Favourite Books


I read a lot. This is an arbitrary subset of some of the best books I've read.

Fiction, Poetry, Plays

  • Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych; Anna Karenina
  • Franz Kafka, Stories esp. The Hunger Artist, The Burrow, In The Penal Colony
  • Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
  • Frank Herbert, Dune
  • William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, etc. 
  • Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov
  • W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants
  • Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
  • TS Eliot, all major poems esp. Four Quartets
  • Shakespeare, major plays
  • J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace; Elizabeth Costello
  • Homer, Iliad
  • Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
  • J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction & Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenter; Franny & Zooey

Non-Fiction + Other

  • Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen: Essays 
  • Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building; The Nature of Order
  • James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
  • Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!; Lectures on Physics
  • Stephen Booth, Precious Nonsense
  • Haruki Murakami, Underground
  • Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons
  • The Paris Review Interviews, I & II
  • M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations; Blue & Brown Books
  • Ray Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes
  • Paul Cronin, Herzog on Herzog
  • Keith Johnstone, Impro