Creating a Bespoke Lifetime Reading List and Building Your Personal Library

In Praise of the Unfinishable

Of Libraries and Lists

I love lists. To my closer friends, this will come as no surprise. If I trust someone’s taste, I’m always asking for their recommendations of books (and films and music). This applies to friends but also to writers I admire. I have a reading list for writers from Dean Koontz, another from Neil Gaiman. I have that best fantasy books book from Michael Moorcock and some other guy I can’t recall. I make my own lists based on my goals and interests. I have more lists than I can finish what’s on them. And while I don’t currently own too many books to finish in my lifetime, I will. I commend both these practices to you.

In mounting a defense of this seemingly foolish idea, I want to start with a paraphrase of something I saw the late great Harlan Ellison say in an interview. Paraphrased because I couldn’t find the clip now for the life of me. Anyway, the host asks Harlan about his massive book collection which he estimated to be around 250,000 titles. Granted, this included a large volume of comic books but regardless of how you slice it, the figure beggars belief. Harlan sarcastically mimicked someone saying, “How can you read all those?” The answer of course is that you can’t. Not in the three score and ten years afforded us. Even if you live to 120 years old, it’s not gonna happen. Harlan replied to his hypothetical interlocutor by saying, “What’s the point of having a library where you’ve read all the books?” There is some tongue in cheek happening there but he’s also right. He goes on to say that there are people who live with books and people who don’t. The former type wouldn’t question this accumulation of books any more than the latter type is capable of understanding it. We can go into elaborate justifications for why it’s good to amass your own library but if you’re the former type of person, you just “get it” and no explanation is necessary. I’ll give a few of my motivations below for acquiring the around 2,000 books I have to date, and for why I intend to grow that number considerably, but if you’re a person interested in this type of essay you probably already have your own similar reasons and practices and it’s sort of self-explanatory. Suffice to say, we love books and that’s enough.

Additionally, if you talk with other book lovers you will inevitably begin to laugh over the impossibility of finishing your TBR (to be read) list. I used to find this truism daunting and a little depressing but somewhere along the way I began to find it inspiring and humbling and kind of marvelous. The best things in life are never really finished, certainly not a love affair, which is what we have with books.

I’m a writer and some of my readers are as well and there is a special place in the heart of a writer for books. This is no dig on someone who simply loves to read only. We need and respect you as well, else who would read our own original work? My desire as a writer is to earn a place on your shelf next to King, and Dickens, and Austen, and even my girl Nora. It’s an honor when a tried-and-true reader loves something I’ve written. I do all this for you in the end. Though I’m happy if there are lots of you and you’ll send me a little cash in exchange.

Don’t Worry About It

First of all, when you are building lists and buying books, as long as it doesn’t plunge you into debt, I say don’t worry about getting too many or pay any mind to concerns over whether you’ll finish them all. You won’t. That’s just fine. This is meant to be something we do for love and leisure and art (that nebulous term), not utilitarian metrical concerns (although I do track everything for my own sake (and for yours now since I’ll have my lists up and growing shortly)).

Sometimes we need to understand we are small. And nothing will do this for you like physically confronting an enormous collection of the best of human thought and storytelling. That’s also not an ivory tower call to only read the Great BooksTM. My favorite authors are John D. MacDonald, Nora Roberts, and Louis L’Amour. The literati scoff at such people, wrongly I might add. I also read a lot of classics and I recommend this practice as well. We should read broadly and with some degree of indiscrimination. At least try out something you think might suck before you write it off out of hand. I read a James Patterson book last year after being snobby about it for too long. It was rather good. Parts at least. The plotting was tight as can be and the pacing was excellent. As expected, the prose leaves something to be desired but you can still enjoy and learn from him regardless. I won’t read his complete works by a long shot, it’s not to my taste, but I’m glad I tried it out.

Ultimately, lifetime reading lists and personal libraries are an exercise in humility. None of us will probably ever be anywhere near as good as Shakespeare. But oh, what joy and learning are to be had in reading all he wrote. To lesser degrees this is my approach to all books.

And the fact that you can’t read them all should be an encouragement, a spur to action, rather than a cause for lament. To take a brief, somewhat serious detour, life is indeed short and we will die. I hope of old age, but I don’t know. Time is not good to waste, this is a given. We get into the weeds about what constitutes wasted time, but for me, any time spent chipping away at these lists, at working through our stacks of owned books, is time well spent. There are few things so enriching as a good book. Spouses, kids, family generally, and friends are about it for me. I don’t value much else above a great book. Even a decent book. That’s just me, but I suspect it’s a lot of you too.

Read What You Love (If It Isn’t Hurting You)

I don’t want to get into a moral debate about what a harmful book is. I like a lot of things most folks would call mindless escapism. I think that’s fine. Often good, in fact. I’m more saying that if you find your literary diet inclines your heart to things you know are bad for you, maybe examine what you’re doing when you read.

Beyond that, try to read a wide range of things. I’ll do my best to encourage that by unearthing some forgotten gems in my lists and reviews and maybe try to convince you to read something excellent you wouldn’t have otherwise picked up. By all means read lots of fantasy if that floats your boat, but I’d caution against rejecting a book out of hand because it doesn’t have dragons and magic in it. I’m being a little hyperbolic but there are such readers out there. Broadening your taste is almost always a good idea.

With those caveats, I think just read what speaks to you. Don’t worry about “1001 Books to Read Before You Die” or whatever else. Lists exist to help you make choices that suit you, not to cajole you into aping the tastes of another. I made this mistake as young man, but some friends snapped me out of it and now I just grab whatever calls to me for the next book to read. This way is much better.

Making Your Own List and Library (My Plan and Some Implicit Suggestions)

My ambitions are to be a bestselling author, whatever that means. It’s not about an accolade as much as finding a way to get my work out to a lot of people and have them enjoy it and make enough off it to live a decent life. As such, I want to study popular fiction. I make no distinctions between era and genre. Good stories are timeless. As is good writing, adjusting for some conventions that have changed over time.

To that end, over the course of my life I am endeavoring to read the complete works of every author I enjoy who sold over 100 million copies of their total catalog. For J.K. Rowling or Sidney Sheldon, this is any easy ask. It’s a slightly bigger task for Stephen King and Dean Koontz. For those of us who love Nora Roberts, it’s a much bigger undertaking, as she’s around 300 titles by herself. Just the five people I named right now are several years’ worth of reading. But assuming I live at least into my eighties, it’s not that big a slice of the pie. This kind of project obviously is tailored precisely to my goals as a writer. There’s not really a call for others to do this unless they want to. But I want to know what makes things tick in books that fly off the shelves. And I plan to do this with older authors too, who are numerous enough it’d be tedious to list them all here. I also, by tackling a complete works of an author want to see where they misstep too, in my estimation, since writing tens if not hundreds of novels will invariably lead to a few duds. Some people are remarkably consistent writers. Some are hit and miss. All are worth reading for the various learning experiences and if something is really bad, gasp, just stop reading it. I promise nothing bad will happen. I say that in jest, but I know people will compulsively finish books over some sunk cost fallacy. Just stop. There are plenty more books and if the first 200 pages didn’t’ do it for you, it’s unlikely to get much better.

I also enjoy the so-called Classics and I work those into my rotation as well. Trollope is a fantastic example of the prolific bestseller mindset from the old days, as are Dumas and Dickens. I love Shakespeare and Homer, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Hawthorne and Poe. I have a list to read all the Hugo and Nebula winners at least through the early 2000s, I have several lists of the GOAT horror novels.

You can see how this snowballs…

My lists have reached a point perhaps already where everything on them cannot be read before shuffling off this mortal coil. No worries. Just imagine the growth if you try.

Same goes with buying. I do a lot of bargain bin, secondhand book shopping. I’ve found a few wonderful stores where I can often pick up a literal stack of things like Louis L’Amour (who is on my complete works list btw) for a quarter a piece. But if it’s not particularly expensive, I buy on sight anything from one of my many lists. L’Amour himself had around 17,000 volumes in his library and believe it or not, you can actually read that many if you read a couple hours a day at a decent rate (I’ll write an article on how to improve reading speed soon. Hint: it’s not speed reading. Don’t speed read, it’s awful for you).

Go Forth and Read

End of the day, my salient point in all this is that for readers and writers, this book list and acquisition thing is a way of life. We’re going to do it compulsively anyway. So if it’s not hurting ourselves or anybody else, I figure we lean into it and try to enjoy it all without any guilt. And I think there is definitely some kind of metaphysical principle where if we are investing our time and money into good books, we generate more of that in the world. More good books being written, more good books being read, more non-readers becoming readers by force of our enthusiasm, more economic power flooding into the written word in service of stories and knowledge.

When it comes to books, I don’t really believe you can have too much of a good thing. Maybe I’m right. Maybe you agree. We’re all stuck this way anyhow.