Books I'm Reading

Photo by Lauren Van Epps

Below is a list of books I'm working through or have recently finished:

  1. The Sympathizer -- Viet Thanh Nguyen
  2. Dark Age Ahead -- Jane Jacobs
  3. The Best American Essays 2009 -- Mary Oliver (Editor)
  4. A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft -- Andrea Barrett and Peter Turchi 
  5. Lincoln in the Bardo -- George Saunders
  6. Between the World and Me -- Ta-Nehisi Coates 
  7. Fourth of July Creek -- Smith Henderson
  8. White Noise -- Don DeLillo

Also: here's a list of books I consider important, formative, interesting, etc., in no particular order: 

FICTION

  1. The Sound and the Fury, Absolam Absolam -- William Faulkner
  2. Suttree -- Cormac McCarthy
  3. Underworld, White Noise, Americana -- Don DeLillo
  4. On the Road, Visions of Cody -- Jack Kerouac
  5. In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea -- Ernest Hemingway
  6. The God of Small Things -- Arundhati Roy
  7. Moby-Dick -- Herman Melville
  8. Look Homeward, Angel -- Thomas Wolfe
  9. Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- James Joyce
  10. Wise Blood, Collected Stories -- Flannery O'Connor
  11. Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn -- Henry Miller
  12. Jesus' Son, Tree of Smoke -- Denis Johnson
  13. The Stranger -- Albert Camus
  14. Carpenter's Gothic -- William Gaddis
  15. Rabbit, Run -- John Updike
  16. Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller
  17. Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov
  18. Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe

NONFICTION

  1. Walden -- Henry David Thoreau
  2. The Republic -- Plato
  3. The Holy Bible -- God Knows
  4. The Odyssey -- Homer
  5. A History of the Middle East -- Peter Mansfield
  6. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- Robert Pirsig
  7. A People's History of the United States -- Howard Zinn
  8. Buddhism Plain and Simple -- Steve Hagan
  9. The Mystics of Islam -- Reynold A. Nicholson
  10. The Happiest Man Alive, A Biography of Henry Miller -- Mary V. Dearborn
  11. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays -- Albert Camus

POETRY

  1. Leaves of Grass -- Walt Whitman
  2. 95 Poems -- E.E. Cummings 
  3. The Collected Poems -- Allen Ginsberg
  4. Burning in Water Drowning in Flame -- Charles Bukoswki
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