* indicates favorites
my brilliant friend | elena ferrante
* the waves | virginia woolf
* eros the bittersweet | anne carson
in praise of shadows | jun'ichirō tanizaki
walden | henry david thoreau
the rings of saturn | w.g. sebald
* to the lighthouse | virginia woolf
* time within time: the diaries | andrey tarkovsky
the book of goose | yiyun li
the imaginary | jean-paul sartre
* notes from the underground | fyodor dostoevsky
* the crying of lot 49 | thomas pynchon
the death of ivan ilyich | leo tolstoy
tinkers | paul harding
nausea | jean-paul sartre
tractatus logico-philosophicus | ludwig wittgenstein
an introduction to wittgenstein's tractatus | g.e.m. anscombe
* then the war | carl phillips
illuminations | walter benjamin
beyond god the father | mary daly
the stranger | albert camus
* i and thou | martin buber
grounding for the metaphysics of morals | immanuel kant
* fear and trembling | søren kierkegaard (revisit!)
* the fire next time | james baldwin
the nature of things | lucretius
* the essence of christianity | ludwig feuerbach
* the periodic table | primo levi
family life | akhil sharma
devotions | mary oliver
on law, morality and politics | thomas aquinas
* a man's place | annie erneaux
* facing unpleasant facts | george orwell
the republic | plato
tell me how it ends: an essay in forty questions | valeria luiselli
lost children archive | valeria luiselli
confessions | st. augustine
* a room of one's own | virginia woolf
a maimonides reader | isadore twersky
the hive and the honey | paul yoon
euthyphro | plato
the creative act: a way of being | rick rubin
poems 1962-2012 | louise glück
night sky with exit wounds | ocean vuong
* the death and life of great american cities | jane jacobs
slouching towards bethlehem | joan didion
i am writing to you from afar | moyna pam dick
human, all too human | friedrich nietzsche
fahrenheit 451 | ray bradbury
slaughterhouse five | kurt vonnegut
* the bell jar | sylvia plath
diary of an oxygen thief | anonymous
* the collected stories | grace paley
* make something wonderful | steve jobs
the communist manifesto | karl marx, friedrich engels
crying in h mart | michelle zauner
my struggle | karl ove kanusgaard
klara and the sun | kazuo ishiguro
in the time of the butterflies | julia alvarez
all quiet on the western front | erich maria remarque
the grapes of wrath | john steinbeck
the importance of being earnest | oscar wilde
the book thief | markus zusak
educated | tara westover
the second sex | simone de beauvoir
time is a mother | ocean vuong
the brothers karamazov | fyodor dostoevsky
the gay science | friedrich nietzsche