Here’s a fun little synthesis of thoughts:
Thus: If I can find 50-100 books that I absolutely adore, I could just rotate reading through those books and be set for life!3 And wouldn’t it be fun if I had my list and my friends had theirs, and we could compare notes?
And so, here’s my 100 Books:
I’m still trying to figure out my exact N here, but I’m guessing it will fall somewhere between 6-10 years. From experience, for N=5 years after I’ve read a book, I’ll have forgotten most of the content but maybe rememeber wisps of how the book made me feel. N=10 is a nice round number and seems promising, but I only started tracking what books I’ve read since 2016 so I don’t have any candidates to test this out on yet. ↩︎
Interestingly this near-decade-long decay seems to only apply to books I actually like. I was looking back at what books I’ve read over the years, and there were books I’d read just 3 years ago that I didn’t really care for that I had already completely 100% forgotten about. ↩︎
Of course I doubt I would just exclusively stick to this rotation of books and never read anything new again. But I love the idea of having such a list. ↩︎