This time last year I sat down with a pen and notepad and wrote a list of things I wanted to achieve in 2018.
One of those things was to read more books - replacing idle time on my phone, wasting away hours scrolling through feeds - with words on a page. No glare and no distractions. I set an ambitious target of 30 books, having read 16 in 2017.
“If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.” – Roald Dahl
One year on and that 30-book target now feels conservative. I read 47.
With just a small shift in behaviour, I was amazed at how quickly I’d work my way through the pages. Those few minutes you have waiting for a train, that 10 minute Uber ride, the 15 minutes you spend in the morning drinking coffee and having breakfast. Last year I’d be a sucker to the dopamine hit served up so readily by the apps on my phone, but while there’s nothing wrong with that, I needed to change - and so I opened up a book instead.
From the biographies of Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin, to the wonderful worlds created by Enid Blyton and C.S Lewis, my 2018 reading list has taken me from Florence in 1452 to Narnia via Oxford and Hogwarts. Midway through the year I started writing a story for my little nephew, and so to get some inspiration I unearthed a few books from my childhood, as well as taking in some popular titles from the modern day. I also wanted to learn more about the craft of writing stories, and so that influenced my reading list too.
Here’s what I read:
Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Alex Cross’s Trial - James Patterson
Dead Simple - Peter James
The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead
Beyond Harvard - Mark H. McCormack
A Place Called Winter - Patrick Gale
Deal Breaker - Harlan Coben
Into the Woods - John Yorke
Poetry In The Making - Ted Hughes
Friend Request - Laura Marshall
Leonardo da Vinci - Walter Isaacson
Where Good Ideas Come From - Steven Johnson
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
The Power - Naomi Alderman
On Writing - Stephen King
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - JK Rowling
The Lion, The Witch and Wardrobe - C.S Lewis
Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
Good Strategy Bad Strategy - Richard Rumelt
Drop Shot - Harlan Coben
Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott
Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud
Camino Island - John Grisham
The Cuckoo’s Calling - Robert Galbraith
61 Hours - Lee Child
The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Heather Morris
Looking Good Dead - Peter James
The Enchanted Wood - Enid Blyton
Legacy - James Kerr
The Midnight Line - Lee Child
The Midnight Gang - David Walliams
Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl - Donald Sturrock
Don’t Let Go - Harlan Coben
Bear Town - Fredrik Backman
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
I Am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes
Fantastic Mr Fox - Roald Dahl
The Explorer - Katherine Rundell
Benjamin Franklin - Walter Isaacson
Charmed Life - Dianne Wynne Jones
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - JK Rowling
A Far Cry From Kensington - Muriel Spark
The Pelican Brief - John Grisham
JRR Tolkien biography - Humphrey Carpenter
Daemon Voices - Sir Phillip Pullman
Say Cheese and Die - R.L Stine
Here’s to more reading in 2019…
