No one else in my family or immediate friend group reads like me, so I did what I always do when I'm looking for reviews of something: I turned to the internet. When I Googled "Best books to read," I stumbled across something that struck my interest - the Amazon 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime, a self-proclaimed "bucket list of books to create a well read life."
I went to high school and college. I have a masters degree in English and an undergraduate minor, but I had only read a quarter of these books, and that included the children's titles like Goodnight, Moon and Where the Sidewalk Ends.
Right then and there, I decided that I must read them all. Completing this bucket list was my destiny. I started with Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and moved on to Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief. Some have been really good (Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes) and some not so much (Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), but I've learned something from each of them and have something new to take with me to make me a better reader, a better writer, and a better person.
The thing about being in a family of non-readers is that no one else has really read them. They don't want to hear me dissect the plot of Lolita or evaluate the roundness of Marquez's characters. So, here I am, writing to you, dear internet, to talk about these books that I'm reading.
None of them are new, so there are plenty of reviews already out there, and I'm not wanting to do that. Instead, I want to share in the lessons I learned, the relation to my own life, the human aspect of these books. It's just a little project I'm taking on, and I want to share my thoughts with someone other than my dog Lucy. She's a really good listener as long as I'm petting her, but it bothers me when she starts licking herself while I'm discussing the books narrative structure.
Anyways, I hope you will stick around and maybe even find a book to read. But even if you don't, there's always Google and the internet.
Oh, and if you want to see how many of the 100 books you've read, here's the link to a ListChallenge that will calculate it for you. Comment below, and let's see who has read the most.
