1000 Books

A year ago I gave myself a challenge: read a thousand books in my lifetime. I decided to start counting books I’d read since November 14, 2014 (although I’d read many books before this, I really only wanted to start counting then, so I could better catalogue them).

I’ve completely fallen in love with reading since finishing university. I always had lots of books around as a kid, but I think I enjoyed collecting them more than I enjoyed reading them. And having them imposed on me by school didn’t help either. So I didn’t do much pleasure reading throughout my school years.

A few things changed when I got out of school. For starters, nobody was telling me what I had to read, so I could do what I wanted. Secondly, my then-girlfriend (now wife, yay!) is an avid reader, and that encouraged me to do the same. Finally, I was starting to read more and more interesting things in Computer Science and realized if I wanted to do anything interesting in my career, it’d probably help me to be well read. I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do, but over the past few years, my newfound love of reading has been a fulfilling experience.

A thousand books is a lot for me. I’m not a super fast reader, but it seemed like a good goalpost to work towards in life. If I were to read a book a week (roughly 50 per year), it’d take me about 20 years to read a thousand. No easy feat! This year I managed 24, about two a month on average. Some are graphic novels which are easy for me to zip through, while others are dense books on education theory, which tend to be a slog. Most are comfortably in between, but nearly all of them have been enjoyable.

The books are, in order:

  • Mindstorms by Seymour Papert
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • Toward a Theory of Instruction by Jerome Bruner
  • Changing Minds by Andrea diSessa
  • How to do Things with Video Games by Ian Bogost
  • The Circle by Dave Eggers
  • Annotated Declaration of Independence + US Constitution by Richard Beeman
  • Experience & Education by John Dewey
  • A Brief History of Time by Stehpen Hawking
  • Best American Comics 2014 by Scott McCloud
  • Making Comics by Scott McCloud
  • Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
  • A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
  • The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert
  • Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Geeks Bearing Gifts by Ted Nelson
  • The End of Education by Neil Postman
  • Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
  • Ode to Kirihito Part 1 by Osamu Tezuka
  • Scott Pilgrim Volume 1 by Brian Lee O’Mally
  • The Educated Mind by Kieran Egan
  • Dr. Slump vol 4 by Akira Toriyama
  • Maps of the Imagination by Peter Turchi
  • Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science-and the World by Rachel Swaby

Here’s to the next 976!

Speed of Light