The Books I Want to Read Again and Again

I have been reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. There is a passage on reading that makes a lot of sense to me:

I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the hundred best books again and again.

There are also more and more books piling up at home. The only bookcase in the living room is no longer enough, so it is time to sort them out. That is how this essay began.

Which books should stay? Which are worth reading again and again?

Life is strange. No matter how old you are, when you look back, only a few books, one or two people, or even a single moment tend to have truly changed you. It feels like the afternoon at the baseball stadium Murakami Haruki describes: suddenly, you understand something.

When I opened Douban and looked through the books I once rated four or five stars, I found the same thing. Some books return with remarkable clarity: when I read them, how many times, what shock or joy they gave me. Others are a blur. No memory at all.

Using that standard, here is the first version of my lifetime reading list. Books that keep becoming new:

1. The Complete Works of Wang Xiaobo
2. Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu
3. The Lover by Marguerite Duras
4. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
5. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
6. No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
7. The Stranger by Albert Camus
8. The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
9. The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
10. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
11. The Body by Cai Chongda
12. The Smiling, Proud Wanderer by Jin Yong
13. Lectures on Modern Western Thought by Liu Qing
14. The Surrender Experiment by Michael A. Singer
15. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
16. Hello, Little Friends by Ryoji Akiyama
17. Personal Best by Elliott Erwitt
18. The Path to Financial Freedom by Li Xiaolai
19. Poor Charlie’s Almanack edited by Peter D. Kaufman
20. The Buffett–Munger Chronicles by Tang Chao
21. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
22. The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness by Andy Puddicombe

I first read The Smiling, Proud Wanderer in high school, lying in a crowded dormitory in a hot southern county town. I could not put it down, caught in Linghu Chong’s chivalry, freedom, and ease. Then university arrived. The only book I remember rereading several times, and later following into film, was Norwegian Wood: those beautiful, subdued years of youth and hormones.

If The Smiling, Proud Wanderer and Norwegian Wood shaped some surface layer of my younger self, Wang Xiaobo changed something much deeper: my outlook and values. His fiction, essays, and love poems to Li Yinhe reveal a singular, independent mind—rational, funny, philosophical, romantic, imaginative, and creative.

In 2019, after leaving an energy-draining startup, I found Li Xiaolai’s The Path to Financial Freedom in a rented room near Mudanyuan in Beijing. It is a very good book hidden behind a rather commercial title. Its ideas about a personal business model, compounding, wealth, friendship, and happiness hit me hard. Since then, I have kept learning and practicing investing and meditation for more than four years.

Read Fortress Besieged to feel Qian Zhongshu’s explosive command of language. Read The Lover for the spare style Wang Xiaobo admired. Read No Longer Human for the pressure and helplessness of being human.

For the anxiety around meaning and emptiness, books such as The Surrender Experiment and Lectures on Modern Western Thought opened a door to philosophy for me. They can help us slowly build a basic framework for understanding the world and our lives.

Ryoji Akiyama and Elliott Erwitt are my two favorite humanist photographers at the moment. Their photographs make the beauty and the fleeting moments of this world visible.

My list still lacks foundational books in mathematics, technology, and other fields. To be continued.

…

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