way of enjoying these books or anything, it was actually generated by a computer. If you’re interested in generating your own order, here’s the code:

I’m not reading these books alone though, as I managed to cobble together a small, private book reading club were we discuss the books during a FaceTime session after our read-through. It’s not a necessity for you to read books at the same time as someone else for purpose of exchanging your thoughts and ideas about it afterwards although it does go a long way towards maintaining your social connections through all this.

I’m going to end this post here, I gotta get back to reading after all ;-)

I wish you all a Happy list-compiling and reading!