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