One Year, Forty Classics: Tackling the books I should have read but never did
As of last September, I had never read Charlotte’s Web. Or Animal Farm, or Brave New World, or The Great Gatsby. After my tally, my literary sins-by-omission totaled forty — such was the result of 25 straight years spent fudging 8th-grade book reports, playing video games, and re-reading Harry Potter.
A year ago, I confessed those sins to my Facebook friends. They were displeased. But, after dishing out some well-deserved shame, my friends delivered. They filled out a highly-scientific survey, through which they told me which books to avoid, which to pair together, and so on — and I was off to the races.
I return to you now a better-read, if battle-tested (and weary), man. And, as I tend to do, I’ll now sprint into what may become yet another minefield by sharing my opinions on all of those books publicly.
In the list and book-by-book breakdown that follow, you’ll find those opinions. You’ll probably disagree with some of them — for instance, I really hated Walden — but that’s the fun of this whole thing. I’m looking forward to having some ~cultured~ conversions and debates with you all over the next few days (or longer — just depends when we forget about this list and go back to pretending that The Art of War was a “great” book.)
Happy browsing!
Quick note on rankings — Scale is 0–100: <50 makes the paper it’s printed on less valuable; 50+ is readable; 60+ is tolerable but lame; 70+ is good; 80+ is great; 90+ are all-timers. “CK Score” is all me; “Friend Score” is based on the simple average of the 37 responses to my Facebook survey in 2016.
Book Rankings, List: Christian vs. Friends
Book-by-book Breakdown — In Chronological Order of Date(s) Read
Sep 14 to Oct 01
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
CK Score: 88 | Friend Score: 93.3
CK Synopsis: Pedophiles can be protagonists too
“She was such a perfect little nymph in the try-out… it is all part of the fun of being young and alive and beautiful. You must understand -” “I always thought of myself,” I said, “as a very understanding father.”
Oct 02 to Oct 16
The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
CK Score: 79 | Friend Score: 87.5
CK Synopsis: Clancy’ll you miss the good ol’ days of hating Russians
“‘I’m sorry.’ Ryan reached down to close his victim’s eyes. He was sorry — why?”
Oct 17 to Oct 19
Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White
CK Score: 91 | Friend Score: 72.3
CK Synopsis: Charlotte is the friend you wish you had
“Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pong. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wing will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur — this lovely world, these precious days.”
Oct 19 to Oct 30
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
CK Score: 76 | Friend Score: 79
CK Synopsis: Pigs can be Communists too
“So that, what with the songs, the processions, Squealer’s lists of figures, the thunder of the gun, the crowing of the cockerel, and the fluttering of the flag, they were able to forget that their bellies were empty, at least part of the time.”
Oct 30 to Nov 01
A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf
CK Score: 84 | Friend Score: 84
CK Synopsis: Did Virginia take her own medicine for genius? Maybe.
“All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded… [I went on] through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swin of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering light of shop windows. All that you have to explore… holding your torch firm in your hand. Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the everchanging and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuff swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through chemists’ bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudomarble.”
Nov 01 to Nov 12
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
CK Score: 91 | Friend Score: 84
CK Synopsis: What did Gastby love: the light, or the girl?
“In his blue gardens men and women came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
Nov 12 to Nov 24
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt
CK Score: 76 | Friend Score: 80
CK Synopsis: Eichmann was dumb, and maybe also evil
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
Nov 24 to Dec 01
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
CK Score: 80 | Friend Score: 83
CK Synopsis: Big bro takes over Earth; little bro kills aliens
“Will people really go [to the new colony]?”
“People always go. Always. They always believe they can make a better life than in the old world.”
“What the hell, maybe they can.”
Dec 01 to Dec 29
The Story of My Experiments with Truth, by Gandhi
CK Score: 68 | Friend Score: 73
CK Synopsis: Gandhi thought a lot about food, apparently
“But you can wake a man only if he is really asleep; no effort that you may make will produce any effect upon him if he is merely pretending sleep.”
Jan 05 to Jan 10
The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank
CK Score: 88 | Friend Score: 78
CK Synopsis: She had to make it one more month! One!!
“…in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.”
Jan 11 to Jan 11
The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
CK Score: 67 | Friend Score: 62
CK Synopsis: Eff da (bourgeois) police
“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”
Jan 11 to Jan 22
Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault
CK Score: 92 | Friend Score: N/A
CK Synopsis: Prisons conquered torture, then society
“This disciplinary technique exercised upon the body had a double effect: a ‘soul’ to be known and a subjection to be maintained.”
Jan 27 to Feb 11
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn
CK Score: 85 | Friend Score: 69
CK Synopsis: Normal science doesn’t apply in paradigm shift
“The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must oten do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem-solving. He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.”
Feb 11 to Feb 19
The Character of Physical Law, by Richard Feynman
CK Score: 72 | Friend Score: 70
CK Synopsis: Physicist says all you can say about simple physics
“Which end is nearer to God… beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws?… To stand at either end, and to walk off that end of the pier only, hoping that out in that direction is the complete understanding, is a mistake. And to stand with evil and beauty and hope, or to stand with the fundamental laws, hoping that way to get a deep understanding of the whole world, with that aspect alone, is a mistake. It is not sensible for the ones who specialize at one end, and the ones who specialize at the other end, to have such disregard for each other. …The great mass of workers in between, connecting one step to another, are improving all the time our understanding of the world.”
Feb 19 to Feb 23
The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
CK Score: 71 | Friend Score: 74
CK Synopsis: Sun Tzu says: this is a metaphor for everything
“No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen.”
Feb 24 to Mar 02
The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of THE STRUCTURE OF DNA, by James Watson
CK Score: 77 | Friend Score: 55
CK Synopsis: 25 year old chases girls, Nobel prizes
“Only for brief moments did the fear shoot through me that an idea this good could be wrong.”
Mar 02 to Mar 30
The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
CK Score: 68 | Friend Score: 64
CK Synopsis: It’s the ciiiiiiirrrcle (tree) of life
“Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may have been effected in the long course of time through nature’s power of selection, that is by the survival of the fittest.”
Apr 01 to Apr 12
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
CK Score: 79 | Friend Score: 73
CK Synopsis: Isn’t it pretty to think things can work out?
“It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.”
Apr 13 to Apr 14
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass
CK Score: 80 | Friend Score: 67
CK Synopsis: Christian slavers were the worst
“The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master.”
Apr 14 to Apr 16
The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. DuBois
CK Score: 86 | Friend Score: 70
CK Synopsis: Emancipation didn’t solve the issue of race
“Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor,- all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked,-who is good? Not that men are ignorant,-what it truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.”
Apr 17 to Apr 19
Philosophy of Mind, by GWF Hegel
CK Score: 52 | Friend Score: 71
CK Synopsis: I understood some of those words
“If a man on any topic appeals not to… reasons… but to his feeling, the only thing to do is let him alone, because by his behaviour he refuses to have any lot or part in common rationality, and shuts himself up in his own isolated subjectivity — his private and particular self.”
Apr 19 to Apr 20
Meditations on First Philosophy, by Rene Descartes
CK Score: 84 | Friend Score: 80
CK Synopsis: Descartes can do no wrong — except overthinking
“Everything I very clearly and distinctly perceive is true.”
Apr 20 to Apr 23
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
CK Score: 89 | Friend Score: 76
CK Synopsis: Genes, not people, naturally select
“Just imagine the headlines if a marine biologist were to discover a species of dolphin that wove large, intricately meshed fishing nets, twenty dolphin-lengths in diameter! Yet we take a spider web for granted, as a nuisance in the house rather than as one of the wonders of the world… It is often said that [spiders] achieve their feats of architecture by ‘instinct’. But so what? In a way this makes them all the more impressive.”
Apr 24 to Apr 26
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
CK Score: 90 | Friend Score: 80
CK Synopsis: A real horrorshow of a veshch, O my brothers
“What I was being made to viddy now was not really a veshch I would have thought to be too bad before, it being only three or four malchicks crasting in a shop and filling their carmans with cutter, at the same time fillying about with the creeching starry ptitsa running the shop, tolchicking her and letting the red red krovvy flow.”
Apr 26 to May 04
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche
CK Score: 65 | Friend Score: 66
CK Synopsis: Nietzsche was a lonely, weird, self-loving genius
“Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know WHAT hath fallen into their depths.”
May 04 to May 06
Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
CK Score: 93 | Friend Score: 82
CK Synopsis: YOLO: everyone is small and will die soon anyways
“That all is as thinking makes it so — and you control your thinking. So remove your judgements whenever you wish and there is calm — as the sailor rounding the cape find smooth water and the welcome of a waveless bay.”
May 06 to May 14
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
CK Score: 94 | Friend Score: 76
CK Synopsis: A story as calm, collected, and interesting as Atticus
People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.
May 15 to May 17
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
CK Score: 84 | Friend Score: 81
CK Synopsis: Soma and cloning killed God
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
[and to grow old, diseased, starved, worried, tortured]“I claim them all.”
May 18 to May 22
Schindler’s List, by Thomas Keneally
CK Score: 79 | Friend Score: 83
CK Synopsis: You’re safe now; you’re with me
“He who saves a single life saves the world entire.”
May 23 to Jun 01
Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
CK Score: 63 | Friend Score: 61
CK Synopsis: Arrogant man builds cabin in the woods; loves nature
“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”
Jun 03 to Jun 14
All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
CK Score: 95 | Friend Score: 80
CK Synopsis: Talos buys and destroys his way to power… and death
“There is one question I should like to ask you. It is this. If, as you say, there is only the bad to start with, and the good must be made from the bad, then how do you ever know what the good is? How do you even recognize the good? Assuming you have made it from the bad. Answer me that.”
“Easy, Doc, Easy,” the Boss said.
“Well, answer it.”
“You just make it up as you go along.”
Jun 15 to Jun 25
The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James
CK Score: 77 | Friend Score: 75
CK Synopsis: The religo-psychical experience is crazy, also real
“But in our Father’s house are many mansions, and each of us must discover for himself the kind of religion and the kind of saintship which best comports with what he believes to be his powers and feels to be his truest mission and vocation.”
Jun 26 to Jul 09
Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien
CK Score: 78 | Friend Score: 81
CK Synopsis: Servant eavesdrops, rewarded with eternal fame
“‘Well, be off with you,’ said Rosie. ‘If you’ve been looking after Mr. Frodo all this while, what d’you want to leave him for, as soon as things look dangerous?’
This was too much for Sam.”
Jul 09 to Jul 30
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving
CK Score: 92 | Friend Score: 82
CK Synopsis: THE VOICE WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG
“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice — not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
Jul 30 to Aug 08
Mythologies, by Roland Barthes
CK Score: 66 | Friend Score: 61
CK Synopsis: Austere, french, inside jokes for days
“In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to be something by themselves.”
Aug 09 to Sep 22
The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
CK Score: 87 | Friend Score: 71
CK Synopsis: He’s either the Archangel Gabriel, or a schizophrenic
“I must think of myself, from now on, as living perpetually in the first instant of the future… But a history is not so easily shaken off; he was also living, after all, in the present moment of the past, and his old life was about to surge around him once again, to complete its final act.”
Disclaimer: Due to poor ratings from a scientific survey of my Facebook friends, I didn’t read Atlas Shrugged, The Second Sex, The Golden Bough, or Critique of Pure Reason. I swapped those out for Hillbilly Elegy, Between The World and Me, The Victory Lab, business school textbooks… and about 100 hours of free time.
