Media that I return to often or that have particularly impacted my thinking:

Literature (Novels)

• Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice / Persuasion
• Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov / Crime and Punishment
• Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina / War and Peace
• Ivan Turgenev: Nest of the Gentry / Fathers and Sons
• Italo Calvino: If on a winter’s night a traveler / Invisible Cities

Poetry:

• Wendell Berry: The Peace of Wild Things
• T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets
• A. R. Ammons: The Very Short Poems of A. R. Ammons
• Denise Levertov: Selected Poems
• Robert Frost: Collected Poems

Short Stories

• Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
• Flannery O’Connor: A Good Man Is Hard to Find
• Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio
• Anton Chekhov: Collected Stories
• P. G. Wodehouse: The Inimitable Jeeves

Travel

• Bruce Chatwin: In Patagonia
• Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts / Between the Woods and the Water
• Jack Kerouac: The Dharma Bums
• Herodotus: The Histories
• Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
• Constantine Cavarnos: Anchored in God
• Anonymous: The Way of the Pilgrim

Fantasy Novels

• Terry Pratchett: Equal Rites / Mort / Going Postal / Night Watch / The Truth
• Susanna Clarke: Piranesi
• Neil Gaiman: The Graveyard Book
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
• J. R. R. Tolkien: The Hobbit
• C. S. Lewis: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader / The Horse and His Boy
• Erin Morgenstern: The Night Circus
• Lloyd Alexander: Taran Wanderer
• Jostein Gaarder: Sophie’s World

Sci-fi Novels

• Kurt Vonnegut: Timequake / Breakfast of Champions
• Connie Willis: To Say Nothing of the Dog
• Martha Wells: The Murderbot Diaries
• Iain M. Banks: Look to the Windward / The Player of Games
• Frank Herbert: Dune
• G. K. Chesterton: The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Nonfiction

• Annie Dillard: Teaching a Stone to Talk
• Anne Lamott: Bird by Bird
• Michael Pollan: The Botany of Desire / How to Change Your Mind / The Omnivore’s Dilemma
• Tracy Kidder: A Truck Full of Money / The Soul of a New Machine
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Fooled by Randomness / The Black Swan
• Mark Fisher: The Weird and the Eerie
• Michael Lewis: The New New Thing / Liar’s Poker
• Barbara Kingsolver: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Plays

• Samuel Beckett: Endgame / Waiting for Godot
• August Wilson: The Piano Lesson

Design

• Christopher Alexander: Design Patterns / The Oregon Experiment / Timeless Way of Building
• Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto
• Dan Roam: The Back of the Napkin
• Edward Tufte: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• Cal Newport: Deep Work

Exercise / Health

• Haruki Murakami: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
• Grant Petersen: Just Ride

Religion

• Annie Dillard: Holy the Firm
• Sergei Bulgakov: The Orthodox Church
• Luke Timothy Johnson: The Experience of God in Early Christianity / Jesus and the Gospels / Teaching Company Recordings
• David Bentley Hart: Doors of the Sea / That All May Be Saved
• Desert Fathers: The Wisdom of the Desert / Early Fathers from the Philokalia
• Tito Colliander: Way of the Ascetics
• C. S. Lewis: Surprised by Joy