Poets
- Sylvia Plath
- Emily Dickinson
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Robert Frost
Essay Collection
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments – David Foster Wallace (Individual essays: E Unibus Pluram )- Farther Away -Jonathan Franzen (Individual Essay: “Farther Away”)
- The View From the Cheap Seats – Neil Gaiman (Essay on Libraries)
- “The American Scholar,” “Nature,” “Self-Reliance“- Emerson
Short Stories:
- “Souls Belated” – Edith Wharton
- “Hills Like White Elephants” – Ernest Hemingway
- “The Kreutzer Sonata” – Leo Tolstoy
- “Bobok” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “Poor Folk” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- “The Yellow Wallpaper” – Perkins
- “Library of Babel” Jorge Luis Borges
- “The Machine Stops” – E.M. Forster
- “The Death of the Moth” – Virginia Woolf
- “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale” – Philip K. Dick
- “When She is Old and I am famous” – Julie Orringer
Classics:
- The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) – Hermann Hesse
- Lord of the Flies– William Golding
- Walden – Thoreau
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- Robinson Crusoe– Daniel Defoe
- East of Eden – John Steinbeck
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
- Today I Wrote Nothing – Daniil Kharms (Russian Absurdist)
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Classical:
- Lysistrata – Aristophanes
- Poems– Sappho
- The Republic – Plato
- The Odyssey – Homer
- Fables – Aesop
Children’s Literature
- Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy specifically) – J.M Barrie
- Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales, Charles Perrault Fairy Tales, Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales
- The Swiss Family Robinson – Wyss
- The Arabian Nights
- A Little Princess – Burnett
- A Monster Calls– Patrick Ness
- The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains – Neil Gaiman
Plays
- The Rabbit Hole– David Lindsay-Abaire
- No Exit – Jean-Paul Sartre
- Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
Memoirs/Biography/Reflections
- George Sand (Aurore Amantine Lucile Dupin)
- George Eliot (Mary-Ann Evans)
- Embers-Richard Wagamese (reflections)
- Memoirs, Dreams, and Reflections – Carl Jung
- Words (Les Mots) – Jean-Paul Sartre
Medieval
- Beowulf
- The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
- Le Morte D’Arthur – Malory
- Mankind – a cycle play
- The Kalevala – A Finnish Epic
New Literary Fiction that is Good
- The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
- Ocean Sea – Alessandro Baricco
- If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things-Jon McGregor
Books I like because of what they are experimenting:
- S.– J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst (as print culture)
- Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace (themes, experimentation, post-avant-garde)
- Tree of Codes – Jonathan Safran Foer
- Nox – Anne Carson
