The Book List

I realized shortly after beginning this blog that the reader, whoever he or she may be, or may someday be, is missing some crucial information. Namely, my list of uncompleted books, movies, and games. How can one appreciate the quest when one is unaware of its magnitude or scope? It would be like a man who goes for a "long run" and lets you know when he's completed every quarter mile. Is it a 5K, or is it a marathon? The latter deserves so much more recognition and respect. Anyone can run a 5K, but it takes a special kind of dedication to run a marathon.

So what about me? Am I on a quick jog, or at the outset of a 26.2-mile endurance test? You be the judge. What follows is my list of unread books in no particular order aside from the conventional "alphabetical by author" one:

Our Living Multiverse (Adams, Fred)
The Story of a Bad Boy (Aldrich, Thomas Bailey)
Designing the Molecular World (Ball, Philip)
The Ancestor's Tale (Dawkins, Richard)
A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens, Charles)
Johnny Tremain (Forbes, Esther)
The Princess Bride (Goldman, William)
Fabric of the Cosmos (Greene, Brian)
Good as Gold (Heller, Joseph)
Something Happened (Heller, Joseph)
Closing Time (Heller, Joseph)
A Thousand Splendid Suns (Hosseini, Khaled)
A Swiftly Turning Planet (L'Engle, Madeleine)
Many Waters (L'Engle, Madeleine)
A Wind in the Door (L'Engle, Madeleine)
The Horse and His Boy (Lewis, C. S.)
Prince Caspian (Lewis, C. S.)
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Lewis, C. S.)
The Silver Chair (Lewis, C. S.)
The Last Battle (Lewis, C. S.)
American Lion (Meacham, John)
How the Mind Works (Pinker, Steven)
The Golden Compass (Pullman, Philip)
The Subtle Knife (Pullman, Philip)
The Amber Spyglass (Pullman, Philip)
The Killer Angels (Shaara, Michael)
The Two Towers (Tolkien, J. R. R.)
The Return of the King (Tolkien, J. R. R.)
Charlotte's Web (White, E. B.)

As you can count, there are 29 books on my list. The list itself is a hodgepodge of classics, children's books, and nonfiction, specifically in the realms of science and American history. There is no chronological order to the list. No plan of attack, so to speak. I will set no desired pace, no benchmarks, and no estimated times of completion. To do so would be to compromise the integrity of the quest. There are some books on the list that will take longer to read than others. Some may require completion before certain others that are later installments of the same series. Some I look forward to reading with excitement, and others, apprehension. But none of that matters. No matter order they end up being read in, or how much I end up enjoying them, each and every book must and will be read. It's that easy.

But it won't actually be easy. Because that would make it not a challenge. And that would make it nothing special. And that would negate the point of this blog entirely.

It begins.