One of my resolutions for 2007 is to beat my book buying habit. Too often I find myself buying a new book, reading the first few chapters, and abandoning it in favour of another new purchase. I have a deck of playing cards which I used a bookmarks and almost all of them are in books, some of which I began reading more than two years ago. I therefore resolve not to buy another book (excepting required textbooks) until I’ve finished those I already own. To start with, I’ve selected twelve shorter unread books:
- Thomas Paine, Common Sense
- Thorstein Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
- Harry Brighouse, Justice
- Alastair Hannay, On The Public
- Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves
- Jonathan Mills (ed.), Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power
- Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
- Chris George, The Book of Digital Photography
- Karen Cheng, Designing Type
- Gordon Rennie, David Bishop, Simon Jowett, Peter Evans & James Swallow, I Am the Law
- Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles