Number one is the respectable one I default to whenever I'm asked what my favorite book is, but the point of this list is to explode the notion that any one book reigns supreme over the others, because all of these have shaped me in some way, and I'm thankful that each of them has come my way:
1. The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
2. Cities of the Interior, by Anaïs Nin
3. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
4. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
5. No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism, by Steven Shaviro
6. The Prince of this World, by Adam Kotsko
7. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, by Mark Fisher
8. Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, by Robin James
9. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek
10. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
11. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
12. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
13. Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
14. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
15. Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace*
16. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
17. The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace
18. Girl with Curious Hair, by David Foster Wallace
19. The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir
20. Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy
21. God's Bits of Wood, by Ousmane Sembène
22. Red Sorghum: A Novel of China, by Mo Yan
23. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, by Elizabeth Hinton
24. The Informant!, by Kurt Eichenwald**
25. The collected works of William Shakespeare***
26. Eskiboy, by Wiley
27. Anti-Semite and Jew, by Jean-Paul Sartre
28. Blindsight, by Peter Watts
29. The Ethics of Ambiguity, by Simone de Beauvoir
30. Post-Cinematic Affect, by Steven Shaviro
31. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, by Shulamith Firestone****
32. The Border Trilogy, by Cormac McCarthy
33. Platform Capitalism, by Nick Srnicek
34. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
35. Hell is Round the Corner, by Tricky
36. Pale View of the Hills, by Kazuo Ishiguro
37. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
38. Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo
39. The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene
40. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
41. House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
42. Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television, by Adam Kotsko
43. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment, by David Bordwell*****
44. Confessions of a Mask, by Yukio Mishima
45. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by Annette Lareau
46. The Shining, by Stephen King
47. The Coast of Chicago, by Stuart Dybek
48. Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina García
49. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, by Hiroki Azuma
50. General Intellects: Twenty-Five Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century, by McKenzie Wark
51. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
52. Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler
53. A Personal Matter, by Kenzaburō Ōe
54. Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto
55. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
56. Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis
57. Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Life in the 21st Century, by Gayle Kaufman
58. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
59. The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber
60. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
61. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, by Mark Fisher
62. Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro
63. Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
64. Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
65. Awkwardness, by Adam Kotsko
66. The Burden of Sympathy: How Families Cope With Mental Illness, by David A. Karp
67. Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, by Malcolm Harris
68. The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, by Arlie Russell Hochschild
69. Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, by Murat Kurnaz
70. The Communist Manifesto, by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx
Some honorable mentions:
1. Justify My Love: Sex, Subversion, and Music Videos, by Ryann Donnelly
2. Falling Man, by Don DeLillo
3. Homo Zapiens, by Victor Pelevin
4. The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, by James K. Galbraith
5. The Parent App: Understanding Families in the Digital Age, by Lynn Schofield Clark
*I've soured on David Foster Wallace over the years, largely due to his grotesque behavior toward women. I chose to include him, though, because the books I've listed are foundational to me, in fact some of the first "adult literature" I took on and felt changed by reading. His imprint still marks me, but I don't think I'll be returning to his books (or reading any new ones) for quite a while.
**This guy's a real weirdo, and I don't even know (or want to know) what went down with that whole hentai thing. I Followed him on Twitter for a well before his conspiratorial rants and bizarre style of abbreviation made me give up and Unfollow him. But The Informant! remains on this list because its mix of surveillance, corporate evil-doing, and individual eccentricity is truly mind-boggling. I bought this in a Thailand airport in 2010 to prep for Soderbergh's adaptation, and the week I spent at my uncle's home in Texas reading this over winter break 2011 has stayed with me quite vividly.
***I know this looks laughably pretentious, and it is, but hear me out. As a college freshman I had no understanding of credits or course levels. I saw a 400-level course on Shakespeare with no real pre-requisites, and I thought to myself, why not dive right into the bibliography of this world-famous playwright? So I did, reading play after play usually in the span of a week and keeping pace with the advanced-level class surprisingly well (it wasn't a challenging year otherwise). By the end I found I quite enjoyed Shakespeare, but it's a full ten years later now, and that time has dissolved into wisps of memory. I can't rightly say which works I prefer to others -- or even which ones I read and which I didn't -- so I'm just listing them all generally as a way of saying I liked almost everything I read and would be happy to re-familiarize myself with any of them.
****I absolutely adored this book when I read it and probably still would, yet I feel compelled to mention Angela Davis' disapproval of Firestone and her sexualized understanding of race. It's a very valid point, and a reminder that I'm well past due to seriously read Davis myself. Again, this is book is fantastic, but I can't recommend it wholeheartedly without paying respect to Davis' critique.
*****I've seen this book criticized for being glib and condescending at times toward the cinema it claims to love, and I agree, that bothered me quite a bit too during my reading. Bordwell's a sharp intellect, but he can be very obnoxious. Still, there's enough salvageable material to mount serious challenges to Eurocentric conceptions of film and art, so I consider it a personal favorite despite my grievances.
Quick summary I guess....this list is all more a reflection of where I've been than where I'll end up going. I see a lot of old favorites, cult authors, and Western hierarchical standards of important literature. I want to read more poetry, more short stories, more critical theory, more work of all kind from women, LGBTQIA2S authors, and the Global South overall. This isn't really a disclaimer or admission of guilt or anything like that, just a gesture in the direction of where I want this list to go as I update it and keep on reading.
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