Books I want to read this year

At the start of every year, I usually sit down and draw up a list of fifty or so books that I would like to get through during the year. Even though I have never managed to read even half this list, the mere idea of planning my read list in advance helps me push myself a bit more and actually start some challenging books that would otherwise intimidate me out of even touching them. These are usually the mammoth classics or the extra-dense nonfiction volumes which require a lot of time and effort to get through. It’s already a few months into 2023 and, believe it or not, I have consistently followed the guidance of the list I made at the start of the year. For a little extra dose of accountability, I’m sharing my Annual Want-to-Read List publicly for the first time. If anyone wants to buddy up and plow their way through any of these together, please feel free to let me know. (Update: added checkmarks ✓ for books I have read up until today).

Fiction

1. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
2. 2666 by Roberto Bolano
3. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
4. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
5. Don Quixote by Cervantes
6. Emma by Jane Austen
7. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen ✓
8. Half of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
9. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
10. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
11. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov ✓
12. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
13. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez ✓
14. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
15. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen ✓
16. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera ✓
17. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
18. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
19. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
20. The Divine Comedy by Dante
21. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
22. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt ✓
23. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
24. The Trial by Franz Kafka
25. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
26. White Teeth by Zadie Smith ✓

Nonfiction

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
2. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
3. Capital and Ideology by Thomas Picketty
4. Capital in the Twenty First Century by Thomas Picketty
5. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
6. Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm ✓
7. God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens ✓
8. Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky ✓
9. Humankind by Rutger Bregman
10. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote ✓
11. Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
12. Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes
13. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
14. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff ✓
15. The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi ✓
16. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
17. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
18. The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
19. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
20. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
21. The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
22. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
23. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
24. The Unabridged Journals by Sylvia Plath ✓
25. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
26. This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends by Nicole Perlroth

Perhaps because I am actually making progress through this list for once, I don’t want to lose my momentum, so I delegate the task of keeping myself accountable to my imaginary blog readers (just kidding, I acknowledge your presence, friends who are so kind as to read my blog from time to time). There is a very good chance I will deviate from the plan and end up leaving a lot of these titles untouched by the time 2023 wraps up, but here’s to a self-motivated effort, no matter how transient, to challenge myself as a reader.

What about you? Do you have any books that you wish to read before the end of 2023?