Junot Diaz 100 Books a Year Challenge (Major Update)

14 years ago I set the goal of reading 100 books in a year. (spoiler alert: I failed to achieve this goal but I did read a lot more than I would have had I not set the goal)

A few years later, I read this great post visualizing our life in weeks (from Tim Urban at Waitbutwhy).

Then in 2024, Dino Ambrosi came to my school to launch Project Reboot (here is a TEDx talk he gave making great use of this graph and helping our faculty and students understand how it can be a useful tool to think about how we use and fail to safeguard our time).

After his talk, whenever I thought about possibly consuming media, I remembered to think to myself about the ratio of time it took to produce the content compared with the time it would take me to consume it: if the ratio was high enough and I had the time and inclination, I would try to consume it. This led me to try reading a lot more books and long form content and try to read a lot less news. 

As I watched my behavior, I realized that my habits were getting in the way. I would have an itch to pull out my phone and read the news and I realized that I was not mindful enough yet to resist it. So, in 2024, I bought myself and my wife two Kindle eReaders, and I connected to the Libby App. Whenever the itch arose to read the news, I would rewire my brain, pulling out the kindle instead. The following timeline represents the raw data of my borrowings since that December 1.5 years ago:

Going through it with a finer tooth come (removing duplicates and books I didn't finish), I have the following books read (or listened to) over that 1.5 year period:

Book Title	Author
Martyr!	Kaveh Akbar
The Fire Next Time	James Baldwin
Big Dumb Eyes	Nate Bargatze
Talking It Over	Julian Barnes
Utopia for Realists	Rutger Bregman
The Meaning of Your Life	Arthur C. Brooks
Hyperbole and a Half	Allie Brosh
Solutions and Other Problems	Allie Brosh
The Body	Bill Bryson
Meditations for Mortals	Oliver Burkeman
Possible Side Effects	Augusten Burroughs
Something Deeply Hidden	Sean Carroll
Influence, New and Expanded	Robert B. Cialdini
Atomic Habits	James Clear
The Other Significant Others	Rhaina Cohen
Born to Flourish	Richard J. Davidson, Cortland Dahl
The Emotional Life of Your Brain	Richard J. Davidson
Why Is Sex Fun?	Jared M Diamond
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?	Philip K. Dick
Turing's Cathedral	George Dyson
QED	Richard P. Feynman
The Character of Physical Law	Richard P. Feynman
What Do You Care What Other People Think?	Richard P. Feynman
The FBI Way	Frank Figliuzzi
Running the Dream	Matt Fitzgerald
Man's Search for Meaning	Viktor E. Frankl
Abiding in Mindfulness, Volume 3	Joseph Goldstein
Abiding in Mindfulness, Volume 2	Joseph Goldstein
One Dharma	Joseph Goldstein
Think Again	Adam Grant
Hidden Potential	Adam Grant
Originals	Adam Grant
Mastery	Robert Greene
The Anxious Generation	Jonathan Haidt
Happiness	Thich Nhat Hanh
The AI Con	Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna
Nexus	Yuval Noah Harari
Lost Connections	Johann Hari
Magic Pill	Johann Hari
Stolen Focus	Johann Hari
Making Sense	Sam Harris
Visible Learning	John Hattie
ADHD is Awesome	Penn Holderness, Kim Holderness
When Einstein Walked with Gödel	Jim Holt
Endure	Alexander Hutchinson
When We Were Orphans	Kazuo Ishiguro
An Artist of the Floating World	Kazuo Ishiguro
Nocturnes	Kazuo Ishiguro
A Pale View of Hills	Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun	Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day	Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro
The Vegetarian	Han Kang
Parent Management Training	Alan E Kazdin
Grace	Cody Keenan
Braiding Sweetgrass	Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Singularity Is Nearer	Ray Kurzweil
The MANIAC	Benjamin Labatut
Relationship-Rich Education	Peter Felten, Leo M. Lambert
Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12	Peter Liljedahl
Sensemaking	Christian Madsbjerg
Do Hard Things	Steve Magness
Born Standing Up	Steve Martin
Greenlights	Matthew McConaughey
Why Fish Don't Exist	Lulu Miller
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World	Haruki Murakami
Sputnik Sweetheart	Haruki Murakami
Norwegian Wood	Haruki Murakami
First Person Singular	Haruki Murakami
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running	Haruki Murakami
Born a Crime	Trevor Noah
Happy Money	Elizabeth Dunn, Michael Norton
The Memory Police	Yoko Ogawa
Untangled	Lisa Damour, Ph.D.
A World Appears	Michael Pollan
Figuring	Maria Popova
The Overstory	Richard Powers
Fair Play	Eve Rodsky
Yearbook	Seth Rogen
Run Like a Pro	Matt Fitzgerald, Ben Rosario
The Everyday Parenting Toolkit	Alan E. Kazdin, Carlo Rotella
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics	Carlo Rovelli
Helgoland	Carlo Rovelli
Anaximander	Carlo Rovelli
White Holes	Carlo Rovelli
Knife	Salman Rushdie
Everything in Its Place	Oliver Sacks
Gratitude	Oliver Sacks
Last Acts	Alexander Sammartino
Vigil	George Saunders
In Persuasion Nation	George Saunders
Pastoralia	George Saunders
The Braindead Megaphone	George Saunders
The Best of Me	David Sedaris
Little Weirds	Jenny Slate
Lifeform	Jenny Slate
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies	Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares
On the Hippie Trail	Rick Steves
Calculating the Cosmos	Ian Stewart
The Way of Excellence	Brad Stulberg
Life 3.0	Max Tegmark
Super Agers	Eric Topol
A Gentleman in Moscow	Amor Towles
The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories, with eBook	Mark Twain
What's Our Problem?	Tim Urban
Aging Well	George E. Vaillant
Oblivion	David Foster Wallace
So Far Gone	Jess Walter
What Is ChatGPT Doing	Stephen Wolfram
10 to 25	David Yeager
The Amateur Hour	Jonathan Zimmerman

 

This summer, I plan to reach for my kindle (or pull out my earbuds much more often). I want to focus on reading because I believe it has enriched my life significantly. The posts that follow will represent some of my thoughts, book by book, one book at a time.

A couple of good reads

I recently read and enjoyed three excellent books:

• George Saunders' The tenth of December - The best fiction I have read in a long time. I was drawn to this book by a wonderful article in the NY Times article (George Saunders has written the best book you'll read this year). The book completely lives up to the hype. I couldn't put it down. I am currently reading another of his books (CivilWarLand in bad decline). Check out two of his excerpted short stories from tenth of December and you'll see what I mean (1 and 2).

• Jim Holt Why does the world exist?: an existential detective story - A wonderful read on why there is something and not nothing. This book goes well with two others I've read in recent years (Brian Greene The hidden reality and Lawrence Krauss A universe from nothing). Holt's approach is more philosophical, and he does a wonderful job framing the problem from this perspective. I was surprised that he even provides his own ontological justification for why there is something rather than nothing and why we could rationally expect that something to be utterly mediocre.

• Julian Barnes The sense of an ending - Barnes' engaging (meta-)commentary on the narrative impulse. The book's self-referential title says it all. We need crave the sense of an ending just as we crave the sense of a reason in an unreasonable world. This is all succinctly put by Barnes when he has a character quote: "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."

 Currently reading

• Oliver Sacks Hallucinations - excellent book that resonates with two questions that I can't shake: what is the physical basis of the subjective (first-person) experience and how different can it become. If you haven't read Sacks' Altered States in the New Yorker you really must. 

A very fractal christmas

Multivariable Calculus Class Does Christmas (fractals)

Please respond using the survey below to choose your favorite!

Updates on The Junot Diaz Challenge and a new book club!

On September 29, 2011, I set the goal of reading 100 books in a year. The goal was a large one and pushed me to do a lot of reading that I definitely would not have done otherwise! However, in case you are wondering, I totally failed at this goal by pretty much any measure, despite my best intentions:

In case you are counting, you will notice that I am a bit behind my pace: we are one month down and I have read 5 books (off my 6 books a month pace while teaching). Not to worry, I am still working hard on this project and will be back on top of my rate in no time. Stay tuned!

Over the course of the year, I have occasionally posted about my readings, but recently, I have been kind of radio-silent! This is the long overdue post to update you on my progress.

In November, I encountered what would become a major flaw in the 100 books in a year ideal and subsequently my inability to set a new goal: the very real time restraints imposed by my teaching schedule combined with a rather arbitrary restriction (that I read a book); and what is a book? Certainly not a chapter, article, blog post. Do short books count equally as well as long books? So we are penalizing longer books with this system? What about podcasts, do these count not at all?

Basically, I reset my goal to find interesting questions to consider and just do that with my free time as much as possible (limiting time spent doing things that distracted me from this goal).

I have had a wonderful time with the challenge I set for myself and over the course of the year I learned about a lot of really cool stuff!

Here is a partial list of things I thought about, learned and read:

Non-Fiction

Comedy

Philosophy

Fiction

Blogs/Articles (noteworthy)

Good source of books off copyright

Excellent PDF about the creativity needed to do real mathematics

I have started an Evidenced-based education group at St. Andrew's and am looking forward to reading a couple good books (Sahlberg and Perkins) on the subject as well as studies. 

Reading now

Check out the book club that John Burk started about this book!

Dawkins is still at the top of his game!