The holiday has finally arrived! (Yeah, tell me about that.)

Since my jobs still occupy me as much as they did beforehand, holiday only changes my ‘weekdays’ and ‘weekends’ into one label of ‘weekdays’. The holiday makes no difference on the practical level, thus I decided to make my own project–or I should say target–so that the upcoming months would actually be filled with some fun and not mere works.

“You see, books fill the empty spaces. If I’m waiting for a bus, or when I’m eating alone, I can always rely on a book to keep me company. Sometimes I think I like them even more than people.” –Marc Acito

Out of the blue, I got an idea to have One Day A Book (although it does sound weird, compared to the usual form of One Book A Day, I guess I just want to have it that way). The basic concept is to have circadian reading on one paperback per day during 31 days of the whole July (or, August, if I can’t make it early), which is preferably 1) fiction, 2) 100-200 paged, and 3) any genre is acceptable.

So I throw the idea to Twitter, and I was so delighted to see that most of my friends are amazing readers! Here goes the already arranged list of books that they recommended:

1. Catcher in the Rye – J.D.Salinger
2. Franny and Zooey – J.D.Salinger
3. Essays in Love – Alaine de Botton
4. Blindness – Saramago
5. Eragon – Paolini
6. Lolita – Nabokov
7. A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan
8. Doctors – Erich Segal
9. The Imperfectionists – Tom Rachman
10. Kafka On The Shore – Haruki Murakami
11. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
12. Perks of Bing a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky
13. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
14. The Solomon’s Ring
15. Twenty Love Poems and Song of Despair
16. The United Burger States of America
17. The Gulag Archipelago
18. Never Let Me Go
19. Panggil Aku Kartini Saja
20. Manjali and Cakrabirawa
21. The Little Prince
22. God Explains in A Taxi Ride
23. Life is Good If We Don’t Weaken
24. Howards End and A Room With a View – E. M. Forster’s
25. Siddhartha
26. The Stranger/The Outsider
27. Homage To Catalonia
28. 1984
29. Dr.Zhivago
30. San Fransisco Blues
31. On The Road
32. Stone Woman
33. Le Fleurs de Mal
34. The Grand Design
35. Sofie’s Verden – Jostein Gaarder
36. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
37. Leviathan – Thomas Hobbes
38. Tuesdays with Morrie – Mitch Albom
39. Tipping Points, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw – All Malcom Gladwell’s
40. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
41. Art of War – Sun Tzu
42. Arthashastra – Kautilya
43. Annie On My Mind – Nancy Garden
44. The First Men On The Moon – H. G. Wells
45. The Lost Symbol, The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, Digital Forters – All Dan Brown’s
46. Brave New World Revisited – Aldous Huxley
47. History of Love – Nicole Krauss
48. Suite Francaise – Irene Nemirovsky
49. Inheritance of Loss – Kiran Desai
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan

The underlined titles are read already, but surely there are many of them left to explore! So yes, challenge-accepters are all welcome (some people actually mentioned me saying that they would also do One Day A Book).

The next obstacle might be on how we’re gonna find those books. Well, some people informed me that both Pasar Festival and Blok M possess decent secondhand bookstores, so there might be treasures that we can find there. Or, library.nu is always there for you who appreciate writers yet do not possess that much of capital to afford the printed version.

Believe me, every good writer was formerly a good reader–actually, many of them still visit the library from time to time. I’ll suggest you to never take advices from professional writers–or anyone else–on how to become a good writer, because it will never work. The only way to get there is by taking extensive readings and find your own style.

That’s how truly great writers really do it.