The hardest part is knowing which 100 books to reread.
I'd like to think there's a period in your youth when you devour everything - even, god forbid, modern books on management. From here you move on to the classics - Dickens, Twain, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald. If a book bores you, drop it. After enough years, inevitably, you reach a point where you're ready for real literature - Dostoevsky, Proust, Molière, Kant - the greats.
Some books can't be summarized (poetry and real literature), some can be compressed to about ten pages and the majority to 0 pages.
This is a good insight, and I sometimes worry I am just optimizing for quantity instead of quality.
That said, how would you pick the “best 100 books” to reread?I also tend to reread things that I enjoyed in the past but it seems like there might be a better way to go about this. I do read from a lot of the “Best books of all time” type of lists and I don’t find a markedly higher success rate with that strategy.
If anyone's looking for a good book on psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan made me think completely differently on them (the book isn't about changing your mind on psychedelics fyi)
Now that the stoics have become so popular in the self help / psychology niche, it seems people are now covering everything about the stoics, besides they're actual useful philosophy (including Holiday, who was one of the ones that made them mainstream in the first place)
Great article. It is amazing how many "best selling" books you read, end up being terrible. Would agree with Atomic Habits being an exception, got the book thinking it would be another overhyped one, but actually really enjoyed it (from the practical habit building formulas it gives)
Used to do the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge for multiple years, until I felt I was just padding my stats with books that weren't useful
Then I saw a Naval tweet that was: "I would rather read the best 100 books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read all the books.”
And I adopted that strategy, which has been more useful for me