Reading

The following is a list of books I have read in their entirety, a large percentage of which (perhaps as much as half) in the last few years. The list is restricted in significant ways that I detail below under the heading "Notes on inclusion." Starred books are ones that I found especially good, memorable, or otherwise noteworthy, although I suspect these judgements, much like the list as a whole, will be of little use or interest to anyone. I may experiment with alternative arrangements, but for now titles are listed chronologically within their subsections.

Fiction

English (American)

• The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
• The Scarlet Letter, Nathanial Hawthorne
• *Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hariot Beecher Stowe
• *Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (x2)
• The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
• The Sea-Wolf, Jack London
• Martin Eden, Jack London
• The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• *Billy Budd, Herman Melville
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (x2)
• The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
• A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
• The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
• *As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
• Sanctuary, William Faulkner
• Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
• *Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner
• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
• The Wild Palms, William Faulkner
• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
• The Hamlet, William Faulkner
• A Streetcar Named Desire, Arthur Miller
• Intruder in the Dark, William Faulkner
• Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
• The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
• Foundation, Isaac Asimov
• The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (x2)
• *East of Eden, John Steinbeck
• Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
• The Crucible, Arthur Miller
• The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov
• *Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
• *On the Road, Jack Kerouac
• *A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.
• To Kill a Mocking Bird, Harper Lee
• Butcher’s Crossing, John Williams
• The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• The Moviegoer, Walker Percy (2x)
• Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
• A Movable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
• The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy
• *Stoner, John Williams
• Outer Darkness, Cormac McCarthy
• *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson (x2)
• Post Office, Charles Bukowski
• The Stand (revised and expanded), Stephen King
• *Suttree, Cormac McCarthy
• *Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
• Beloved, Toni Morrison (x2)
• Leaving Las Vegas, John O’Brian
• All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
• Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
• *The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy
• Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy
• Ravelstein, Saul Bellow
• Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang
• *Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
• The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy (x2)
• The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins
• The Martian, Andy Weir
• Wool, Shift, Dust, Hugh Howey
• Exhalation, Ted Chiang
• The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel (Canadian)
• The Lucky Star, William Vollmann
• Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
• 2034, Elliot Ackerman, Admiral James Stavridis
• The Last Resort, Andrew Lipstein
• Yellowface, R. F. Kuang
• The Vegan, Andrew Lipstein
• Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte

English (British)

• The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser
• *Richard III, Shakespeare
• Love’s Labor’s Lost, Shakespeare
• *Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
• Richard II, Shakespeare
• Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare
• *Henry IV, Part 1, Shakespeare
• Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare
• Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare
• Henry V, Shakespeare
• *Hamlet, Shakespeare
• Twelfth Night, Shakespeare
• *King Lear, Shakespeare
• *Macbeth, Shakespeare
• Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare
• *Tempest, Shakespeare
• *Paradise Lost, John Milton
• *Frankenstein, Mary Shelly
• A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
• *Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
• The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
• *Dracula, Bram Stoker
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
• *Brave New World, Huxley (x2)
• Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
• Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
• *The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
• Animal Farm, George Orwell
• The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
• *1984, George Orwell
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
• Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• The Quiet American, Graham Greene
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
• Fantastic Mr. Fox, Roald Dahl
• Watership Down, Richard Adams
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
• The Children of Men, P. D. James
• Never Mind, Edward St Aubyn
• Bad News, Edward St Aubyn
• Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts (Australian)
• Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
• There Is No Antimemetics Division, qntm
• *The MANIAC, Benjamín Labatut (author is Chilean, book written in English)

English (Irish)

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
• *Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett

Russian (in translation)

• *Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
• Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky
• *Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Gambler, Dostoevsky
• *War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
• *The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
• *The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
• *The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

French (in translation)

• The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
• Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
• The Stranger, Albert Camus
• *The Plague, Albert Camus
• Submission, Michel Houellebecq

German (in translation)

• Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
• The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
• Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
• *The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
• *The Trial, Franz Kafka

Czech (in translation)

• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

Greek (in translation)

• *The Iliad, Homer
• *The Odyssey, Homer
• The Persians, Aeschylus
• *Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus
• *Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
• Trojan Women, Euripides
• Philoctetes, Sophocles
• Bacchae, Euripides

Italian (in translation)

• *Inferno, Dante (2x)
• The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Spanish (in translation)

• 2666, Roberto Bolaño
• *When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut

Japanese (in translation)

• *Silence, Shusaku Endo

Chinese (in translation)

• The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Liu Cixin

Norwegian (in translation)

• *My Struggle, Books 1–6, Karl Ove Knausgaard
• *Septology, Books 1–7, Jon Fosse
• The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity, The Third Realm, Karl Ove Knausgaard

Swedish (in translation)

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

Nonfiction

• John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs, Jack London
• *Endurance: Ernest Shackleton’s Incredible Journey, Alfred Lansing
• *In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences, Truman Capote
• Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, Hunter S. Thompson
• Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, Hunter S. Thompson
• Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, A. Scott Berg
• *A Childhood: A Biography of a Place, Harry Crews
• The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, Hunter S. Thompson
• Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, Paul Johnson
• Eric Gill, Fiona MacCarthy
• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester
• The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, Paul Elie
• *The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom, Simon Winchester
• The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own., David Carr
• The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink, Olivia Laing
• *Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Dan Gardner and Philip E. Tetlock
• This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital, Mark Leibovich
• A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, Ben Macintyre
• The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal, David Hoffman
• Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help, Larissa MacFarquhar
• The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, Michael Lewis
• The King of Content: Sumner Redstone's Battle for Viacom, CBS, and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire, Keach Hagey
• Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World, Bradley Hope and Tom Wright
• *The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, Ben Macintyre
• Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers, Andy Greenberg
• The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution, Gregory Zuckerman
• *Sontag: Her Life and Work, Benjamin Moser
• The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Erik Larson
• Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron, John Preston
• *The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann, Ananyo Bhattacharya
• The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics, Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb
• Roland in Moonlight, David Bentley Hart
• Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, Andy Greenberg
• *The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, David Grann
• Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, Michael Lewis
• Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen
• Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan's Masayoshi Son, Lionel Barber
• Caryll Houselander: A Biography, Mary Frances Coady
• When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, Graydon Carter
• Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, Melanie McDonagh

Notes on inclusion:

I specify that these are books I have read "in their entirety" because I have started and not finished hundreds more (perhaps even more than I have finished). Some of these I continue to work through and will likely finish, eventually adding them to this list, although others are probably lost causes at this point (which I don't necessarily lament - I am making an effort to read more books to the end, which is in fact why I created this list in the first place, but if a book repeatedly fails to engage you, it is often rational to simply disengage).

The most significant restrictions to the list are that it largely focuses on the last few years, and relatedly that it excludes nonfiction works I read as part of my formal higher education. All the scholarly monographs I read as an undergraduate and graduate student are not on the list, and more significantly none of the classic works I have read, from Plato to (say) John Rawls, are included either. I did this because it would make this list more unruly and less reflective of my personal, idiosyncratic reading interests. It was also hard to recall if I actually read every page of more scholarly volumes (often not), a prerequisite to be listed here. A final significant limitation of the list is that it excludes all poetry and short stories I have read. Perhaps I will one day make such a list, but I wanted to focus here on books (although I do try to add plays).

I started the list in 2023 as a way to catalogue books I read moving forward, and that is primarily what I have done, although when I first created it I made some (highly imperfect and radically incomplete) effort to remember major works I read earlier in my life. Several dozen books thus "seeded" the list, but it is first and foremost a forward-looking list that attempts to record books as I finish them.