I’m crazy, and this proves it. Last spring, I decided that I should do something “useful” before I graduate from college.

Not something that’s actually useful to humanity and the world in general — I volunteer some, but that isn’t part of my new mission. It isn’t even something that’s really useful to me personally, except in a good-cocktail-party-story sort of way. I’m not learning a new language or trying to find a decent job. My mission is pure egocentric self-indulgence: I’m going to read all the books on the BBC Top 100 list by May 2014.

There are many lists out there that claim to enumerate _the_ books everyone _needs_ to read; I picked the BBC Top 100 simply because it was the first one I’d heard of. Are there books on the list I dislike? Yes. Are there books off the list that I can’t live without? Definitely yes. The List isn’t perfect, but it’s a great place for dedicated readers to start.

Lots of the books on the list are classics (“Pride and Prejudice” and “The Count of Monte Cristo”). Others are newer, but I’m sure they’ll become classics with time (the Harry Potter series and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books). Some of them I’d read before, and some of them I’d never even heard of (am I really that weird for not knowing what “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” is?).

I’m not going through the list in any particular order. I’m reading books I already own first, but I just select from that large subset at random. There are three Jane Austen books on the list. I read “Pride and Prejudice” last spring, but I have no idea when I’ll get to the others. So far, I’ve read 33 of the books on the list, leaving me 67 books to finish sometime in the next year and a half (reading four non-school-related books a month during my junior and senior years is totally doable, right?).

Committing myself to this admittedly odd project has already broadened my literary horizons. There are classics that have been sitting on my bookshelves, unread, for five years, and now I’m actually getting around to reading them because they’re on The List. There are also books that I’ve never even considered picking up until I saw them on The List, but now I love them. One such book is “Bridget Jones’s Diary” by Helen Fielding. I saw the movie, thought Bridget was obnoxious and totally wrote off the book. But then I read it over the summer so that I could cross it off The List, and now it’s a new favorite.

Last spring, I plowed my way through all 585,000 (give or take a few thousand) words of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Not exactly a book most people would pick as a beach read. It took me almost a month to finish it, and it would’ve taken even longer if I hadn’t devoted half of my spring break to it. Would I do it over again? In a heartbeat. Even though it’s ancient and seemingly unintelligible at first, lessons from this book resonate with me in my hectic 21st century life: don’t trust everything a boy tells you, war doesn’t care how good of a person you are and “freedom fries” aren’t the first we-don’t-like-France-anymore change.

Up next? I’m making my way through George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” (my mom’s reaction: “Wait, you’re reading that on purpose?”). Like most 19th century novels, many of its ideas are outdated — the pursuit of a wedding ring isn’t the end-all and be-all of my existence. Despite some archaic themes, the story is still engrossing. The author might be dead, but the emotion the book evokes isn’t.

So set your own reading goal. Read something published before 1900. Read something that didn’t come from the teen paranormal romance section of the bookstore. Read something with an ugly cover and a ridiculous title.