I’ve been trying to read a lot more lately, and I came across Pewdiepie’s video of the books he read in 2018. Similar to Stephan Duneier’s New Year’s resolution to read 50 books in a year, Felix set himself a target of reading (and more importantly, he says, finishing) more books in 2018.
While I’m not a big fan of Pewdiepie’s — at least his gaming content — he’s a behemoth that if you visit YouTube.com at all you can’t escape and have definitely seen his face. Currently he’s the second largest YouTuber, and biggest solo content producer in the world. So when someone recommended the video of his reading list to me, I was intrigued enough to watch it and was pleasantly surprised.
Not knowing much about ‘Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg,’ I assumed his list would be filled with Game of Thrones books, gaming-themed books, and more juvenile or teen picks more in tune with his audience which is mostly 13-24 year olds [1]. But that’s not the case. It’s a very eclectic mix of classics, philosophy, non-fiction, history, Japanese and Russian literature.
It’s a very interesting list, and one that in just 72 titles, leaves him more well read (and well rounded) than most people who claim to be bookworms but only read fantasy (hello, GRRM readers).
I thought I’d list all of the books it out here for my own reference since there’s not one single repository for all 72, they’re mostly split between his videos and incomplete GoodReads lists.
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky [buy here]
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley [buy here]
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee [buy here]
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka [buy here]
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde [buy here]
- 1984 by George Orwell [buy here]
- 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B Peterson [buy here]
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway [buy here]
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury [buy here]
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E Frankl [buy here]
- Beyond Good and Evil by Freidrich Neitzche [buy here]
- American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis [buy here]
- Dune by Frank Herbert [buy here]
- No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai [buy here]
- Stoner by John Williams [buy here]
- Sapiens: A brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari [buy here]
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes [buy here]
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville [buy here]
- The Culture Critique by Kevin B MacDonald [buy here]
- I Am Legend by Richard Matheson [buy here]
- Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami [buy here]
- The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima [buy here]
- Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky [buy here]
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov [buy here]
- Japanese Death Poems by Yoel Hoffman [buy here]
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro [buy here]
- The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima [buy here]
- The Forever War by Joe Haldeman [buy here]
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra [buy here]
- The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe [buy here]
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov [buy here]
- The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky [buy here]
- Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold by Stephen Fry [buy here]
- Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark [buy here]
- Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Inazo Nitobe [buy here]
- A Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi [buy here]
- The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima [buy here]
- Inferno by August Strindberg [buy here]
- Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima [buy here]
- Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami [buy here]
- Either/Or: A Fragment of Life by Soren Kierkegaard [buy here]
- Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler [buy here]
- We by Yevgeny Zamyatin [buy here]
- The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss [buy here]
- Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima [buy here]
- In the Buddha’s Words by Bhikkhu Bodhi [buy here]
- Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks [buy here]
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut [buy here]
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold [buy here]
- Blame! Vol.1 by Tsutomu Nihei [buy here]
- The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart [buy here]
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas [buy here]
- Tony Takitani by Haruki Murakami [buy here]
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu [buy here]
- Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan [buy here]
- The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin [buy here]
- A Sister’s Promise by Shelby Perry [buy here]
- The City of Gold and Lead by John Christopher [buy here]
- The Republic by Plato [buy here]
- The Symposium by Plato [buy here]
- The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien [buy here]
- The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky [buy here]
- The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa [buy here]
- The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict [buy here]
- 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami [buy here]
- Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami [buy here]
- High Fidelity by Nick Hornby [buy here]
- Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima [buy here]