"Reading without writing is like sowing without reaping." A list of books I have read and my thoughts and recommendations. I enjoy literary fiction, essays, social and political thought, multi-generational narratives, and novels that experiment with form. I love many of the books that I end up not recommending. There is some organization by author's first name and genre for now, but the list will remain unsorted as it grows.

Titles with a black knight chess peice ♞ are books that I recommend.

Connectome / Sebastian Seung

The Three-Body Problem / Cixin Liu (trans. Ken Liu)

The Dark Forest / Cixin Liu (trans. Joel Martinsen )

Death's End / Cixin Liu (trans. Ken Liu) ♞

Homebase / Shawn Wong [Thoughts]

Homebase was the only Chinese-American novel in print in America at the time of its publication in 1979. See my interview with Shawn Wong.


American Knees / Shawn Wong

The Stranger / Albert Camus ♞

Brave New World / Aldous Huxley ♞

Call Me By Your Name / André Aciman ♞

Man's Fate / André Malraux ♞

Less / Andrew Sean Greer ♞

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Norton) / Anonymous

The Natural / Bernard Malamud

Little Fires Everywhere / Celeste Ng

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe / Charles Yu

Things Fall Apart / Chinua Achebe

The Underground Railroad / Colson Whitehead

The Road / Cormac McCarthy

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress / Dai Sijie

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius / Dave Eggars

Infinite Jest / David Foster Wallace ♞

The Pale King / David Foster Wallace ♞

The Broom of the System / David Foster Wallace

Snow Falling on Cedars / David Guterson

White Noise / Don Delilo ♞

The Goldfinch / Donna Tartt

The Known World / Edward P. Jones ♞

Dawn / Elie Wiesel

Day / Elie Wiesel

Night / Elie Wiesel

The Old Man and the Sea / Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises / Ernest Hemingway

The Great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald

One Hundred Years of Solitude / Gabriel García Márquez ♞

Lincoln in the Bardo / George Saunders ♞

The Vegetarian / Han Kang ♞

A Little Life / Hanya Yanagihara ♞

Kafka on the Shore / Haruki Murakami

Norwegian Wood / Haruki Murakami

The Turn of the Screw & In the Cage / Henry James

Moby Dick / Herman Melville

The Catcher in the Rye / J. D. Salinger

Elizabeth Costello / J. M. Coetzee ♞

Waiting for the Barbarians / J. M. Coetzee

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man / James Joyce

Winter in the Blood / James Welch

Middlesex / Jeffrey Eugenides

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close / Jonathan Safran Foer ♞

Blindess / José Saramago ♞

The Awakening / Kate Chopin ♞

Never Let Me Go / Kazuo Ishiguro ♞

The Remains of the Day / Kazuo Ishiguro ♞

The Buried Giant / Kazuo Ishiguro

The Gangster We Are All Looking For / Le Thi Diem Thuy

Frankenstein (1818) / Mary Shelley

Pachinko / Min Jin Lee ♞

The Book of Salt / Monique Truong ♞

The Elegance of the Hedgehog / Muriel Barbery

The Blithesdale Romance / Nathaniel Hawthorne ♞

The Picture of Dorian Gray / Oscar Wilde

The Sellout / Paul Beatty ♞

Tinkers / Paul Harding ♞

The Good Earth / Pearl S. Buck ♞

Sons / Pearl S. Buck

The Plot Against America / Philip Roth

Outline / Rachel Cusk

Invisible Man / Ralph Ellison ♞

Gould's Book of Fish / Richard Flanagan ♞

Black Boy / Richard Wright

Uncle Tom's Children / Richard Wright

Beloved / Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye / Toni Morrison

The Sympathizer / Viet Thahn Nguyen

Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf ♞

Shoeless Joe / W. P. Kinsella

Robinson Crusoe / William Defoe ♞

As I Lay Dying / William Faulkner ♞

The Sound and the Fury / William Faulkner ♞

Lord of the Flies / William Golding

Sophie's Choice / William Styron ♞

NW / Zadie Smith ♞

White Teeth / Zadie Smith

Their Eyes Were Watching God / Zora Neale Hurston

The Journey to the West Vol 1-4 / translated by Anthony C. Yu ♞

All My Sons / Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman / Arthur Miller

Fences / August Wilson

The Beaux' Stratagem / George Farquhar

The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me / Larry Kramer ♞

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Oxford) / Shakespeare ♞

Julius Caesar (Oxford) / Shakespeare ♞

King Richard III (Arden) / Shakespeare ♞

Macbeth (Arden) / Shakespeare ♞

Othello (Arden) / Shakespeare ♞

The Tempest (Norton) / Shakespeare ♞

Titus Andronicus (Penguin) / Shakespeare ♞

Hamlet (Arden) / Shakespeare

King Lear (Arden) / Shakespeare

Pericles (Arden) / Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet (Arden) / Shakespeare

The Merchant of Venice (Arden) / Shakespeare

Blizzard of One / Mark Strand ♞

Dark Mirror / Mark Strand ♞

New Selected Poems / Mark Strand ♞

Alternative Medicine / Rafael Campo ♞

Singing School / Robert Pinsky

The Sounds of Poetry / Robert Pinsky

The Golden Gate / Vikran Seth ♞

Lyrical Ballads / Wordsworth and Coleridge

Lark in the Morning / edited by Robert Kehew

Consciousness / Christof Koch

Willpower / John F. Baumeister and John Tierney

Proust was a Neuroscientist / Jonathan Lehrer

Long for this World / Jonathan Weiner

Time, Love, Memory / Jonathan Weiner ♞

The Selfish Gene / Richard Dawkins

The Language Instinct / Steven Pinker ♞

The Human Condition / Hannah Arendt ♞

Elements of the Philosophy of Right / Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

One-Dimensional Man / Herbert Marcuse

Today I Wrote Nothing / Daniil Kharms ♞

The Brothers Karamazov / Fyodor Dostoevsky ♞

Poor Folk / Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Double / Fyodor Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment / Fyodor Dostoevsky

Demons, or The Possessed / Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from Underground / Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Idiot / Fyodor Dostoevsky

Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoy

The Death of Ivan Ilyick / Leo Tolstoy

Selected Stories / Nikolai Gogol

The Golovlyov Family / Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin ♞

Pale Fire / Vladimir Nabokov ♞

Pnin / Vladimir Nabokov ♞

Speak, Memory / Vladimir Nabokov ♞

Invitation to a Beheading / Vladimir Nabokov

Laughter in the Dark / Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita / Vladimir Nabokov

Mary / Vladimir Nabokov

The Eye / Vladimir Nabokov

The Luzhin Defense / Vladimir Nabokov

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight / Vladimir Nabokov

The Tragedy of Mr. Morn / Vladimir Nabokov

Consider the Lobster / David Foster Wallace ♞

This is Water / David Foster Wallace ♞

Walden and Other Writings / Henry David Thoreau ♞

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors / Susan Sontag ♞

Intoxicated by My Illness / Anatole Broyard

The Hedgehog and the Fox / Isaiah Berlin

How to be Alone / Jonathan Franzen ♞

Less Than One / Joseph Brodsky ♞

Against Everything / Mark Grief ♞

Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics / Mikhail Bakhtin

The Dialogic Imagination / Mikhail Bakhtin

The God Delusion / Richard Dawkins

How to Interpret Literature / Robert Dale Parker ♞

Between the World and Me / Ta-Nehisi Coates ♞

How to Read Literature like a Professor / Thomas C. Foster

The Reason for God / Timothy Keller

Theory of Prose / Viktor Shklovsky

A Room of One's Own / Virginia Woolf

Feel Free / Zadie Smith ♞

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men / David Foster Wallace ♞

Girl with Curious Hair / David Foster Wallace ♞

Oblivion / David Foster Wallace ♞

Legend of a Suicide / David Vann ♞

The Paper Menagerie / Ken Liu ♞

Dreams From My Father / Barack Obama ♞

Living with a Wild God / Barbara Ehrenreich

Just Mercy / Bryan Stevenson ♞

Wait Till Next Year / Doris Kearns Goodwin

In Search of Memory / Eric Kandel

Angela's Ashes / Frank McCourt ♞

Tis / Frank McCourt

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas / Gertrude Stein

The Double Helix / James Watson

The Year of Magical Thinking / Joan Didion

Into the Wild / Jon Krakauer ♞

When Breath Becomes Air / Paul Kalanithi ♞

The Desire to Heal / Rafael Campo ♞

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman / Richard Feynman ♞

Thinking in Pictures / Temple Grandin

Age of Propaganda / Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson

Being Mortal / Atul Gawande

Natural Causes / Barbara Ehrenreich

Fast Food Nation / Eric Schlosser

Eichmann in Jerusalem / Hannah Arendt

Bad Blood / John Carreyrou ♞

Moonwalking with Einstein / Joshua Foer

Outliers / Malcolm Gladwell

What the Dog Saw / Malcolm Gladwell

Bird by Bird / Anne Lamont

Designing Your Life / Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

So Good They Can't Ignore You / Cal Newport

Meditations / Marcus Aurelius

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up / Marie Kondo

Getting What You Came For / Robert L. Peters

Advice for a Young Investigator / Santiago Ramón y Cajal

On Writing / Stephen King

The Situation and the Story / Vivian Gornick