Someone once told me this rule of thumb: your bookshelf should be two-thirds books you have read and one-third books you have not yet read. I really like that ratio. It discourages over-consumption: you have to actually try to read a majority of the books you buy. But it allows some indulgence and encourages you to collect books you know you want to read in the future. When you have a collection of books waiting for you, you have something to pick up as soon as you're done with your current read.

Here's my recent reading list, with some thoughts about my favorites.


2024

  • Stoner by John Williams

  • The Divided Self by R.D. Laing

  • Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

  • Houses of Ravicka by Renee Gladman

  • How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

  • The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche

  • Ways of Seeing by John Berger

  • Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

  • The Immoralist by André Gide

  • The Complete Short Stories by Clarice Lispector

  • Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

  • Short Talks by Anne Carson

  • Nietzsche in Italy by Guy de Pourtalés

  • Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux

  • Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson

  • Bluets by Maggie Nelson

  • Indigo by Ellen Bass

  • Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

  • Firstborn by Louise Glück

  • Kudos by Rachel Cusk

  • Descending Figure by Louise Glück

  • Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

  • Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

  • The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

2023

  • São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos

  • Transit by Rachel Cusk

  • The Heart of Meditation by the Dalai Lama

  • Representations of the Intellectual by Edward Said

  • The Biggest Prison on Earth by Ilan Pappe

  • Outline by Rachel Cusk

  • Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

  • The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

  • The Lover by Marguerite Duras

  • Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag

  • Henry and June by Anaïs Nin

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

  • The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor

  • Reading the Bible Again for the First Time by Marcus J. Borg

  • Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector

  • The Courage to Be Disliked by Fumitake Kona and Ichiro Kishimi

  • White Noise by Don DeLillo

2022

  • This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

  • Natural History by Andrea Barrett

  • Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

  • Spring by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  • The Street by Ann Petry

  • The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère

  • Lila by Robert Pirsig

  • Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

  • Red Doc> by Anne Carson

  • The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère

  • Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

  • The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye

  • Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar

  • The Archer by Shruti Swamy

  • The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

  • The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

  • Normal People by Sally Rooney

2021

  • Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

  • The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye

  • The Trial by Franz Kafka

  • To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

  • Poison for Breakfast by Lemony Snicket

  • Hamlet by Shakespeare

  • The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin

  • Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

  • Ballistics by Billy Collins

  • On Metropolitan Life by Franz Lebowitz

  • The Medium is the Massage: an inventory of effects by Marshall McLuhan

  • Coraline by Neil Gaiman

  • The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

  • Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag

  • Plainwater by Anne Carson

  • The Employees by Olga Ravn

  • The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

  • In Our Times by Ernest Hemingway

  • Obit by Victoria Chang

  • The Secret History by Donna Tartt

  • A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham

  • The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

  • Sightings by Sam Keen

  • Angels and Saints by Eliot Weinberger

  • The Needle's Eye by Fanny Howe

  • Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith

  • Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer