Michael Karnjanaprakorn

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One Hundred Books

January 18th, 2010 · Comments


(image via Jonathan Harris)

I’m a huge fan of Jonathan Harris.  He’s the creative genius behind We Feel Fine, Sputnik Observatory, and The Whale Hunt among many other projects.  His interview on 99% and talk on TED are my favorites.  And his vignettes about World Building in a Crazy World will blow your mind.

Everyday he has been posting one photo a day beginning on his 30th birthday.  I’ve been reading them religiously everyday and one of my favorites includes the one he wrote on December 17, 2009.

I have been wanting to read some Faulkner, so I visited the Smith Family bookstore in Eugene. I asked the clerk if they had just received a big shipment, but she said that no, that is always how it looks in there. This confirmed my intuition that there are many books.

I would like it if somebody worth emulating would give me a list of the 100 books that I need to read, in order to push and poke at my stiff sense of self until I am larger and more dynamic, expanded like a rubber balloon in 100 directions by 100 well-expressed world views.

With such a list, I would have no problem with a computerless cabin-bound existence, and I would never venture back to the swampland of the Smith Family bookstore, nor any other wetland like it, trudging through printed sprawl to look for pearls.

For the past month, I’ve wanted to write an article on “book swaps” — essentially publishing all of the books I’ve read on my blog, and encouraging anyone to swap books with me.  Instead, I’d like to compile “a list of 100 books that have changed your life.” These can be anything ranging from business to fiction.  If it’s worth reading, please leave them in the comment section below.  I’ve started the list by listing out a couple of books that have changed my life…

  1. The Republic of Tea: Letters to a Young Zentrepreneur
  2. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
  3. Life Inc: How the World Become a Corporation and How to Take it Back by Douglas Rushkoff
  4. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
  5. 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

My goal is to eventually read through every book on this list in my lifetime.  And share this list with others.  I’d also love to start a book swap so please let me know if you’d like to trade any books as well!

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Tags: Creativity

  • joshua
    Perfume by Suskind
    Spoon River Anthology EL. Masters
    If on a winters night a traveler by calvino
    Invisible Man Ellison (you probably already read this)
    Best of by Roald Dahl
    extremely close and incredibly loud j.s.f.
    Gordy Howe by GH
    blood meridian mccarthy
    anything by anton chekov
    anything by Dostoevsky
    anything by tom stoppard (mostly plays)
    anything by tom robbins
  • Great list Rafe! Adding Happiness Hypothesis to my list.
  • The Starfish and the Spider
    Wild Swans
  • Love The Starfish and the Spider!
  • I nearly forgot one other book you should read: The Life and Times of Michael K, by J.M. Coetzee. Not only because it shares your namesake, but because it's a lovely tale of an outsider in a time of crisis.
  • You've got such a great list here already. I have one book to add to this list.

    Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
    One of the best books I've read on happiness, psychology and creativity.
  • Enders Game. It was the first to demonstrate to me that by changing your perspective, you can entirely change the nature of the game. I literally kid then (7th grade?), but it really opened my mind to many of the possibilities that I would learn later in life. To this day I am still embracing new ways to understand challenges.
  • Simon
    Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
    About Paul Farmer - Dr, founder of Partners in Health, all round good guy. Quite inspirational. Also topical as a lot of his work is in Haiti.
  • The Fountainhead should be top three - easily one of my favorite books.

    Others that will change your life: The Dip (Seth Godin), Good to Great (Jim Collins), Ignore Everybody (Hugh MacLeod), The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell), Fortress of Solitude (Jonathan Lethem), Team of Rivals (Doris Kearns Goodwin)
  • heynathan
    The Shape of a Pocket, by John Berger
    http://readernaut.com/books/0375718885/
    I've read it 10 times and will read it 10 more. Almost any Berger can go on this list for me, but if you read just one, make it this one.

    The Essential Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks
    http://readernaut.com/books/0061792098/
    My upbringing was religious (Christian) and this was the first spiritual text other than the Bible that I read, which opened me up to learning from and being influenced by other belief systems.

    Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie
    http://readernaut.com/books/0140366504/
    Stay young. It's like The Lorax (Dr. Seuss) for big kids.

    A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit
    http://readernaut.com/books/0143037242/
    A different twist on exploration, discovery and risk-taking.

    Built to Last, by Jim Collins
    http://readernaut.com/books/preview/0060566108/
    A little ashamed to include this to be honest, as it sits pretty firmly in the canon of business cliché. However, I read it just as I was starting my web consulting business, and it inspired me to build the business as my long-term, full-time priority, as opposed to a side gig which was how I had been treating it previously.

    And my last one isn't a book, but a speech…

    Come September, by Arundhati Roy
    PDF - http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~hartleyg/docs/comeSe...
    Video - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9454054...
  • Self-Reliance by Emerson has the most amount of highlighting of any book I own (I like the version edited by Richard Whelan)

    An Eames Primer by Eames Demetrios made me want to be a more gracious, caring designer and human being.

    Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig was the first book I immediately started reading again after I finished it.
  • DLO
    Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
  • The Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People by Carol Eikleberry.

    Gave me the direction I needed to figure out what I was good at, what I was passionate about and helped me start my career.
  • What an awesome idea!

    Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (it's so beautifully written, it will change the way you look at the English language)

    Paradise Lost by Milton (an epic in every sense of the word -- if you read closely, there are some pretty modern points about religion)

    In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honore (just finished this one up, and it made me completely revisit my thoughts on work, food, and time in general -- we need to swap!!)
  • Lolita's been on my to-read list for the longest time... I'm going to just go ahead and order it now. Thanks!
  • It's may absolute favorite. Interested to hear what you think...
  • The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
    Post War, Tony Judt
    Brush with the Law, Robert Byrnes & Jaime Marquart
  • Ok, here goes:

    Against the Grain, by Richard Manning (brilliant revisionist history of agriculture, and a wonderful complement to Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma)

    A Problem from Hell, by Samantha Powers (on the history of genocide in the 20th century, and how we could have prevented it; Powers is in the Obama administration these days; not exactly an uplifting read, but important)

    Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond (on how Western civilization became the dominant power in the world—also a revisionist history of agriculture, it pairs nicely with Manning's book)

    The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein (a cogent history of Chicago-style economics and its horrific effects on South America, plus how these ideas spread to Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, not uplifting, but worthwhile.)

    Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges (the most extraordinary short stories ever written)

    Bewulf, translated by Seamas Heaney (the origins of the English language, in one outrageously beautiful poem)
  • I've been looking to for a way into Borges... is Ficciones a good place to start? Or would you recommend something else of his first?
  • Ficciones is the collection of all of Borges fictions—there are smaller books you could start with, Labyrinths most notably, but worth getting the complete collection. The poetry and nonfiction collections are only interesting to serious Borges scholars.
  • Omnivore's Dilemma was a nudge in getting me to think about my diet and my health, and inspired me to read a dozen or so books on the subject from widely varying points of view (Dean Ornish to Weston Price to Gary Taubes). The books that changed my actual behavior are:

    _Eat To Live_ by Joel Fuhrman
    _Spark_ by John J. Ratey

    The former completely changed the way I eat. The latter got me to think of exercise the way I think of brushing my teeth -- not something I should try to make time for, but something essential to my physical/mental/emotional health.

    There are many books I've loved more, but none have had so profound an impact on my day to day life. I'm unwilling to part with my copies (I refer to both of them too often), but I will donate multiple copies of both books to a book swap.
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