101 Books I Must Read Before I Die

Strange to start this project  with a sequel, but Doomed , the second part of Chuck Palahniuk 's Damned  trilogy, just happened to be the book I was reading when I started making the list . So here it is. Palahniuk is one of those authors I have long kept going back to, having enjoyed several of his early novels and short stories as well as his Non-Fiction  collection. He's best known for Fight Club   and after that perhaps for the utterly horrifying  Guts  from his collection Haunted, which is one of the few short stories I know of to have gone viral, after it featured in Playboy . I read part one,  Damned,  a couple of years ago. That booked pushed a number of my buttons, being set in Hell (I can never get enough visions of the Underworld) and narrated by a sardonic teenager (which is who I really am, deep inside, clearly). I recall it being in turns entertaining and baffling. Sadly I got much more of the latter from this second instal...

People recommend books to me all the time. All. The. Time. You think you get a lot of books recommended to you? More books recommended to you than you can read? Try working in one of the busiest public libraries in London. I do. And, of course, it's (among) the best job(s) ever. But I don't plough through books any more like I used to, and more and more often, I've found myself saying, "Wow... that sounds great. Yeah, I'm probably not going to read it though. I've got 101 books queued up to read already..."  When I'd said this for around the 101st time, I thought, 'I bet I really do have 101 books stacked up waiting', and, 'I should probably actually read them'. It doesn't help that I've become a slower and slower reader. I get distracted constantly by social media, the news and games; or just by the never-ending internal nag that I should be getting on with my own writing . It takes me months to get through an ave...