1000 Books to Die Enlightened
Plenty of books have been written on self-development and spiritual journeys. Even more Medium articles are churned out daily about those books, sharing insights, learning, and encouraging you on the way. It seems almost as if everybody wants to become a better human.
When we read, we read with more than just the round things in our head following lines of text. We, or our neurons and whatnot, are transported to a whole different world (unless the writer sucks at writing). In that brave new world, we get to live through things. We get to experience emotions that may even incite physical reactions in the bodies we left behind. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said:
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
We at Kugel Books — our presently but aspirational fictitious self-serving publishing outfit — have decided to become the best-ests humans we can be, and since books are the greatest medium for self-discovery, we are going to read a whole lot of them.
What books should we be reading then? What books hold the most promise of transformation? What books are guaranteed to challenge us and provide enough material for complaining (we do love to complain)? These books need to be springboards to talk about all the important questions in life as well as life itself.
We think there is only one option here and it is the classics. The classics are supposedly the best entire nations can offer. They are often exceptionally long and tedious and should, therefore, really be worth their salt (or ink?).
Follow us here at Kugel Books for updates on the thoughts these books will give us and the inevitable incessant complaining that we are bound to produce as well. We are absolutely going to be very arbitrary about it and it is going to take forever but as numerous internet articles say, we must read these 1000 books before we die!
Literature… is the union of suffering with the instinct for form. — Thomas Mann
