Bookshelf

The list below contains books I consider significant. It is a selection, not a complete collection.

• The most valuable book is the one you read twice.
• You should start many books and complete few.
• You should buy books on a whim. Your home library should act like one: you should not know its entire contents, you should discover and rediscover within it.
• You should prune without mercy.

Literature

• I Served the King of England - Bohumil Hrabal
• Too Loud a Solitude - Bohumil Hrabal
• Closely Watched Trains - Bohumil Hrabal
• Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
• If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino
• Numbers in the Dark - Italo Calvino
• Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov - Vladimir Nabokov
• Ada, or Ardor - Vladimir Nabokov
• No One Writes to the Colonel - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• (Almost anything by Garcia Marquez) -
• The Post-Office Girl - Stefan Zweig
• Memories of the Future - Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
• The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
• Silas Marner - George Eliot
• Middlemarch - George Eliot
• Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
• Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
• War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy

History

• Seeing Like a State - James Scott
• Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States - James Scott
• The Origins of Political Order - Francis Fukuyama
• An American Childhood - Annie Dillard
• Sexual Personae - Camille Paglia
• The Merchant of Prato - Iris Origo
• Reflections on the Revolution in France - Edmund Burke

Biographies

• Napoleon: A Life - Andrew Roberts
• Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination - Neal Gabler

Design

• The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander
• Get Your House Right - Marianne Cusato
• Drawing for Architecture - Leon Krier

Food

• An Everlasting Meal - Tamar Adler
• The Measure of Her Powers: An M. F. K. Fisher Reader - M. F. K. Fisher