30 books to read by the time you are 30

I came across a website with 30 books to read before you are 30. I read the list, and because I turned 30 in March, I sorted into two groups: the ones I have read and the ones I haven't. Then I sorted the list of the books I hadn't read into two groups: the ones I would read this year, and the ones I might try to read if I had time to get to them.

Once I started really looking at the list of the books I would try to read, I realized that they were few. So instead, I made my own list. I don't want to read Lord of the Rings, but I loved The Hobbit. I tried to read Catch-22 several times, but couldn't get into it. 1984 was good, but the Russian book We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, of the same genre, is better. I like Hemmingway's short stories, but I can't stand his novels. And there was nothing on that list by Milan Kundera, who I think might be the greatest author of our time to deal with the human condition. I started War and Peace about six times, but couldn't get through it. I have read Anna Karenina four times.

So I made my own list.

Note: I haven't read all the books on it, but I have read most of them, and they are brilliant.

Immortality, Milan Kundera
Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Blink, Michael Gladwell
We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Kubler Ross
Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemmingway
The World According to Garp, John Irving
Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkein
Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Pilgrem at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
The Sorrow of War, Bao Ninh
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
One, One Hundred, One Hundred Thousand, Luigi Pirandello
The Things they Carried, Tim O'Brien
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
The End of Faith, Sam Harris
The Alchemist, Paulo Coehlo
The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang
Wicked, Gregory Maguire
Illusions, Richard Back
The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama

the listening

I sit listening and
I hear meaning, or, at least
the dazzling crystalline melancholy of a sad song;
Otherwise, a midnight blue electric guitar plays
cinematic masterpieces. The famous literary heroine,
sweetly drying in poetic black waters
waves with silvery hand motions
through each mind flits a different nothingness
while simultaneously expressing the same thought.

I sit listening
and the noise is a quietly rocking chair,
but even it's rhythm gives meaning
in it's over and over and over.