Your Everyday Nerd

I got a confession to make…

I’ve been reading books 😮

I know. How can I allow myself to engage in such a heinous activity?

I mean, do people even read anymore?

All jokes aside, I have been reading more lately and it’s been really fun!

I’ll keep the preamble short today, but if you’d like to hear more about my reading journey as of late, feel free to check out this article on Medium.com, where I review Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.

Anyways, this is my official ranking of every book I’ve read since 2019.

I’m choosing 2019 because that is when I started keeping up with my thoughts on literature. There are many books from before 2019 that I love, so as soon as I reread them, they’ll join the list.

Here’s the ranking!

Fiction

1. The Stranger – Albert Camus 5/5 (layers of philosophical questions in an easy to read 120 pages) | Finished: 4/26/2022
2. The Stormlight Archive (#1): The Way of Kings – Brandon Sanderson 5/5 (LOTR is good, but this may have made me an epic fantasy fan) | Finished: 4/24/2022
3. The Lord of the Rings (#1): The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien 5/5 (perfect introduction to LOTR. I like the rest of the trilogy, but I love this book) | Finished: 7/10/2020
4. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again – J.R.R. Tolkien 5/5 (bilbo baggins is fantastic and tom bombadil is the best character in literature) | Finished: 7/2/2020
5. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 5/5 (this is easily one of the best-written books I’ve ever read, i did have to put it down a lot tho…) | Finished: 7/26/2021
6. The Lord of the Rings (#3): The Return of the King – J.R.R. Tolkien 5/5 (exceptional ending. Tolkien wraps up everything wonderfully. what more could I ask for?) | Finished: 8/4/2021
7. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut 5/5 (those silly tralfamadorians are back at it again. so it goes.) | Finished: 6/21/2020
8. The Lord of the Rings (#2): The Two Towers – J.R.R. Tolkien 4/5 (the first half is a bit of slog, but the second half rocked by socks off) | Finished: 3/29/2021
9. Warriors (#1): Into the Wild – Erin Hunter 4/5 (i loved this in 7th grade. i love this now. sue me.) | Finished: 11/14/2019
10. Carrie – Stephen King 4/5 (a solid first book in King’s bibliography. i look forward to reading the bigger hits) | Finished: 4/10/2022
11. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 4/5 (i hated this in high school, but now i kind of appreciate it. part 3 is the best part.) | Finished: 4/2/2022
12. Artemis Fowl – Eoin Colfer 3/5 (would’ve worked better as a comic book. too boring for kids, too cliche for adults.) | Finished: 6/27/2020
13. Snow White – The Brothers Grimm 3/5 (a lot darker than the disney adaptation) | Finished: 9/1/2020

Nonfiction

1. A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking 5/5 (a great introduction to physics for the layman. the later chapters are a bit more intense, but there’s a lot of fun stuff here) | Finished: 10/23/2019
2. The Art of War – Sun Tzu 4/5 (i understand its value, but i need to do a more deliberate reread) | Finished: 6/25/2020

Comics & Manga
^{(I’ll eventually separate these when the list is longer.)}

1. Batman, Volume 1: The Court of Owls – Scott Snyder 4/5 (fun opening to new 52 batman. the court of owls are a fascinating antagonist) | Finished: 3/16/2022
2. Elfen Lied Omnibus, Volume 1 – Lynn Okamoto 3/5 (had potential. there’s some great ideas here, but it gets bogged down by childish perverted humor) | Finished: 9/15/2019

Currently Reading
^{(I’ve adopted a reading policy of “read whatever, read whenever”, so progress in some of these books has not been made in months. Most of these are nonfiction. I don’t consider these DNFs and will update page numbers periodically.)}

• Invincible: Compendium One – Robert Kirkman (Issue #29/47)
• The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome – Susan Wise Bauer (pg. 202/777)
• The Complete Stories – Franz Kafka (pg. 196/457)
• Dune – Frank Herbert (pg. 104/694)
• The Story of Philosophy – Will Durant (pg. 62/692)
• Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace (pg. 60/1079)
• The Myth of Sisyphus – Albert Camus (pg. 46/138)
• Beyond Biocentrism – Robert Lanza (pg. 42/200)
• Animal Farm – George Orwell (pg. 36/141)
• The Stormlight Archive (#2): Words of Radiance – Brandon Sanderson (pg. 33/1087)
• The Republic – Plato (pg. 30/379)
• How to Read a Book – Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren (pg. 29/417)
• The Pig that Wants to Be Eaten – Julian Baggini (pg. 28/300)
• Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust (pg. 22/444)
• Reading Like a Writer – Francine Prose (pg. 18/273)
• Making Movies – Sidney Lumet (pg. 10/220)
• How to Read Literature Like a Professor – Thomas C. Foster (pg.7/299)