1000 Pages Everyone Should Read

I’m always interested in lists of the most popular books, or books people have read, etc.  Usually it’s a list of something like 100 books – something that would take a really long time to get through (unless you are a speed reader, and I am not).  So, I thought it might be more interesting to identify a list of books that was small enough that any reader could reasonably read through the list in a year.  There are a lot of ways to do this, but I came up with a plan that I think is pretty workable.  It is basically a list of “1000 pages that I think everyone should read”. 

The rules of the list are as follows:

1) Identify 1000 pages (give or take ~50 or so) of reading that you think everyone should read.

2) You can’t break up a book, i.e. you can’t pick and choose passages from one book and passages from another.

For my personal list, I only picked one book per author, but I’m not sure that should necessarily be a rule.

Also I broke up the Bible because it is a book of books.  Therefore, I could choose one or more books out of the Bible without violating rule #2.

One technical issue that confronts us is “how long is a page?” or “what defines a page?”  I know that is vague and varies – especially if you decide to pick a book from the Bible and use one of those microscopic print Bibles!  But, I wanted to make this easy for everyone to do.  It’s easy to find out how many pages are in a book on your shelf.  It would have been more technically accurate to define the list by “number of words” or “number of characters”, but those details are not as readily available as the number of pages.  So, when it comes to “how many pages”, I just looked at whatever copy I had, or I looked on Amazon at the first copy that popped up, and determined the total number of pages.  This is just for fun anyway – so no reason to make it difficult.  Also, the list doesn’t need to add up to 1000 pages – just something close.

I figure 1000 pages is an amount that anyone could easily read in a year with just reading a few minutes a day.  If you’re serious about it, you could complete this reading in a month or so even in the midst of a busy schedule.  That seemed about right to me.

So…here is my list (in order by date written):

“Ecclesiastes”, written by Solomon, ~24 pages

“Epistle to the Romans”, written by Apostle Paul, ~42 pages

“Gospel of John”, written by Apostle John, ~72 pages

“Penseés”, written by Blaise Pascal, ~169 pages

“A Confession”, written by Leo Tolstoy, ~64 pages

“Miracles”, written by C.S. Lewis, ~294 pages

“Being Mortal”, written by Atul Gawande, ~304 pages

That’s a total of 969 pages.

I didn’t pick any fiction because I figure that fiction is a matter of taste and so I couldn’t come up with any fiction that I think “everyone should read.”  I’m a big fan of Tolkien and so on, but I would only recommend it if you like that sort of thing.  I also ended up picking books that were written at vastly different time periods.  That seemed kind of cool to me, but really it just worked out that way.

The idea is to share such lists and agree to read each other’s lists of 1000 pages.  Therefore, I’d be very interested in hearing other people’s lists following the rules I laid out above.  I think it would be a good challenge among us all to agree to read each other’s book lists.  After all, 1000 pages doesn’t take that long to read.  I wonder how many of us might have the same books on our list – or will any book make anyone’s list more than once?

By the way, it would also be interesting to create a similar list that consisted of specific passages from each book.  For example, Penseés, which is really an unfinished collection of writings by Pascal, certainly has some sections in it that are too unfinished to really be that useful, so there are some of the 169 pages that you could skim over.  Also, there are other books, especially biographies, that I have found very moving, but biographies tend to be longer.  If you try to make your own list, you’ll find that you have to struggle with what to do with some of the longer books.  For example, I asked myself if I should delete the first four books of my list for an autobiography by Nabeel Qureshi, but that just didn’t seem like a good trade.

So, there it is.  I’d be very interested in hearing any such lists that others might have!