100 Books That Will Make You More Interesting

           Reading has and will always be my biggest passion. There has never been a time when I couldn’t find a book that would fix or help me forgot about what I was feeling. Some of my best friends have been in books, the places I long to visit described in their pages, and all manners of things I wish I could have been, there for me to imagine I can become them.

           

A huge part of being a reader is the culture surrounding it. Everyone has their favorite book (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) everyone has the suggestion for the next book ‘you absolutely have to read!’ and everyone has an opinion about every book you will ever mention.

The most awesome and most devastating thing about books is that you’ll never get to them all. For every one that you finish, six more get added to your list which makes it impossible sometimes to decide what to read next. I am a type A list maker and I often look to lists, such as the New York Times 100 Best Novels list to suggest new books for me to read. The NYT list is dense with the classics (Les Miserables, Gone With the Wind, multiple Jane Austen’s) which are books that should be celebrated and have stood the test of time but they are not the most readable of stories. That’s when I came upon this list of ‘100 Books That Will Make You More Interesting.’ This list is referenced on GoodReads.com where they cite the source to be GMHS Media Center. I found it by general search engine searches for ‘Book Lists’.

When I took a look I was presently surprised to say that I had read a good portion of them and I also was encouraged by the fact that these books ranged over a wide variety of genres. There are several graphic novels on the list, some Sci-Fi, some YA, non-fiction, a few of the classics, and a lot of modern fiction. It is a list that will garner much more enjoyment from reading them as opposed to just the satisfaction of saying you had troughed through all the books on another list. If you are going to spend the time with them, might as well enjoy it.

 

For me some of the stand outs on the list are:

Lord of the Flies,

The Great Gatsby,

One Flew Over

The Cuckoo's Nest,

Night by Elie Wiesel.

            This is a great jumping off point for book club suggestions, getting your feet a little deeper into some substantive literature that you may otherwise have written off because of a bad high school experience, or it may just deliver on what it says and you will end up a more interesting person... maybe even the most interesting person in the world.

            I think that if you read, you are all ready interesting. What you read says a lot about your open mindedness and your personality. Most people that I have met who have had a book in their hand are people I continue to want to be around.

http://www.granby.k12.ct.us/uploaded/GMHS_Media_Center/Documents/100_Books_That_Will_Make_You_More_Interesting.pdf