Peter S. Clarke

I suspect that I enjoy creating lists even more than I like reading books, which is a lot. Combining the two activities creates some kind of critical density in my brain so I thought it might be fun to create a super reading list, a large list of all of the worthwhile books that I should try to read over the course of my life.

Now, I’m fairly open-minded when it comes to the meaning of worthwhile. The problem really is knowing where to start. It would need to:

• be large, but manageable – say around 100 books initially, with another couple of hundred added as I went along
• cover the essentials of a wide variety of subjects – art, metaphysics, history, mythology, psychology, architecture, scientific method, biology etc etc

Here’s a start to give some suggestion of what kind of reading list I’d like to create – a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, classic and modern and without getting bogged down in any one area (although I will confess a soft spot for continental intellectualism!).

So help me out – what books can you recommend that are indispensable reading? What should I be reading that will introduce the essentials of a field or change my understanding of a subject I thought I knew?