A Fresh reading list (of old titles)
Jason and I spent a couple of hours making a list of books we wanted to read, re-read, and/or felt like we should read from several lists of essential books on different websites. It ended up being 78 titles (screenshot of Google doc above of copy and pasted titles). We decided a goal of reading 15 books by the end of the year. To chose the 15 we privately gave each book a score between 1-25. The top scoring 15 would be our books. There was some sneaky strategy going on both our parts ("betting" low to counter a presumed high from him, et cetera).
Our final list came out as such, with Mockingbird and Catcher scoring a perfect 50:
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
Herzog, Saul Bellow
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Life: a User’s Manual, Georges Perec
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
The Stranger, Albert Camus
Because of free Kindle availability, we're starting with Franklin's autobiography. Here we go!