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.

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