I love to read, but it’s often a “feast or famine” proposition for me.  I’m prone to suffering from analysis paralysis, and I feel that a healthy love for reading can become excessive/obsessive and feed into that (or be a form of procrastination that’s at least more socially acceptable than binging an entire series on Netflix over the course of a weekend).  I set a goal of reading 12 books this year, with a maximum of 25; that’s between one per month to roughly one every two weeks.  That’s on top of my usually daily reading of science, design, development, and general news articles.

I’ve decided to start with Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Workweek”.  Below you’ll find my list of other potential reads for this year.  It’s roughly sorted at the top.  It’s also subject to change (from simple reordering, all the way to adding or removing items).  I’ll also be checking in every so often to determine whether or not this process is achieving my goal of moderation in my level of reading.  One other approach I’ve been considering is shooting for a quantity of time reading per {day, week, whichever} rather than specifying the quantity of books.  I’ve got to let that idea marinate a little more, but I wanted to get a basic plan in place that can be modified later.  After all, “the key to success is to start”, yeah?

• Ferriss, T.  The 4-Hour Workweek
• Rowling, J. K.  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
• Hunt & Thomas.  The Pragmatic Programmer
• Catmull, E.  Creativity, Inc
• Rogers, S.  Level Up
• Aristotle.  Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, or Poetics
• Csikszentmihalyi, M.  Flow
• McConnell, S.  Code Complete
• L’Engle, M.  A Wrinkle in Time
• Camus, A.  The Stranger
• Rowling, J. K.  The Harry Potter series
• Dostoevsky, F.  The Brothers Karamazov
• McCarthy, C.  The Road
• Plato.  The Republic
• Lucretius.  On the Nature of Things
• Aurelius, M.  Meditations
• Alighieri, D.  The Divine Comedy
• Machiavelli, N.  The Prince
• Hobbes, T.  Leviathan,
• de Spinoza, B.  Ethics
• Milton, J.  Paradise Lost
• Gibbon, E.  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• Kant, I.  Critique of Pure Reason
• Hegel, G. W. F.  The Philosophy of Right
• Marx, K.  Capital
• Voltaire.  Candide
• Nietzsche, F.  Beyond Good and Evil
• Russell, B.  The Problems of Philosophy
• Heidegger, M.  What is Metaphysics?
• Whitehead, A. N.  An Introduction to Mathematics
• Hsieh, T.  Delivering Happiness
• Ries, E.  The Lean Startup
• Blank, S.  Four Steps to the Epiphany