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A goal that I have is to read all of the books on the New York Public Library's list of the best books of the 20th Century. The original brochure had 158 titles, but the NYPL website expanded the list by 17 titles for a total of 175. This is the link to the website with the list of books:

Books of the Century

The longest book I've ever read was Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (which is included in the list). The style of the book requires a lot of concentration because of Proust's tendency to include run-on sentences and his multi-layered digressions. I read Proust with a dictionary by my side, looking up approximately one word every two pages. Needless to say my vocabulary expanded amplitudinously. I started reading the book in the summer of 2004 and finished it in 2010. I've discovered that books that are difficult to read can be very rewarding because the struggle to comprehend is an exercise in effort that builds a muscle in your brain. That muscle can be used to help with other struggles that life throws your way.

I read the New Yorker magazine every week. First, I go through all of Talk of the Town. If any of these pieces bore me I skip it. I used to always read The Financial Page (it was written by James Surowiecki from 2000 to 2017, but they removed it because Surowiecki left the magazine), then I read at least two other pieces; usually the non-fiction pieces but once in a while I'll read one of The Critics' pieces. I almost never read the fiction or Shouts & Murmurs. In 2023, they added the crossword puzzle on the last page which I attempt if it's easy.

I was a member of a book club that existed for about ten years with my mom, brother & cousin. We read the same book and then got together and discussed it. We took turns choosing the book to read and when it was my turn I would pick books from the Best Books of the 20th Century list.

I like fiction and non-fiction, and I've read some poetry (and written some too). I sometimes read in Spanish. I can also read music, hand signals, body language and facial expressions. I used to read to my children on a daily basis. I occasionally use the encyclopedia when I come across topics of interest. Here's something that I got off of Wikipedia:"Reading is a process of retrieving and comprehending some form of stored information or ideas. These ideas are usually some sort of representation of language, such as symbols to be examined by sight, or by touch (for example Braille). Other types of reading may not be language-based, such as music notation or pictograms. Although reading is now a primary means for most people to receive information this has been the case only for the last 150 years or so, with some exceptions only a small percentage of the population in any country was literate before the industrial revolution."

Comprehending information and ideas is essentially learning which is the activity that strengthens the mind.

Landmarks of Modern Literature

Anton Chekhov. Tri sestry / The Three Sisters (1901)

Marcel Proust. A la recherche du temps perdu / Remembrance of Things Past (3 vols., 1913-27)

Gertrude Stein. Tender Buttons: Objects Food Rooms (1914)

Franz Kafka. Die Verwandlung / The Metamorphosis (1915)

Edna St. Vincent Millay. Renascence and Other Poems (1917)

William Butler Yeats. The Wild Swans at Coole (1917)

Luigi Pirandello. Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore / Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)

T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land (1922)

James Joyce. Ulysses (1922)

Thomas Mann. Der Zauberberg / The Magic Mountain (1924)

F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby (1925)

Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse (1927)

Federico Garcia Lorca. Primer romancero gitano / Gypsy Ballads (1928)

Richard Wright. Native Son (1940)

William Faulkner. The Portable Faulkner (1946)

W. H. Auden. The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947)

Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot; A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (1952)

Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man (1952)

Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita (1955)

Jorge Luis Borges. Collected Fictions (1944; 2nd augmented edition, 1956)

Jack Kerouac. On the Road (1957)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

Philip Roth. Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

Toni Morrison. Song of Solomon (1977)



Nature's Realm

Maurice Maeterlinck. La vie des abeilles / The Life of the Bee (1901)

Marie Sklodowska Curie. Traite de radioactivite / Treatise on Radioactivity (1910)

Albert Einstein. The Meaning of Relativity (1922)

Roger Tory Peterson. A Field Guide to the Birds (1934)

Aldo Leopold. A Sand County Almanac (1949)

Konrad Z. Lorenz. King Solomon's Ring: New Light on Animal Ways (1949)

Rachel Carson. Silent Spring (1962)

Smoking and Health (known as The Surgeon General's Report) (1964)

James Watson. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968)

Edward O. Wilson. The Diversity of Life (1992)



Protest & Progress

Jacob Riis. The Battle with the Slum (1902)

W. E. B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Upton Sinclair. The Jungle (1906)

Jane Addams. Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)

Lillian Wald. The House on Henry Street (1915)

Lincoln Steffens. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931)

John Dos Passos. U.S.A. (1937)

John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

James Agee and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)

Lillian Smith. Strange Fruit (1944)

Paul Goodman. Growing Up Absurd (1960)

James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time (1963)

Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

Randy Shilts. And the Band Played On (1987)

Alex Kotlowitz. There Are No Children Here (1991)



Colonialism & Its Aftermath

Joseph Conrad. Lord Jim (1900)

Rudyard Kipling. Kim (1901)

Mohandas K. Gandhi. Satyagraha / Non-Violent Resistance (1921-40)

E. M. Forster. A Passage to India (1924)

Albert Camus. The Stranger (1942)

United Nations Charter (1945)

Alan Paton. Cry, the Beloved Country (1948)

Edward Steichen. The Family of Man: The Photographic Exhibition Created by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art (1955)

Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart (1958)

Frantz Fanon. Les damnes de la terre / The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

Tayeb el-Salih. Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal / Season of Migration to the North (1969)

V. S. Naipaul. Guerrillas (1975)

Buchi Emecheta. The Bride Price (1976)

Ryszard Kapuscinski. Cesarz / The Emperor (1978)

Rigoberta Menchu. I, Rigoberta Menchu (1983)

Marguerite Duras. L'amant / The Lover (1984)



Mind & Spirit

Emile Durkheim. Le suicide: etude de sociologie / Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897)

Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

Havelock Ellis. Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1901-28)

William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)

Kahlil Gibran. The Prophet (1923)

Bertrand Russell. Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

Margaret Mead. Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

Jean-Paul Sartre. L'etre et le neant / Being and Nothingness (1943)

Dr. Benjamin Spock. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946)

The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version (1952)

Paul Tillich. The Courage to Be (1952)

Ken Kesey. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)

Timothy Leary. The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. On Death and Dying (1969)

Bruno Bettelheim. The Uses of Enchantment (1976)



Popular Culture & Mass Entertainment

Bram Stoker. Dracula (1897)

Henry James. The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Arthur Conan Doyle. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)

Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan of the Apes (1912)

Zane Grey. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)

Agatha Christie. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)

Dale Carnegie. How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)

Margaret Mitchell. Gone with the Wind (1936)

Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep (1939)

Nathanael West. The Day of the Locust (1939)

Grace Metalious. Peyton Place (1956)

Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat (1957)

Robert A. Heinlein. Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

Joseph Heller. Catch-22 (1961)

Truman Capote. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965)

Jim Bouton. Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues (1970)

Stephen King. Carrie (1974)

Tom Wolfe. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)



Women Rise

Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence (1920)

Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler. Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement (1923)

Margaret Sanger. My Fight for Birth Control (1931)

Zora Neale Hurston. Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)

Simone de Beauvoir. The Second Sex (1949)

Doris Lessing. The Golden Notebook (1962)

Betty Friedan. The Feminine Mystique (1963)

Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

Robin Morgan, editor. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement (1970)

Susan Brownmiller. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975)

Alice Walker. The Color Purple (1982)



Economics & Technology

Thorstein Veblen. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899)

Max Weber. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus / The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904)

Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

John Maynard Keynes. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)

Friedrich A. von Hayek. The Road to Serfdom (1944)

Milton Friedman. A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957)

John Kenneth Galbraith. The Affluent Society (1958)

Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

Helen Leavitt. Superhighway - Superhoax (1970)

E. F. Schumacher. Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973)

Ed Krol. The Whole Internet: User's Guide & Catalog (1992)



Utopias & Dystopias

H. G. Wells. The Time Machine (1895)

Theodor Herzl. Der Judenstaat / The Jewish State (1896)

L. Frank Baum. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

J. M. Barrie. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Herland (1915)

Aldous Huxley. Brave New World (1932)

James Hilton. Lost Horizon (1933)

B. F. Skinner. Walden Two (1948)

George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged (1957)

Anthony Burgess. A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale (1985)



War, Holocaust, Totalitarianism

Arnold Toynbee. Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (1915)

John Reed. Ten Days That Shook the World (1919)

Siegfried Sassoon. The War Poems (1919)

Jaroslav Hasek. Osudy dobreho vojaka Svejka za svetove valky / The Good Soldier Schweik (1920-23)

Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf (1925-26)

Erich Maria Remarque. Im Westen nichts Neues / All Quiet on the Western Front (1928)

Anna Akhmatova. Rekviem / Requiem (1935-40)

Ernest Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

Arthur Koestler. Darkness at Noon (1941)

John Hersey. Hiroshima (1946)

Anne Frank. Het Achterhuis / The Diary of a Young Girl (1947)

Winston Churchill. The Gathering Storm (1948)

Elie Wiesel. La nuit / Night (1958)

Mao Zedong. Quotations from Chairman Mao (1966)

Dee Alexander Brown. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970)

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. Arkhipelag Gulag, 1918-1956 / The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (1973-75)

Michael Herr. Dispatches (1977)

Art Spiegelman. Maus: A Survivor's Tale (2 vols., 1986-91)



Optimism, Joy, Gentility

Sarah Orne Jewett. The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

Helen Keller. The Story of My Life (1903)

G. K. Chesterton. The Innocence of Father Brown (1911)

Juan Ramon Jimenez. Platero y yo / Platero and I; An Andalusian Elegy (1914)

George Bernard Shaw. Pygmalion (1914)

Emily Post. Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home (1922)

P. G. Wodehouse. The Inimitable Jeeves (1923)

A. A. Milne. Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)

Willa Cather. Shadows on the Rock (1931)

Irma S. Rombauer. The Joy of Cooking: A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat (1931)

J. R. R. Tolkien. The Hobbit (1937)

Margaret Wise Brown. Goodnight Moon (1947)

Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

Langston Hughes. The Best of Simple (1961)

Elizabeth Bishop. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (1983)



Favorites of Childhood & Youth

Beatrix Potter. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901)

Betty Smith. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)

C. S. Lewis. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)

J. D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

E. B. White. Charlotte's Web (1952)

Ezra Jack Keats. The Snowy Day (1962)

Maurice Sendak. Where the Wild Things Are (1963)

Patricia MacLachlan. Sarah, Plain and Tall (1985)