What I’ll Read During my Mid-Twenties Gap Year

A long, evolving list with 1 sentence synopses.

Photo by Lacie Slezak on Unsplash

I wanted to keep this story short and sweet as a literal list. But to introduce the list, I wanted to preface by saying this list may grow over time as I edit it. I will italicize books that I finish. Bolded are the books I want to target next. My goal is that by the end of the year I will change or add to this first list below:

My Favorite Book

1. Heart of Darkness

Entrepreneurship + Personal Development

1. Think and Grow Rich — Learning how to become rich with anecdotes from famous rich people.
2. Rich Dad Poor Dad — The difference between working for money and having money work for you.
3. The Intelligent Investor — Investing strategies that shield you from error and help you develop long-term strategies.
4. Money Master the Game — 7-step blueprint for securing financial freedom.
5. The 4 Hour Work Week — Escape the rat race, travel the world, and how to increase your monthly income.
6. The Millionaire Fastlane — How to escape the “Slowlane” that we’ve come to accept and gain riches younger.
7. The Power of Habit — How to change habits for success.
8. How to Win Friends and Influence People — How to take any situation and make it work for you.
9. The $100 Startup — 50 case studies on how regular people turned less than $100 into businesses earning $50,000 or more.
10. The E Myth Revisited — ‘E’ as in ‘entrepreneurial,’ this book dispels myths about starting your own business. “Why most small businesses don’t work and what to do about it.”
11. The 10x Rule — Defy mediocrity with the 10x Rule, and the principle of “Massive Action”— the level of action that guarantees companies and individuals realize their goals and dreams.
12. Zero to One — Discover the uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create.
13. Atomic Habits — Follow this system for changing your habits for the better.
14. Traction — Learn the secrets of strengthening your business.
15. Miracle Morning — A manual to riches where you’ll discover the undeniable connection between mornings and wealth.
16. Flip Your Future — How to turn $10,000 into more than $1,000,000 in just three years by flipping houses.
17. Good to Great — How long term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.
18. Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion — Learn the six universal principles of influence and how to use them to become a skilled persuader.
19. Getting to Yes — Step-by-step strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict.
20. Crushing It! — The principles behind why a personal brand is crucial to entrepreneurial success.
21. The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Running a business is very difficult, which is why this book teaches you how to get past hard times.

Classics I’ve Always Wanted to Read

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Centered around 7 generations of one family and the town they built in Colombia.
2. Brave New World — Breaking free in a far away dystopian future.
3. Jane Eyre — A woman with a difficult childhood grows up to search for a wider and richer life than allowed for a woman in Victorian society.
4. Crime and Punishment — A destitute former student wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and randomly murders someone, resulting in a game of cat and mouse with a police investigator.
5. Moby-Dick — In an obsessive quest to slay the white whale Moby-Dick, Ishmael finds himself in a struggle between good and evil.
6. To the Lighthouse — The Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged.
7. The Master and Margarita — As a carnivalesque satire of Soviet life, it describes how the Devil weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow one spring afternoon.
8. 1984 — Under the gaze of Big Brother, the protagonist yearns for love and engages in an illicit affair, but that is a “thought crime” that could result in imprisonment or death.
9. Ulysses — Set entirely on one day in 1904, two men go about their business in Dublin.
10. Anna Karenina — A story about Anna, whose passionate affair with a dashing Count leads to her ruin, and Levin, an awkward idealist whose happy marriage and domestic trials form the backdrop for a similar quest.
11. Metamorphosis — A salesman wakes up one morning and he has tranformed into a huge insect and subsequently struggles to adjust to his new condition.
12. The Castle — An unwanted Land Surveyor is never accepted in the Castle nor the village, but cannot go home. Kafka began this novel in 1922 and never finished it, yet it feels strangely complete.

Junk Fiction

1. Midnight Sun — Twilight but from Edward Cullen’s perspective.