In no particular order, this is a list of my favourite writers/books. Of course, it is incomplete.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Pale Fire and Speak, Memory and literary lectures
Franz Kafka
Geoff Dyer
JG Ballard
Simone de Beauvoir
Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
Hélène Cixous
Judith Butler
Peter Handke’s The Weight of the World
Søren Kierkegaard
Marguerite Duras
JM Coetzee
Robert Walser
Roland Barthes
Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup
Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Pascal Quignard’s The Roving Shadows
John William’s Stoner
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea
AM Homes
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Jay Griffith’s Wild: An Elemental Journey
Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s War and War
Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness
Samuel Beckett
Simon Critchley
Noam Chomsky
Roger Deakin
Carlos Fuentes’s Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone
Ruth Reichl’s Endless Feast
Teju Cole’s Open City
Jenny Erpenbeck’s The Visitation
Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? and The Lessons of Modernism
Virginia Woolf’s later novels and diaries
Jospeh Heller’s Something Happened
WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn
Don DeLillo’s Underworld
Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
Marcel Proust
Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva
Dante’s Divine Comedy
Kate Zambreno’s Heroines
Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych
James Joyce’s Ulysses
Richard Power’s The Time of our Singing
Will Ferguson’s Hokkaido Highway Blues
Filed under: The Joy of Lists, Verbals Tagged: AM Homes, Carlos Fuentes, Clarice Lispector, Dante, Don DeLillo, Doris Lessing, Geoff Dyer, Hélène Cixous, Jay Griffith, Jean-Paul Sartre, JG Ballard, Joseph Heller, Judith Butler, Kafka, Kate Chopin, Kate Zambreno, Kierkegaard, László Krasznahorkai, Mahmoud Darwish, Marguerite Duras, Noam Chomsky, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peter Handke, Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Richard Powers, Roger Deakin, Ruth Reichl, Samuel Beckett, Simon Critchley, Simone de Beauvoir, Teju Cole, Theodor Adorno, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, WG Sebald, Will Ferguson
