Reverse-chronological list of what I’ve read. My record keeping started in 2012, when I was 27. Anything before that is a rough record of what I can recall. This is pretty redundant with Goodreads, but sometimes it’s nice to have a simple text list, à la Steven Soderbergh.

Key:
Bold: Personal canon
* Read with Craig
† Read with Denny
‡ Read with Ben

2025

  • Angels by Denis Johnson*
  • Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus*
  • V. by Thomas Pynchon
  • Comments on the Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
  • The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
  • Panegyric: Volumes 1 & 2 by Guy Debord
  • “Youth” and The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad*
  • A Smile of Fortune by Joseph Conrad
  • The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac
  • Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky*
  • Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America by Erik Baker
  • Train Dreams by Denis Johnson*
  • Persuasion by Jane Austen†‡
  • Typhoon and Other Tales by Joseph Conrad*
  • The Shadow-Line by Joseph Conrad*
  • Amerika/The Missing Person by Franz Kafka
  • The Castle by Franz Kafka
  • The Trial by Franz Kafka†‡
  • Typee by Herman Melville
  • Naples 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory by Martin Mittelmeier
  • The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky†‡
  • The Complete Poems by Andrew Marvell
  • Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the Complete Shorter Poems by John Milton

2024

  • Pierre by Herman Melville
  • Faust I and II by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe†‡
  • Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville*
  • Three Tales by Gustave Flaubert
  • November by Gustave Flaubert
  • The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville*
  • Daisy Miller by Henry James
  • Paradise Lost by John Milton
  • Berlin Childhood Around 1900 by Walter Benjamin
  • All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
  • Israel Potter by Herman Melville†
  • Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai
  • Agapē Agape by William Gaddis
  • Concrete by Thomas Bernhard
  • War by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
  • The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen
  • Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
  • Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen
  • The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen
  • How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen
  • Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • Timaeus and Critias by Plato
  • Phaedrus by Plato
  • Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf
  • Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates
  • A Good School by Richard Yates
  • The Skin of Dreams by Raymond Queneau
  • Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry†‡
  • The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire by Walter Benjamin
  • Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

2023

  • The Temptation of Don Volpi by Alfred Hayes*
  • The Fire Within by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
  • The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life by Clare Carlisle
  • A Shining by Jon Fosse
  • The Woman in Me by Britney Spears
  • The Divine Comedy: Paradiso by Dante†‡
  • The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut
  • The Curve of Binding Energy by John McPhee
  • When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
  • The Pole by J. M. Coetzee
  • The Aeneid by Virgil (tr. John Dryden)
  • The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio by Dante†‡
  • Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
  • Dante: Poet of the Secular World by Erich Auerbach
  • The Divine Comedy: Inferno by Dante†‡
  • Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy†‡
  • English Renaissance Poetry by John Williams, ed.
  • Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam
  • The Georgics by Virgil
  • The Eclogues by Virgil
  • Patrimony by Philip Roth
  • A Special Providence by Richard Yates
  • The Complete Odes and Epodes by Horace
  • In the Café of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano*
  • Black Spring by Henry Miller
  • Basin and Range by John McPhee
  • Young Once by Patrick Modiano*
  • The Symposium by Plato
  • Metamorphoses by Ovid†‡
  • Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
  • Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates*
  • The Journal 1837–1861 by Henry David Thoreau (ed. Damion Searls)†

2022

  • In Love by Alfred Hayes
  • Pitch Dark by Renata Adler‡
  • Speedboat by Renata Adler‡
  • On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
  • The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth
  • Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays by Tom McCarthy
  • The End of Me by Alfred Hayes
  • Picture by Lillian Ross
  • Unrecounted by W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp
  • Across the Land and the Water by W. G. Sebald
  • On the Natural History of Destruction by W. G. Sebald
  • A Place in the Country by W. G. Sebald
  • Campo Santo by W. G. Sebald
  • After Nature by W. G. Sebald
  • Solo Faces by James Salter
  • Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • The Prague Orgy by Philip Roth
  • The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth
  • For Years Now by W. G. Sebald and Tess Jaray
  • Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban
  • My Life as a Man by Philip Roth
  • Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth
  • Falling Man by Don DeLillo
  • The Body Artist by Don DeLillo
  • Stoner by John Williams
  • Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard
  • The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
  • Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
  • Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

2021

  • Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion
  • Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by Claudia Goldin
  • Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
  • Vertigo by W. G. Sebald
  • Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
  • Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes†
  • Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon
  • Billion Dollar Loser by Reeves Wiedeman
  • Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
  • Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
  • The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
  • Daybreak: New and Selected Poems by Claire Malroux
  • Zone: Selected Poems by Guillaume Apollinaire

2020

  • Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
  • The New Life by Dante
  • Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate by Daniel Mendelsohn
  • What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub
  • The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr
  • Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein
  • Life & Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee
  • The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
  • The Silence by Don DeLillo
  • A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
  • Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
  • The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo
  • My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes
  • Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace
  • The Stars at Noon by Denis Johnson
  • Intimations by Zadie Smith
  • Quiet Days in Clichy by Henry Miller
  • Italian Hours by Henry James
  • The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company by Robert Iger
  • Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
  • The Waves by Virginia Woolf

2019

  • Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
  • Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee
  • Living by Henry Green
  • The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students by Anthony Abraham Jack

2018

  • How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
  • The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
  • The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
  • The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
  • The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson
  • The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus
  • Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters

2017

  • Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011 by Lizzy Goodman
  • Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
  • A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
  • Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller

2016

  • Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
  • Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
  • Indignation by Philip Roth
  • Zero K by Don DeLillo
  • The Names by Don DeLillo
  • The Golden Bowl by Henry James

2015

  • Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
  • White Noise by Don DeLillo
  • Who Gets What—And Why by Alvin E. Roth
  • I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son by Kent Russell
  • Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be by Frank Bruni
  • Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution by Derrick Jensen

2014

  • Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz
  • Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir
  • The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
  • Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
  • Hope for Film by Ted Hope
  • Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
  • Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon

2013

  • Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg
  • Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan
  • The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
  • Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

2012

  • Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas
  • American Pastoral by Philip Roth
  • Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton
  • Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser
  • Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
  • So You Want to Be a Producer by Lawrence Turman
  • How Fiction Works by James Wood
  • Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

2000–2011

The tracking gets worse starting here, but here’s some of what I read from high school and into my mid-twenties. I don’t have a good record of what I read in college, but I actually didn’t really read for fun in that era because my head was pretty messed up.

  • The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
  • The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron
  • The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography by Philip Roth
  • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo
  • Point Omega by Don DeLillo
  • Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon
  • Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
  • Lost in the Meritocracy by Walter Kirn
  • The Humbling by Philip Roth
  • The Dying Animal by Philip Roth
  • Everyman by Philip Roth
  • Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
  • Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
  • Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
  • No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
  • Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
  • Reservation Road by Jonathan Burnham Schwartz
  • The End of Poverty by Jeffrey D. Sachs
  • The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
  • On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
  • If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
  • The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald
  • A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
  • A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  • The Odyssey by Homer
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  • Beowulf
  • Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

1997–2000: Middle School

  • Dubliners by James Joyce
  • The Stranger by Albert Camus
  • Our Town by Thornton Wilder
  • Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
  • Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello
  • A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
  • The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
  • Contact by Carl Sagan
  • Walden by Henry David Thoreau
  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • Animal Farm by George Orwell
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  • The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  • Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
  • The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
  • Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  • Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  • The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
  • The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  • All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque