Stunt reading: Choosing a reading project

Choosing your next book can be a difficult prospect. Sometimes it's downright exhausting. That's surely part of the appeal of tackling a massive reading project like the one currently underway at Kahn's Books. This intrepid blogger is planning to plow through every book that hit the #1 spot on the Publishers Weekly annual bestseller list, which stretches all the way back to 1913.

This list is probably as good a place to start as any other. It provides an interesting insight into the past, and what people really enjoyed reading back then. Although you could argue that these books are not as representative of their eras as the books that have survived the passage of time and continue to be active today.

For example, the bestseller for 1916 is by Booth Tarkington, a man who is largely forgotten today. You might get more out of the experience of reading James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, or Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg. Or for that matter The Real Mother Goose by Blanche Fisher Wright.

In fact, the most difficult part of a project like this is choosing the list. It makes you focus on what you really want out of the project. If you want to read the most popular blockbusters of all time, then this Wikipedia page is as authoritative as it is surprising. If you want to read the most influential literary works, then Harold Bloom's reading list of the Western canon is, well, canonical.

You could always go alphabetically, of course, but I can't personally recommend this course. When I was about 13, I decided to read my way alphabetically through the stacks of the (very small) local library branch. I made it all the way to Plague Dogs by Richard Adams before I realized what a horrible idea this truly was. (Still emotionally scarred by that book, by the way. It's like Watership Down with more brutality.)

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