GREAT BOOKS


FICTION

bold denotes an especial favourite

LATIN AMERICA

  • Ficciones & The Aleph, Jorges Luis Borges
  • The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Cesares
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

CHINA

  • Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong
  • Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh, Shi Naian
  • Journey to the West, Wu Chengen
  • The Scholars, Wu Jingzi
  • Dream of Red Mansions, Cao Xueqin
  • The King of Trees, Ah Cheng

ENGLAND

  • Paradise Lost, John Milton
  • Samson Agonistes, John Milton
  • The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
  • Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
  • Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
  • Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne
  • Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
  • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  • Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
  • Middlemarch, George Eliot
  • The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
  • Kim, Rudyard Kipling
  • A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke

FRANCE

GERMANY & AUSTRIA

  • The Sorrows of Young Werther, J.W. Goethe
  • Demian, Herman Hesse
  • Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
  • The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse
  • The Trial, Franz Kafka
  • The Castle, Franz Kafka
  • Complete Stories, Franz Kafka
  • The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
  • Joseph and His Brothers, Thomas Mann

JAPAN

  • I Am A Cat, Natsume Soseki
  • No Longer Human, Dazai Osamu
  • The Makioka Sisters, Tanizaki Junichiro
  • The Master of Go, Kawabata Yasunari
  • The Old Capital, Kawabata Yasunari
  • Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness, Kenzabure Oe
  • Spring Snow, Mishima Yukio
  • The Box Man, Abe Kobo
  • Asleep, Banana Yoshimoto
  • Amrita, Banana Yoshimoto

POLAND

  • The Manuscript Found In Saragossa, Jan Potocki
  • Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
  • Solaris, Stanislaw Lem

RUSSIA

  • Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
  • Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov
  • Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
  • War & Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  • Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
  • Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Ada, or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov

USA

  • Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe
  • The Murders in the Rue Morgue & The Purloined Letter, Edgar Allan Poe
  • Typee, Herman Melville
  • Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
  • Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Herman Melville
  • Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville
  • The Ambassadors, Henry James
  • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Short Fiction, HP Lovecraft
  • East of Eden, John Steinbeck
  • The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck
  • Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
  • Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving
  • The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick
  • The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Philip K. Dick
  • A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick
  • Dune & Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert
  • God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert
  • Virtual Light, William Gibson (& the entire Bridge trilogy)
  • The Solitudes, John Crowley (& the entire Aegypt series)
  • Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

NON-FICTION

BOOKS OF BIG & SMALL IDEAS

  • The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library, W.G. Bloch
  • The Birth of Modern Belief, Ethan Shagan
  • Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford
  • Selected Non-Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges
  • The Art of Memory, Francis A. Yates
  • The Kingdom of God is Within You, Leo Tolstoy
  • Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, Mircea Eliade
  • The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, Philip K. Dick
  • Zen At War, Brian Daizen Victoria

PHILOSOPHY

  • Tao Te Ching, Laozi
  • Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi
  • Complete Works, Plato (I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading them all… stop when you are no longer having fun.)
  • Utopia, Thomas More
  • Ash Wednesday Supper, Giordano Bruno
  • Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume
  • German Philosophy 1760-1800, Terry P. Pinkard
  • Critique of Pure Reason & Practical Reason & Judgment, Immanuel Kant
    (and/or Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysics & Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals)
  • The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer
  • The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson
  • Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy, Katsuki Sekida

LITERARY BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

  • Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford
  • Coleridge: Early Visions & Coleridge: Darker Reflections, Richard Holmes
  • Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Sutin