Life goals: Reading actual books

I decided by now that I want to spend some time in my life reading books, the old-fashioned way. I have read books in the past, mostly books for adolescents, not to mention a bunch of fantasy and some science-fiction novels, but I only recently discovered that my score on most Top 100 books lists I can find on the omniscient Internet is below five. A limiting factor might be that my native language is not English, but that aside, I have four languages to care about, and I don’t get more than ten out of a hundred anywhere else either.

So I said to myself, well, if there are so many books out there which are supposed to be more interesting than most stuff I’ve read so far – and I have always enjoyed reading books – starting one of those lists, one book by one, will probably be a lot of fun.

This week I decided to start with the ‘ultimate list,’ a list compiled by Medium author Joel Patrick. Three of the books mentioned there I have already completed:

• George Orwell, 1984 (13)
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (18)
• Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (46)

Therefore, the first book I will read is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and I will let you know what I think about it when I’m done.