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This is my third year of reading classic literature and philosophy. I started this habit in 2024 as an experiment. The tl;dr is that I’ve been more enlightened in one year of focusing on classic works than in a decade of randomly reading my way through non-fiction “bestsellers”. As a result, I’ve decided to continue doing that for the rest of my life.
In 2026, I want to return to authors that resonate with me and explore them more deeply to get to the core of why I like them. There’s no better feeling than starting to discover your own taste.
🔍 How I’ll read
I will continue to treat reading as a daily “study” practice, armed with a pen to scribble my reactions in the margins. I’ll read books through the lens of themes I care about (e.g., memory, perception of time, the mundane, wisdom, beautiful analogies/metaphors, etc.) and keep track of where they appear (I find it helpful to create an index on the title page).
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| January | Mémoires d’Hadrien – Marguerite Yourcenar |
|---|---|
| February | Genesis, Exodus, Job, Matthew |
| March | Macbeth – William Shakespeare |
| April | The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck |
| May | The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck |
| June | The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy |
| July | Le Città Invisibili – Italo Calvino |
| August | L’Enracinement – Simone Weil |
| September | The Peregrine – J. A. Baker |
| October | The Republic – Plato |
| November | The Republic – Plato |
| December | A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway |
| All year long | The Confessions – Saint Augustine |
| Essais – Montaigne |