Books That Changed My Life

I've read at least 1000 books at this point, although with the books I read growing up (I'm looking at you, Animorphs and Boxcar Children) that number is certainly greater. Of that, I found a few books to be of truly exceptional quality - ones that have fundamentally altered what I thought a novel can do. This page is dedicated to those books, and what makes them stand out to me.

Fiction

Aira, César. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. New Directions Publishing, 25 May 2006.

Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. New York, N.Y., Random House, 2017.

Bolaño, Roberto. The Savage Detectives. New York, Picador/Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 2008.

Cixin, Liu. The Dark Forest. New York, Tor, A Tom Doherty Associates Book, 2015.

Davis, Lydia. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 26 Oct. 2010.

DeWitt, Helen. The Last Samurai. New Directions Publishing, 31 May 2016.

Everett, Percival. Erasure. Graywolf Press, 25 Oct. 2011.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York, Random House, 1951.

Fosse, Jon. Septology. Giramondo Publishing, 1 Oct. 2022.

Gass, William The Tunnel. Normal, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012.

Yu, Hua. To Live. Translated by Michael Berry, New York, Anchor Books, 2003.

Krasznahorkai, Laszlo. Satantango. New Directions Publishing, 2020.

Lerner, Ben. Leaving the Atocha Station. London, Granta, 2013.

Markson, David. Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Deep Vellum Publishing, 14 Nov. 2023.

Murakami, Haruki. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. London, Vintage Books, 2011.

Oe, Kenzaburo. A Personal Matter. Grove/Atlantic, 1969.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1818.

Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. New York, Little, Brown, 2006.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Penguin Classics, 1925.

Autofiction

Guibert, Herve. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. MIT Press, 26 May 2020.

Levé, Édouard. Autoportrait. Champaign, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012.

Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. New York, New Directions Publ. Corp, 1999.

Sei Shōnagon. The Pillow Book. London, Oxford University Press, 1967.

Wojnarowicz, David. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. Edinburgh, Canongate Books Ltd, 2017.

Non-Fiction

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, New Press, 5 Jan. 2010.

Chamayou, Grégoire. A Theory of the Drone. New York, The New Press, 2015.

Egan, Dan. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York, Vintage Books, 1963.

Solomon, Andrew. Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. New York, Scribner, 2013.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York, Picador, 1977.

Vollmann, William T. Carbon Ideologies. Vol. 2, No Good Alternative. New York, Penguin Books, 2019.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. 2010. Random House, 2016.

Poetry

Bronk, William. Selected Poems. New York, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1995.

Glück, Louise. Poems 1962-2012. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 8 July 2014.

Koch, Kenneth. The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. New York, Knopf, 2007.

Lax, Robert. Poems (1962-1997). Wave Books, 5 Nov. 2013.

Lerner, Ben. No Art. Granta Books, 3 Nov. 2016.

Powell, D. A. Repast: Tea, Lunch, Cocktails. Graywolf Press, 18 Nov. 2014.

Rankine, Claudia. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Penguin Books, 2017.

Siken, Richard. Crush. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005.

Sze, Arthur. The Glass Constellation. Copper Canyon Press, 13 Apr. 2021.

Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. Oxford, Clarendon Pr, 1982.

Philosophy

Baruch Spinoza, and George Eliot. Spinoza’s Ethics. Princeton ; Oxford, Princeton University Press. Copyright, 2020.

Fukuoka, Masanobu. The One-Straw Revolution. New York, New York Review Books, 2009.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. 1887. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, New York Vintage Books, 2011.

Heraclitus. Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus. New York, Penguin Books, 2003.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London ; New York, Routledge, 2002.