This is just a small list of books I found to be especially formative. Either that I often reference in conversations or privately recall.

My to-read list is a long one, maybe it will never shorten. This list however, should pick up some additions as I chip away at the former.

Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman

Lysistrata by Aristophanes

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

Ways of Being by James Bridle

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

In The Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Penguin Book of Modern American Short Stories edited by John Freeman

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

Funny Weather: Art in the State of an Emergency by Olivia Laing

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

1491 by Charles C. Mann

1493 by Charles C. Mann

One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

Amateur by Thomas Page McBee

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

On Freedom by Maggie Nelson

Mob Psycho 100 by One

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

War of the Foxes by Richard Siken

Walking by Henry David Thoreau

Techno-Feudalism by Yanis Varoufakis

On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde