After a nice Christmas Day spent with my family, I went to bed, picked up a book of Franz Kafka’s work that contained “The Metamorphosis” and read the long short story through for the first time. I had of course known of the book’s famous opening — Gregor Samsa, a young traveling salesman, wakes up one morning in his parents’ home to find himself changed into some hideous creature — for years. And I had known that the story is perhaps the primary reason why we use the word Kafkaesque to describe something marked by a sense of surreal distortion, impending danger or menacing complexity.

But I had no idea how visceral and moving Kafka’s depiction of guilt, depression and family dysfunction actually was. I’m happy to say my intense literary experience was a marked contrast to my family celebration. But it did give me a deeper understanding of life that I did not have before.

Good films and music often prod me toward useful thought, but a good book always does. That’s why my resolution for this new year is to read — or in some cases re-read — as much as I can that might help me understand life a little more.

More Kafka — “The Trial,” “The Castle,” and “Amerika” — is at the top of my list. So is “The Stranger” by Albert Camus, another existentialist.

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I’m also going to start back through the work of Southern writer Walker Percy. His novels “The Moviegoer” and “Lancelot,” along with the impossible-to-categorize “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book” have stuck with me closer than anything else I read in college a decade ago.

Then there’s Fyodor Dostoevsky. His “Notes from the Underground” was the most perceptive work on human nature I had ever read, until I kept my 2006 resolution to read the masterful “The Brothers Karamozov.” In 2007, I’m going to try for either “Crime and Punishment” or “The Idiot.”

Research for another column led me back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” a few weeks ago, and I’ve been dipping into it since, always amazed at the depth and relevance of a work more than 165 years old. The only works of political science that equal it are “The Federalist Papers,” by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, and Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” All three works are essential to any attempt to explain what goes on in Washington, including the daffy spectacle we’re likely to see the next two years.

As for Shakespeare, I had managed to completely avoid him until I picked up “Hamlet” several months ago in a handy edition with the original text side-by-side with modern English. I was amazed at the play’s brilliance and its dozens of phrases still in use today. I’m going for “Henry V” and “Macbeth” next.

Of course, many resolve to read some translation of the Bible each year. I’m going to re-read the King James Version. The beauty of its language is outdone only by its immeasurable power and wisdom. Starting with, and referring back to, the Gospels, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes inspires me to read the rest.

I’m sure that I won’t read everything on my list, but I’m going to try. And there is one thing I know I can do this year that I’ve been putting off for far too long. I’m going to volunteer with a literacy program to help give others a skill I can’t imagine living without.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.