Picking 52 Books to Read in 2015

By James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Last year I read 67 books. At first thought, I wondered if I could read 100 books in 2015.  But I neither want to spend all my time reading, nor do I want to be in a race to finish 100 books. Reading one book a week is a nice pace for me, however for many years now, I’ve been buying about five books a week. This certainly presents a problem if I don’t want to speed up my reading pace.

To complicate the situation, I’ve been buying some rather outstanding books that I’m lusting to read soon. I’ve gathered books for decades in anticipation of retiring. I thought for sure retiring would let me read 100-200 books a year, but after my first year of not working I’ve discovered I’m not inclined to be a superbookworm. I now have more books than I could read in five retired lives. Once on my bookshelf, books are out-of-sight out-of-mind, leaving me literary hungry to prowl the bookstores. I need to fix that.

Since I’m always compelled to start projects I never finished, I thought this week’s ambitious endeavor would be to go through my physical bookshelves, my library at Audible.com and my Kindle library at Amazon.com and pick the 52 books I’d most loved to read most. To nag myself daily of this project, I thought I’d pile them up somewhere very visible so they will sneer at me to be read. But since so many are digital, invisible from view, I figured I needed to slightly amend that inspiration. Thus the muse for this blog post. I’ll make a list that I will meditate on daily, and keep it near the pile of physical books that are begging me to be read.

Here are the 52 books I’d love to read in 2015. I’d be immensely satisfied with myself if I did, and very proud if I read half their number. They will be in no order – just listed as I pull them from the shelves and stack them in their special pile. This is a nice snapshot of my interests at the beginning of 2015. It will be revealing to see how I do at the beginning of 2016. I’m pretty sure I’ll have read 52 books, but will it be these books?

I know myself well enough to know I won’t stick to the plan exactly, but I’m curious how close I can get at predicting my reading future. I know I will read a bunch of science fiction books I haven’t listed, and books for my book clubs that haven’t been selected yet. I will promote these books when we nominate books though, so I can get some extra incentive to read them. In fact, some of the books listed here are books I was supposed to read in 2014 for book clubs, but didn’t. And some of these books are ones I’ve started and never completed.

What’s interesting, is 52 books is probably more books than I read to get my Bachelor’s degree. And this list covers a lot of subjects. If I do read and comprehend them, it will be like getting another degree.

1. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
2. The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham
3. The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God by Peter Watson
4. Ulysses by James Joyce
5. The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt
6. Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age by Kurt W. Beyer
7. ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of The World’s First Computer by Scott McCartney
8. Old Friends by Tracy Kidder
9. What Makes This Book so Great by Jo Walton
10. Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
11. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson
12. Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other by Sherry Turkle
13. On Writing Well by William Zinsser
14. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
15. The History of Mr. Wells by Michael Foot
16. About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made by Ben Yagoda
17. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos
18. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
19. It’s Complicated by Danah Boyd
20. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama
21. This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman
22. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
23. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life by Daniel C. Dennett
24. The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg
25. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnerman
26. Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson
27. The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson
28. Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope
29. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
30. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
31. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
32. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
33. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade
34. The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb
35. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
36. Atonement by Ian McEwan
37. The Math Book by Clifford Pickover
38. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline
39. A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
40. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
41. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence by George B. Dyson
42. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments by Gertrude Himmelfarb
43. The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson
44. A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900 by Stephen Puleo
45. The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman
46. The Violinist’s Thumb by Sam Kean
47. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
48. How To Live or A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
49. Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright
50. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
51. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
52. Children of God by Mary Doria Russell

JWH