These are some of my favorite books, poems, and essays, not in any particular order. I have tried to limit myself to my absolute favorites.
1. Dante – The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso)
2. Richard Powers – The Overstory, Bewilderment, Playground
3. Flannery O’Connor – “Revelation” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
These stories are very strange accounts of grace in the American South. They are amazing.
4. Jason Hickel – The Divide
A wonderful and well-researched book which talks about the fundamental inequalities of the global economic system, focusing on the Global North/Global South divide. I think everybody should read it. I love how he includes around 50 pages of solutions too. Love this book so much.
5. Annie Ernaux – A Girl’s Story
This is what I wrote in my journal after listening to the audiobook on a walk when I lived in France by myself near the monastery:
I think I will look back on this book in years time and realize how pivotal it was for me.
I’ve been feeling a strange, suppressed dread in France over the question of whether or not I must become an artist. Not in an occupational sense, but as a way to deepen my being in the world. As it stands now, it feels like I have taken much from the world and not known what to do with it.
Yet feelings of indolence and aversion, alienating feelings, stir in me whenever I think about creating something. Yesterday those feelings were starting to simmer, so I went for a walk and began to listen to this. It gave me so much clarity. Not in the story itself, because gosh it’s sad, but in how Ernaux tells it: how she jumps back and forth across time, through her mature artist self and her younger girl self. The compassion with which she creates for her younger self, the compassion with which writing empowers her — it empowers me too.
6. The Poems of Paul Celan – especially “Psalm,” “Once,” “Ashglory,” and “You be like you” (Du sei wei du, immer)
A Holocaust survivor, Celan wrote poems which explore the boundary of language, through which he troubles and questions God.
7. Rilke – Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus
It is difficult to say anything other than that I am so grateful for these poems, which will be with me for the rest of my life!
8. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Purple Hibiscus
The first novel I truly loved, and the one which got me back into reading as a high schooler. I owe this to Ms. Mathes’s wonderful sophomore English class at Jesuit. All of Adichie’s novels are wonderful.
9. The Poems of Emily Dickinson
10. Koshihiko Izutsu – Sufism and Taoism
A comparative study of Sufism and Taoism, particularly Ibn Arabi and Zhuangzi.
11. Wallace Stevens – Collected Poems
Stevens’s greatest hits list is unreal. I love his later poems — especially “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself,” “Of Mere Being,” and “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”
12. Marcus Du Sautoy – Music of the Primes
A wonderful book about the history of prime number theory and the Riemann hypothesis. In many ways, it reignited my curiosity and love for learning in high school after a long absence. I was stunned by how the book stretched my imagination like art.
13. Michael Sells – Mystical Languages of Unsaying
Sells’s account of apophasis has been very influential in how I think about mysticism and inner experience. The chapter “Ibn Arabi’s Polished Mirror” is a particular standout.
14. Lee Yearley – “Ethics of Bewilderment”
Professor Yearley’s account of the “ethics of bewilderment” puts vague spiritual moods into concrete philosophy, and explores the ethical power of “bewilderment.” It also provides a wonderful integration of the Eastern and Western traditions through Du Fu and Dante. Professor Yearley’s account of Cunizza from Dante’s Paradiso — a woman, formerly very free with her affections, whose bewilderment causes her to forgive herself and others —is endlessly moving to me.
15. Rebecca Stead – When You Reach Me
A meticulously-told children’s novel about friendship, redemption, sacrifice — and time travel. It moved me so much.
16. Toni Morrison, “Goodness and the Literary Imagination”
17. Elena Ferrante – Neapolitan Novels
These books explore the friendship of two girls from Naples, from elementary school into adult life. A very compelling story of a friendship, I savored the quartet all summer.
18. Collected Poems of Louise Gluck
19. The physics books of Carlo Rovelli
These are beautifully written introductions to physics which make me want to know much, much more.
20. Zadie Smith – White Teeth and On Beauty
When I think of the funniest contemporary books, I think of these. They make me laugh out loud. Zadie Smith is so witty.
21. Enrique Martinez Celaya – Sea Sky Land
This is cheating because it is an art book, but Celaya is my favorite contemporary painter, and this book collects my favorites of his paintings and protagonists.
22. Simone Weil – Waiting for God
I have struggled with Weil’s asceticism since I first read this collection of essays a few years ago, yet the force of her thought ensures that it persists in mine.
23. Maurice Blanchot – “Rilke and Death’s Demand” from The Space of Literature
This chapter in Blanchot’s “The Space of Literature” takes me through a gentle torrent of abstraction until my mind rests in peace. Blanchot also provides a phenomenal reading of Rilke.
24. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Some of these philosophical puzzles have stuck with me for some time, while I am still waking up to others. It is a book that always draws me in through its opacity and style. I respect and admire Wittgenstein’s turning-point in his life and work.
25. Thoreau, Walden
26. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 100 Years of Solitude
27. George Saunders – A Swim in the Pond in the Rain
A book that makes me love reading. Saunders prints seven stories by Russian masters (Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev), and then follows each with captivating analysis of why the story works. Saunders’s analysis on Turgenev’s “The Singers” is awe-inspiring, and he also made me love Chekhov.
28. Fierce Poise by Alexander Nemerov
Professor Nemerov’s biography of Helen Frankenthaler both introduced me to a wonderful artist, and showed me, as he puts it, how “lightness has an ethical power in our lives.”
29. Ben Lerner, 10:04
Ben Lerner’s books are some of my favorites on the contemporary. For me the standout is 10:04, which combines brilliant writing with Lerner’s remarkable ability to capture both collective and individual emotions.
30. Rita Dove – “Receiving the Stigmata”
After checking out an anthology of American Religious Poems, I flipped to a page at random, and was stunned into silence by this poem. I was stunned first and foremost by the title — I had no idea poets could still write on themes like the stigmata. The poem wonderfully exhibits how religious tradition may beckon to us even across time and context.
31. The Prelude by William Wordsworth
I was lucky enough to be taught this poem by Dr. Kieron Winn, the first poet in residence at Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s historical home. He was a wonderful guide into Wordsworth’s epic, which explores the growth of the poet’s mind.
32. Bessel van Der Kolk “The Body Keeps the Score”
33. Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass
34. William Lynch – Christ and Apollo: Dimensions of the Literary Imagination
Written by an obscure Jesuit, this book is a phenomenal study of the “Christic imagination,” and how it appears in modern literature. Flannery O’Connor loved this book, me too!