Inspired by my friend Greg Miller’s sharing of David Bowie’s 100 favorite reads, I decided to put together my own list of books that have influenced me and my own writing.  Needless to say, each text took me down a rabbit hole through which I emerged a changed writer… And now, in no particular order, the list:

1.  Italo Calvino – The Baron in the Trees
2. Anne Sexton – Transformations
3. Scott Carrier – Running After Antelope
4. Denis Johnson – Jesus’ Son
5. Mircea Eliade – Myth of the Eternal Return
6. Russell Banks – Trailerpark
7. Lewis Nordan – Lightning Song
8. David Vann – Legend of a Suicide
9. Brian Doyle – Mink River
10. Susan Sontag – On Photography
11. Craig Childs – Soul of Nowhere
12. Fernando Pessoa – Book of Disquiet
13. Martin Amis – Other People
14. Joel Sternfeld – On this Site
15. Rebecca Solnit – A Field Guide to Getting Lost
16. Alexander Theroux – The Primary Colors
17. Sjon – The Blue Fox
18. George Saunders – Civilwarland in Bad Decline
19. Raymond Carver – Ultramarine
20. John Jeremiah Sullivan – Pulphead
21. Pablo Neruda – Book of Questions
22. John Berryman – Dream Songs
23. Orhan Pamuk – The New Life
24. William Blake – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
25. Ed Dorn – Gunslinger
26. Leslie Marmon Silko – Almanac of the Dead
27. Lewis Hyde – Trickster Makes this World
28. Haruki Murakami – Kafka on the Shore
29. Jim Harrison – The River Swimmer
30. Robin Robertson – Sailing the Forest
31. Charles Simic – A Wedding in Hell
32. Russell Edson – The Tunnel
33. Olena Kalytiak Davis – Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities
34. Jack Gilbert – Refusing Heaven
35. Albert Goldbarth – Everyday People
36. Dean Young – Fail Higher
37. Homero Aridjis – Solar Poems
38. David Berman – Actual Air
39. Jaroslav Seifert – The Casting of Bells
40. W.S. Merwin – Present Company
41. Patricia Lockwood – Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
42. David Stannard – American Holocaust
43. Mikhail Bulgakov – Master and Margarita
44. Herman Melville – Moby Dick
45. Edgar Lee Masters – Spoon River Anthology
46. Howard Norman (trans.) – The Wishing Bone Cycle
47. Richard Brautigan – Trout Fishing in America
48. Bernd Heinrich – Mind of the Raven
49. Luis Alberto Urrea – Devil’s Highway
50. Peter Coates – Salmon
51. Etgar Keret – Suddenly a Knock at the Door
52. Carl Wilson – Let’s Talk About Love
53. Robert Frank – The Americans
54. Sherman Alexie – The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
55. Gerald Vizenor – Griever: An American Monkey King in China
56. Jared Diamond – Collapse
57. David Quammen – Monster of God
58. R.D. Laing – The Divided Self
59. Henri Bergson – Laughter
60. Miguel De Cervantes – Don Quixote
61. Shakespeare – King Lear
62. Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus
63. Donald Barthelme – Sixty Stories
64. Sebastian Junger – The Perfect Storm
65. Victor Pelevin – The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
66. Eduardo Galeano – Walking Words
67. Jerome Rothenberg, Ed. – Technicians of the Sacred
68. Amy Gerstler – Dearest Creature
69. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother and Other Stories
70. Malcom Gladwell – David and Goliath
71. Sigmund Freud – Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
72. Bilge Karasu – Garden of Departed Cats
73. Eugene Ionesco – Rhinoceros
74. Robert Hass (trans.) – The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa
75. Charles Bowden – Blues for Cannibals
76. Jim Shepard – You Think That’s Bad
77. Karen Russell – Swamplandia!
78. Aimee Bender – The Color Master
79. Cormac McCarthy – Cities of the Plain
80. Matthew Zapruder – Come on All You Ghosts
81. Judith Herman – Trauma and Recovery
82. Jon Kracauer – Into the Wild
83. Carl Jung – The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious 
84. Dino Buzzati – Restless Nights
85. Edward Abbey – Desert Solitaire
86. Victoria Finlay – Color
87. Marina Warner – Monsters of Our Own Making
88. Svetlana Alexievich – Voices from Chernobyl
89. CAConrad – ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness
90. J.M. Coetzee – Waiting for the Barbarians
91. William Saroyan – Man with the Heart in the Highlands: And Other Stories 
92. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
93. Stephen Grosz – The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
94. Nicanor Parra – Antipoems
95. Richard Flanagan – Gould’s Book of Fish
96. Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot
97. Austin Kleon – Steal Like an Artist
98. Diane di Prima – Loba
99. William Gass – On Being Blue
100. Paul Shepard – The Others: How Animals Made Us Human