One of my aims for 2015 is to begin catching up on all the reading I’ve neglected for, well, the majority of my life. So, I started by googling several combinations of ‘books to read before you die,’ ‘100 most important books,’ and so on. I discovered that quite a few reputable (and a few not so reputable) sources have published such a list. Nice, but it still leaves me at a loss for what to do next. Which list do I go with?
After carefully reading through what was on offer I decided to take the collective wisdom from the various sources by painstakingly comparing (Well, I hired ‘Vi’ from Vietnam via Elance to painstakingly compare) all of the lists to determine how much overlap existed between them. I used this information to create a new list of the top books based on the number of times the book appeared as one of the list’s recommendations. The more the book was referred to by the lists, the more the experts agreed, and the more securely that book’s place became in my new and improved books-to-read-before-you-die list.
And now for the books. Surprisingly enough, there were 520 books from the 8 lists, which meant there was less overlap than I expected. 65 of the books were pretty straightforward as they were mentioned at least 3 times (with The Great Gatsby and Catch-22 being the only 2 making it on all 8 lists). To make up the remaining 45 books, since my list had to be 100 books long, I simply needed to choose those books that made it onto at least 2 lists. Unfortunately, 91 books were on at least two lists. So, I decided to further cull those 91 by focusing on the books that were mentioned at least twice by The Guardian, Amazon, Harvard, Time and The Telegraph. That left me with the right number of books and, voila, the greatest list ever created now lives. Lucky for me most are available on Audible ❤. Enjoy!
That’s it. I’m pretty busy so plan on getting through most of these usingAudible — I highly recommend giving it a try (they’re currently giving 2 audio books away FREE).
Feel free to drop me a line if you think I’ve missed anything or if you’d like the spreadsheet with all 500+ books listed on it.