Books

Here are some of the books I have read as part of my autodidactic studies and explorations of the written word.

Books I am Currently Reading

I juggle these books and am therefore taking forever to read each one, since I can’t be content to focus on just one!

  • Isaac Asimov – Foundation
  • Geoffrey Chaucer – The Canterbury Tales
  • Jefferson Davis – The Essential Writings
  • James Joyce – Stephen Hero
  • George Leonard – Mastery
  • John Milton – Paradise Lost
  • Ayn Rand – The Fountainhead
  • Sinclair Lewis – Elmer Gantry
  • Saulo Ribeiro with Kevin Howell – Jiu-Jitsu University
  • The Yale Shakespeare
  • Benjamin T. Smith – The Dope
  • Edmund Spenser – The Faeirie Queen
  • Charles H. Trout – Boston, the Great Depression, and the New Deal

Ancient & Medieval Classics

  • The Epic of Gilgamesh
  • Homer – The Odyssey
  • Laozi – Dao De Jing (in English translation and Classical Chinese)
  • The Nibelungenlied (excerpts, in English translation)
  • Sunzi – The Art of War (in English translation and Classical Chinese)
  • The Zhuangzi (excerpts, in English translation and Classical Chinese)

Literary Fiction & Belles-Lettres

  • Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart
  • Akutagawa Ryūnosuke – Kappa (excerpts)
  • Sherman Alexie – The Lone Ranger & Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
  • Isabel Allende – The Stories of Eva Luna
  • Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice
  • Mariama Ba – So Long a Letter
  • Samuel Beckett – Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
  • Ray Bradbury – Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man
  • Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre
  • Claude Brown – Manchild in the Promised Land
  • Cao Xueqin – Story of the Stone (excerpts)
  • Carolyn Cassady – Off the Road
  • Neal Cassady – The First Third
  • Michael Chabon – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
  • J.M. Coetzee – Elizabeth Costello
  • Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations
  • Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man
  • John Feffer – Splinterlands
  • Jean Genet – Our Lady of the Flowers
  • Jonathan Goldstein – Lenny Bruce is Dead; Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!
  • Gunter Grass – The Tin Drum
  • Sadegh Hedayat – The Blind Owl
  • Ernest Hemingway – The Old Man and the Sea
  • Alexander Hemon – Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project
  • Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
  • James Joyce – Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses
  • Franz Kafka – The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony
  • Jack Kerouac – Big Sur, Visions of Cody
  • Jan Kerouac – Baby Driver, Train Song
  • Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Curtain (excerpts)
  • Chang-Rae Lee – The Surrendered
  • Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
  • Ella Leffland – Rumors of Peace
  • Li Ruzhen – Flowers in the Mirror (excerpts)
  • Jack London – The Star Rover (excerpts)
  • Oscar Micheaux – The Homesteader
  • Nami Mun – Miles from Nowhere
  • Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita, The Luzhin Defense, Invitation to a Beheading
  • Kenzaburō Ōe – Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
  • Chuck Palahniuk – Fight Club, Survivor
  • Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar
  • Daniel Quinn – Ishmael
  • Ayn Rand – Anthem, Atlas Shrugged
  • J.D. Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye
  • Lauren Sapala – Between the Shadow and Lo
  • Jean Paul Sartre – Nausea
  • Vladimir Sorokin – Ice, The Queue
  • Jean Toomer – Cane
  • Voltaire – Candide
  • Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle, Galapagos, Slaughterhouse Five
  • David Foster Wallace – Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
  • H.G. Wells – The Time Machine
  • Richard Wright – Native Son
  • Stefan Zweig – Chess Story
  • Scott Zwiren – Godhead

Short Stories

  • Octavia Butler – Bloodchild and Other Stories
  • Charles W. Chesnutt – “The Sheriff’s Children”
  • Alice Childress (various short stories)
  • Edwidge Danticat – “The Dew Breaker”
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky – “Bobok”
  • W.E.B. DuBois – “The Comet”
  • Percival Everett – “Cry About a Nickel”
  • Julia Fields – “Not Your Singing, Dancing Spade”
  • C.H. Fuller, Jr. – “A Love Song for Seven Little Boys Called; Sam”
  • Nikolai Gogol – “The Nose”
  • Han Shaogong “Déjà vu”
  • Chester Himes – “Lunching at the Ritzmore”
  • Zora Neale Hurston – Spunk
  • James Joyce – Dubliners (excerpts)
  • Franz Kafka – The Complete Stories
  • William Melvin Kelley – “The Only Man on Liberty Street”
  • Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala – “Faulty Glasses”
  • Lu Xun (various short stories)
  • James Alan McPherson – “A Matter of Vocabulary”
  • Herman Melville – “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
  • Wallace Thurman – “Cordelia the Crude”
  • Yu Hua (various short stories)
  • Alice Walker – “Everyday Use”
  • Mikhail Zoshchenko – “Yuletide Story”

Genre Fiction

  • V.C. Andrews – Dollanganger and Casteel series
  • Octavia Butler – Kindred
  • Orson Scott Card – Ender’s Game series
  • Neil Gaiman – American Gods
  • Terry Goodkind – Sword of Truth series
  • John Grisham – A Time to Kill
  • Frank Herbert – Dune
  • Stephen King – The Gunslinger, The Shining
  • Anne McCaffrey – Acorna, Dragonriders of Pern series
  • Terry Pratchett – Equal Rites
  • J. R. R. Tolkien – The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings trilogy

Fairytales

  • Peter Christen Asbjørnsen – Erotiske Folkeeventyr

Philosophy & Literary Criticism

  • Theodor Adorno – Minima Moralia (excerpts), Prisms
  • Walter Benjamin – Selected Writings, Vol. 1 & 2 (excerpts)
  • TJ Clark – Farewell to an Idea (excerpts)
  • Walter Kaufmann – The Portable Nietzsche
  • Sir Anthony Kenny – The Wittgenstein Reader (excerpts)
  • Friedrich Nietzsche – The Gay Science
  • Roger Sale (various articles)
  • Lionel Trilling – Beyond Culture (excerpts)
  • Sarah Tyson, Joshua Hall – Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Political & Economic Theory

  • Hannah Arendt – On Violence
  • Jeremy Bentham (various essays)
  • Barry Eichengreen – Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System
  • Thomas Hobbes (various essays)
  • John Locke (various essays)
  • Karl Marx – The Communist Manifesto
  • Thomas Piketty – Capital in the Twenty-First Century (excerpts)
  • Ayn Rand – Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, The Virtue of Selfishness
  • Adam Smith – The Wealth of Nations (excerpts)
  • Max Weber – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Essays & Anthologies

  • The Norton Anthology of African American Literature
  • Mikhail Lossel (Editor) – Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States
  • George Orwell – “Shooting an Elephant”
  • Atif Rafay – “On the Margins of Freedom”
  • Lu Xun – “A Call to Arms”

History & Economics

  • Ervand Abrahamian – A History of Modern Iran
  • Dee Brown – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
  • The CIA World Factbook
  • James West Davidson, William Gienapp – Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic, Vol. I & II
  • Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs and Steel
  • David Fromkin – A Peace to End All Peace
  • Alan Greenspan – Age of Turbulence
  • Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf (excerpts)
  • Joseph Kinsey Howard – Strange Empire
  • David Kherdian – The Road from Home: The Story of an Armenian Girl
  • Charles P. Kindleberger – Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises
  • Nelson Mandela – Long Walk to Freedom
  • William Morgan, Charles Stuart Kennedy – American Diplomats: The Foreign Service at Work
  • Jerry Z. Muller – Capitalism and the Jews
  • David Rockefeller – Memoirs
  • Jonathan Spence – The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution
  • Joseph Stiglitz – Globalization and Its Discontents
  • Kamala Tiyavanich – The Buddha in the Jungle
  • Tim Weiner – Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
  • Eli Wiesel – Night
  • Howard Zinn – A People’s History of the United States
  • Dave Zirin – A People’s History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play

Finance & Business

  • Zvi Bodie – Essentials of Investments (excerpts)
  • Robert T. Kiyosaki – Rich Dad, Poor Dad
  • Jeffrey Little – Understanding Wall Street
  • Barbara Stanny – Overcoming Underearning (excerpts)

Psychology & Self-Help

  • James Carse – Finite and Infinite Games
  • John Gray – Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
  • Robert A. Johnson – Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
  • Carl Jung – The Red Book
  • Richard Krafft-Ebing – Psychopathia Sexualis
  • Susan Nathiel – Daughters of Madness: Growing Up and Older with a Mentally Ill Mother – James Carse – Finite and Infinite Games
  • John Gray – Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
  • Robert A. Johnson – Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
  • Carl Jung – The Red Book
  • Richard Krafft-Ebing – Psychopathia Sexualis
  • Susan Nathiel – Daughters of Madness: Growing Up and Older with a Mentally Ill Mother
  • Avrum G. Weiss – Hidden in Plain Sight: How Men’s Fears of Women Shape Their Intimate Relationships

Religion

  • Faith Adiele – Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun
  • Robert Buswell – Religions of Korea in Practice
  • Bart Ehrman – Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
  • Chatsumarn Kabilsingh – Thai Women in Buddhism
  • C.S. Lewis – The Screwtape Letters
  • The Book of Mormon (Excerpts)
  • The Holy Bible
  • The Holy Quran (Excerpts)

Experimental Prose

  • Hakim Bey – Temporary Autonomous Zone

Science & Nature

  • James K. Agee – Fire Ecology of Pacific Northwest Forests
  • Black Walnut As a Crop (Black Walnut Symposium, 1973)
  • Linda Chalker-Scott – How Plants Work
  • Daniel Chamovitz – What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses
  • Roger Fouts – Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees
  • James Herriot – All Creatures Great and Small (excerpts)
  • Ilkka Hanski, Paul R. Ehrlich – On the Wings of Checkerspots: A Model System for Population Biology
  • Mark D. Hunter – The Phytochemical Landscape: Linking Trophic Interactions and Nutrient Dynamics
  • Daniel Joel et al. – Parasitic Orobanchaceae: Parasitic Mechanisms and Control Strategies
  • Arthur R. Kruckeberg – The Natural History of Puget Sound Country
  • Nick Lane – Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life
  • Aldo Leopold – A Sand County Almanac
  • William Bryant Logan – Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth
  • Bruce McCune – Analysis of Ecological Communities
  • John Polkinghorne – Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction
  • Oliver Sacks – The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
  • Georg Ossian Sars – Phyllocarida and phyllopoda (a beautiful 1896 folio bilingual Norwegian-English illustrated encyclopedia of crustaceans)
  • Herman J. Viola, Carolyn Margolis – Seeds of Change: Five Hundred Years Since Columbus
  • Richard White – Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington
  • Michael Wink – Biochemistry of Plant Secondary Metabolism

Music, Mathematics & Chess

  • Daubi Abe – 6 ‘N the Morning
  • Bobby Fischer – Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess
  • Nat Shapiro, Nat Hentoff – Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told by the Men Who Made It
  • Ernest Nagel, James Newman – Gödel’s Proof

Linguistics

  • Lisa Delpit – The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom
  • Robert Ramsey – The Languages of China

Sociology & Anthropology

  • Thomas Buckley, Alma Gottlieb – Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation
  • Jean Marie Christenson – The Keepers and the Caged
  • Ted Conover – Coyotes, Newjack, Rolling Nowhere, Whiteout
  • William R. Conte – Is Prison Reform Possible? The Washington State Experience in the Sixties
  • David Skarbek – The Social Order of the Underworld
  • Anne Fadiman – The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
  • Isabel Fonseca – Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey
  • Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish
  • Erika Friedl – The Women of Deh Koh
  • Andrew Goldsmith et al. – Tackling Correctional Corruption
  • Robert Ellis Gordon – The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison
  • Gloria Goodwin Hurh – We Married Koreans
  • Ira Katznelson – When Affirmative Action Was White
  • Kouri Keenan – Mr. Big: Exposing Undercover Investigations in Canada
  • Christopher Murray – Unusual Punishment: Inside the Walla Walla Prison 1970–1985 (excerpts)
  • Victor Folke Nelson – Prison Days and Nights
  • James Spradley – You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads
  • Yan Yunxiang – The Individualization of Chinese Society
  • Marvin Zalman, Julia Carrano – Wrongful Conviction and Criminal Justice Reform

Food

  • Sandor Ellix Katz – The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World
  • Michael Pollan – In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
  • Vandana Shiva – Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed

Memoir

  • Colonel Levi S. Burr – A Voice from Sing Sing
  • Tim Guest – My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru
  • The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea
  • Kay Redfield Jamison – An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
  • Agnes Davis Kim – I Married a Korean
  • Mark Lanegan – Sing Backwards and Weep
  • Donald Lowrie – My Life in Prison
  • Tom Runyon – In for Life

Poetry

  • Sherman Alexie – The Business of Fancydancing, First Indian on the Moon
  • Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) – “Each Morning”
  • William Blake (various poems)
  • Aimé Césaire – The Collected Poetry
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
  • Billy Collins – Nine Horses
  • Countee Cullen (various poems)
  • Ray Durem (various poems)
  • T.S Eliot – “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
  • Langston Hughes (various poems)
  • Ted Hughes – Birthday Letters
  • Li Bai (various poems)
  • Li Qingzhao (various poems)
  • Philip Larkin – “This Be The Verse”
  • Julian Henry Lowenfeld – My Talisman: The Poetry & Life of Alexander Pushkin (excerpts)
  • Claude McKay (various poems)
  • Pablo Neruda (various poems)
  • Octavio Paz (various poems)
  • Alexander Pushkin (various poems)
  • Sergei Roy – Vladimir Vysotsky: Hamlet with a Guitar
  • Shakespeare – Sonnets (excerpts)
  • Vladimir Vysotky (various poems)
  • Words? Words! Words – anthology by the Seattle African American Writers Alliance
  • William Butler Yeats (various poems)

Theatre & Plays

  • Antonin Artaud – Selected Writings
  • Samuel Beckett – all plays
  • Ilkhom Theatre Group – Ecstasy with the Pomegranate
  • Jean Paul Sartre – No Exit
  • Shakespeare (various plays)
  • Richard Brinsley Sheridan – The Rivals
  • Tang Xianzu – The Peony Pavilion

Publications

  • Harper’s
  • Lapham’s Quarterly
  • Nature
  • Science
  • The New York Review of Books

Comic Books & Graphic Novels

  • Kyle Baker – Nat Turner, Captain America: Truth
  • Aaron McGruder – The Boondocks
  • Charles Schultz – Peanuts
  • Chobits (Clamp)
  • Neil Gaiman – The Sandman
  • Frank Miller – Sin City
  • xxxHolic (Clamp)

Children’s Books

  • Sherman Alexie – The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
  • Beverly Cleary – Ramona (series)
  • Roald Dahl (everything written for children)
  • John R. Erickson – Hank the Cowdog (series)
  • C.S. Lewis (everything written for children)
  • Madeleine L’Engle – A Wrinkle in Time
  • Astrid Lindgren – Pippi Longstocking
  • Lowis Lowry – The Giver
  • Shel Silverstein (everything written for children)
  • Anne-Cath. Vestly – Ole Aleksander Filibom-bom-bom