Giving Myself a Reading List

I have so many books that I've bought, but never read. Hell, I'm pretty sure I have more books that I haven't finished than books I haven't started. The main reason for this is that I am not much of a reader. Never really was. In school, reading was a mandated assignment that came with rewards if you over-achieved. In elementary school, I mostly stuck with the Berenstain Bears "big chapter" books. I did try to read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, however, as I recall, it took me three days to finish reading the first chapter.

In middle school, we had a reading pyramid. The assignment was to read 5 books per trimester, a total of 15 per school-year (math is hard). Simple enough. However, the next year, they switched from trimesters to 6-week terms, so students then had to read 3 books per term and write short summaries of each book. It almost seemed as if the school system was trying to make me hate reading.

It wasn't until junior high and high school that I started to warm up to reading. We had a half-hour class called 'Advisory'. It was focused on helping us figure out our post-high school life, but most of the time, it was just a study hall period, and they encouraged us to have something to read. It was at this point in my life when I got into watching The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. So for recreational reading, I read Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You), Lewis Black's Me of Little Faith and Nothing's Sacred, Alan Moore's Watchmen and V For Vendetta, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, H.P. Lovercraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland series, and Sakurako Kimino's Strawberry Panic series (don't look at me like that).

As of now, I have many books spanning various genres that I would like to read sometime in my nearest future, given that I actually give myself time to read.

Here's is the list (some of these books I had started but haven't yet finished):

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
Space Cadet by Robert Heinlein
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Watership Down by Richard Adams
On Writing by Stephen King
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw
The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Dune by Frank Herbert
Looking For Alaska by John Green

Let the games begin.