Here’s a more limited and adventurous selection of stuff I absolutely love that may be somewhat less familiar… hopefully you’ll find something great and new here to explore. Feel free to leave other public recommendations or thoughts in the Comments section!

 

novels

Italo Calvino: If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler

G.K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday

Michael Ende: Momo

Zdenek Jirotka: Saturnin

Haruki Murakami: A Wild Sheep Chase

Milorad Pavic: Dictionary of the Khazars

Terry Pratchett / Neil Gaiman: Good Omens

William Steig: Dominic

 

short stories

Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths

Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles

Ursula LeGuin: Orsinian Tales

Alan Lightman: Einstein’s Dreams

J.R.R. Tolkien: Leaf by Niggle

Guy de Maupassant: Short Stories

 

essays

Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

Peter Gomes: What We Forgot To Tell You

John Cage: Silence

Jonah Lehrer: Proust Was A Neuroscientist

Christine de Pizan: The Book Of The City Of Ladies

Lewis Thomas: The Lives of a Cell

Helen Vendler: Coming of Age as a Poet

Virginia Woolf: A Room Of One’s Own

 

memoirs

Edward Abbey: Desert Solitaire

Annie Dillard: Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

Eugen Herrigel: Zen In The Art Of Archery

Fritz Kreisler: Four Weeks In The Trenches

Mezz Mezzrow: Really the Blues

Henry David Thoreau: Journals

Dorothy Wordsworth: Diary

Sei Shonagon: The Pillow Book

 

treatises

Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics

Kakuzo Okakura: The Book Of Tea

Constantin Stanislavski: An Actor Prepares

Wassily Kandinsky: On The Spiritual In Art

Cal Peternell: Twelve Recipes

Edouard de Pomaine: French Cooking in Ten Minutes

Johann Joachim Quantz: On Playing The Flute

Michael Kaiser: The Art of the Turnaround

 

graphic novels

Allie Brosh: Hyperbole and a Half

Neil Gaiman: Sandman

Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis

David Mack: Kabuki

Alan Moore: V for Vendetta

Bryan Lee O’Malley: Scott Pilgrim

Osamu Tezuka: Phoenix

Naoki Urusawa: Pluto