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Favourite Books

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

Fiction

Homer

  • Iliad (c. 762 BC)

Dante

  • The Divine Comedy (1320)

Shakespeare

  • Major plays

Herman Melville

  • Moby-Dick (1851)

George Eliot

  • Middlemarch (1871)

Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • Demons (1872)
  • The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

Leo Tolstoy

  • Anna Karenina (1877)
  • The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886)

Marcel Proust

  • In Search of Lost Time (1913)

Franz Kafka

  • Stories, esp. The Hunger Artist, The Burrow, In the Penal Colony

Jorge Luis Borges

  • Ficciones (1944)

J.D. Salinger

  • Seymour: An Introduction (1959)
  • Franny & Zooey (1961)

Frank Herbert

  • Dune (1965)

A.S. Byatt

  • Possession (1990)

Norman Rush

  • Mating (1991)

W.G. Sebald

  • The Emigrants (1992)
  • The Rings of Saturn (1995)
  • Austerlitz (2001)

Michael Ondaatje

  • The English Patient (1992)

Vikram Seth

  • A Suitable Boy (1993)

Philip Pullman

  • His Dark Materials (1995)

Roberto Bolaño

  • The Savage Detectives (1998)
  • 2666 (2004)

J.M. Coetzee

  • Disgrace (1999)
  • Elizabeth Costello (2003)

Vernor Vinge

  • A Deepness in the Sky (1999)

Karl Ove Knausgaard

  • The School of Night (2008)
  • My Struggle (2009)

Poetry

You are best off with anthologies here — I like The Rattle Bag and The Oxford Book of English Verse — but here are a few poets I particularly like.

Shakespeare

  • Sonnets (1609)

John Donne

  • Songs and Sonnets (1633)

George Herbert

  • The Temple (1633)

William Blake

  • Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789)
  • The Marriage of Heaven & Hell (1793)

Arthur Rimbaud

  • A Season in Hell (1873)
  • Illuminations (1886)

Robert Browning

  • Men and Women (1855)

Ezra Pound

  • Cathay (1915)
  • Selected Cantos (1930)

Wallace Stevens

  • Harmonium (1923)

W.H. Auden

  • Collected Poems (1945)

Basil Bunting

  • Chomei at Toyama (1932)
  • Briggflatts (1966)

T.S. Eliot

  • All major poems, esp. Four Quartets (1943)

Philip Larkin

  • The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
  • High Windows (1974)

Geoffrey Hill

  • For the Unfallen (1959)
  • King Log (1968)
  • Mercian Hymns (1971)

Tomas Tranströmer

  • The Half-Finished Heaven (1962)

Anne Carson

  • The Beauty of the Husband (2001)

Non-Fiction

Plato

  • Major dialogues, esp. Apology, Symposium, Euthyphro (c. 399 BC)

Book of Common Prayer (1549)

King James Bible (1611)

John Donne

  • Sermons (c. 1640)

James Boswell

  • The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

T.S. Eliot

  • Essays, esp. Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) and the Dante essay

Arthur Quiller-Couch

  • On the Art of Reading (1920)

William Empson

  • 7 Types of Ambiguity (1930)

Sigmund Freud

  • Civilization and its Discontents (1930)

Ezra Pound

  • ABC of Reading (1934)

G.H. Hardy

  • A Mathematician's Apology (1940)

Erich Auerbach

  • Mimesis (1946)

Ludwig Wittgenstein

  • Philosophical Investigations (1953)
  • Blue & Brown Books (1958)

The Paris Review Interviews (2006)

René Girard

  • Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961)
  • A Theater of Envy (1991)

Richard Feynman

  • Lectures on Physics (1964)
  • Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

Stephen Booth

  • An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (1969)
  • Precious Nonsense (1998)

Christopher Alexander

  • The Timeless Way of Building (1979)
  • The Nature of Order (2002)

Keith Johnstone

  • Impro (1979)

Derek Parfit

  • Reasons and Persons (1984)

Richard Rhodes

  • The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986)

Ted Hughes

  • Winter Pollen: Essays (1994)

Haruki Murakami

  • Underground (1997)

M. Mitchell Waldrop

  • The Dream Machine (2001)

Ray Carney

  • Cassavetes on Cassavetes (2001)

Paul Cronin

  • Herzog on Herzog (2002)