"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