I like to read books
And here is a list of them.
A ✺ denotes a book that I highly recommend—I either really enjoyed it, or felt that I got something valuable from it (or both!).
I also draw every book I read; you can see those here.
What I’m currently reading
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
- Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff
- Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana
- Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar
- Selected Poems by Rumi
- The Book of Tea by Kakuzō Okakura
- The Complete Works by Michel de Montaigne
- Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Jesus and the Gospels by Luke Timothy Johnson
- Color Accessibility Workflows by Geri Coady
2022
- No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories by Gabriel García Márquez
- Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston
- Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife by Bart D. Ehrman
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- The New Frontier of Religion and Science: Religious Experience, Neuroscience and the Transcendent by John Hick
- The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
- Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
2021
- Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
- Atheism: The Basics by Graham Oppy
- How to Live: 27 Conflicting Answers and One Weird Conclusion by Derek Sivers
- If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin
- Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain
- Consciousness and Its Implications by Daniel N. Robinson
- October Child by Linda Boström Knausgaard
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
- Sunjata by Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute
- Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson
- Highly recommended: The Great Ideas of Psychology by Daniel N. Robinson
- Highly recommended: Why Evil Exists by Charles T. Mathewes
- Highly recommended: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders
- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
- The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
- Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
- Highly recommended: Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon
- Intimations by Zadie Smith
- Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright
- Swing Time by Zadie Smith
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
- The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith
- Spring by Karl Ove Knausgaard
- No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
- Highly recommended: Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement by Buster Benson
- A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
- How to Write One Song: Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back by Jeff Tweedy
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- Highly recommended: Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
- The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Highly recommended: Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley
- Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon
- The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman
- Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon
- A Promised Land by Barack Obama
- The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray
- Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power by Pam Grossman
- Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
- The Story of the Bible by Luke Timothy Johnson
- The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
- A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans by Jeffrey Burton Russell
- The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss
- Beowulf by Seamus Heaney
- Hunger: An Unnatural History by Sharman Apt Russell
- Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra
- Highly recommended: The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
- Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky
- Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard
- How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
- Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice by Shunryu Suzuki
- Grand Union: Stories by Zadie Smith
- Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds by Gina Rippon
- When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God by T. M. Luhrmann
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
- Gratitude by Oliver Sacks
2020
- The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks
- The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart
- The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
- Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard
- Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: And Other Questions About Dead Bodies by Caitlin Doughty
- We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s by Richard Beck
- The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford
- after the quake by Haruki Murakami
- Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte
- The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
- Gilgamesh the Hero by Geraldine McCaughrean
- Highly recommended: Gilgamesh by Stephen Mitchell
- A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living by Luc Ferry
- The End: My Struggle Book 6 by Karl Ove Knausgaard
- The Machinery of Life by David S. Goodsell
- River Flow: New & Selected Poems 1984-2007 by David Whyte
- In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
- Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon
- A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare and Harold Bloom
- The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
- Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
- In Persuasion Nation: Stories by George Saunders
- Understanding the Enneagram: The Practical Guide to Personality Types by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson
- Ballad by Blexbolex
- Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll by Greil Marcus
- A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson
- The Library Book by Susan Orlean
- No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4′33″ by Kyle Gann
- Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
- Highly recommended: Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
- Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution by Susan Stryker
- The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks
- How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
- Highly recommended: Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks
- The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson
- Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer
- At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
- This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund
- Religion As We Know It: An Origin Story by Jack Miles
- True Grit by Charles Portis
- The Stand by Stephen King
- The Name of the World by Denis Johnson
- Highly recommended: Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
- One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson
- Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders
- Highly recommended: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella by George Saunders
I drew most of these, too, if you're interested in seeing that.