In trying to nail down this list, which I am tentatively calling "The Book That Meant the Most to Me in the Year in Which I Read It, Going Back 25 Years Or So: The List," I adopted a few guiding principles. They are:
Pretend like nobody is going to read this list. An easy enough rule to follow, since nobody is going to read this list, but my goal was to avoid self-consciousness. For better or worse, this is an honest reflection of the books that have lodged themselves in my heart and soul more than any others. In other words, sorry about all the white American men. And the Celine.
Pick the book that resonated with you most strongly in each year. An ill-defined criterion for an ill-defined list, what I think this means is that I should pick the books that helped shape me into me. In effect this meant very little history or philosophy made the cut, despite the fact that I read a lot of history and some philosophy. Reading James McPherson's Civil War history The Battle Cry of Freedom on my honeymoon is a cherished memory, but I don't know that it "resonated" with my life in the same way the other books on this list did. And reading philosophy, with the possible exceptions of Nietzsche and Camus, feels a little too much like work. Reading should be a hedonistic activity. Let's have some fun here.
No religious texts. A decade-plus of Catholic school and Sundays at a Protestant Bible church gave me a deep appreciation for scripture as literature, and the Bhagavad Gita helped make me real annoying to be around for most of 2016, but I don't want to get lost in the weeds with this stuff. Books that otherwise explore religious themes are OK — looking at you, Flannery and Fyodor.
One book a year. Some hard calls were necessary. Apologies to Emily Dickinson, Larry McMurtry, and Emmanuel Carrere.
11 years old · 2000 · The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
Peter Jackson's film adaptations were on the way, and I think my mother (a hippie at heart, who must have some memories of Tolkien's counter-culture associations in the '60s and '70s) may have suggested that I (a nerd) might like these books. She was right, even though The Shire's tweeness and everything up through that godawful slow stretch with the despicably obnoxious Tom Bombadil seem designed to bore a preteen boy to death. But once Strider and other grown men with swords show up and the Ringwraiths pick up their pursuit of Frodo and company, it's off to the races, and I thereafter wanted to spend the rest of my life reading hundreds of pages about made-up worlds.
12 years old · 2001 · The Stand by Stephen King
The real bridge away from the Goosebumps and Animorphs that defined my first few years of reading, King feels adult in a way that can be important for a 12-year-old while also being a total blast to read. The Stand, with its scary-movie opening about an apocalyptic virus giving way to a good-vs-evil fantasy epic, has the feel of American mythology. And at 12 years old, I didn't know that the sex scenes were bad, I was just happy to have the sex scenes. My interest in King also led me to On Writing. A wonderful guide to the craft, it proved to me that writers were people, and that it was in fact possible to be one.
13 years old · 2002 · A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Given to me by my stepmother, A Confederacy of Dunces made me realize that serious novels could also be funny. Toole's life, and particularly his death following his failure to get this book published, gave me some early ideas about art and success and losers that I've never shaken off. There's meaning to be found in failure, even if Toole couldn't quite get there.
14 years old · 2003 · The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Another one I owe to my stepmother, because I had a very Holden Caulfield approach to assigned reading at school and would have rejected The Catcher in the Rye as more phony propaganda if I'd first encountered it on a syllabus a year later. Salinger is crucial for anyone who's ever felt disaffected, which should really mean everyone. And I still bristle at critics who dismiss Holden Caulfield as whiny. People are phonies, man.
15 years old · 2004 · Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I remember almost nothing about the plot of Slaughterhouse-Five except for the burning of Dresden and Vonnegut's embrace of absurdity in the face of total horror. And I still think often of the aliens' conception of time as encompassing an infinite number of simultaneously existing moments, which never really begin or end, an idea I find equally comforting and terrifying, like the thought of everlasting life.
16 years old · 2005 · Post Office by Charles Bukowski
Parents, do not let your boys read Post Office. I still admire Bukowski as the gritty, big-hearted poet of the down and out, but I'd be lying if I told you that I thought the self-destructive apathy I dabbled in throughout my teens and early 20s was unrelated to me reading everything Bukowski ever wrote. I understand now that nobody should ever read a novel, especially novels about bitter alcoholic womanizers who hate their day jobs, for instructions on how to live. That was less clear to me then. Life, unfortunately, imitates art.
17 years old · 2006 · Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
A fixture in the backseat pocket of my 1999 Volvo, I knew Our Band Could Be Your Life before I knew most of the music Azerrad writes about, which is why I never begrudge somebody wearing the T-shirt of a band they've never listened to — maybe they just haven't listened yet. There's something special about the music you love when you're 17, and the groups (including Black Flag, the Replacements, and Dinosaur Jr.) that get mini-biographies here were obviously great when I did finally get around to buying their albums at CD World. The no-sellouts, no-posers DIY ethos that drove at least a few of these musicians felt to me like Salinger with a bloody nose and an electric guitar. This is purely aspirational. I am of course a poser if not quite a sellout, as somebody who's always been an observer and not an artist: I love books about bands I wish I could join, but I don't know how to play a single chord.
18 years old · 2007 · Ubik by Philip K. Dick
I read Ubik, a tightly wound novel about a group of psychic corporate spies who may or may not be dead, in one night while in the grips of a jittery comedown. I closed the book and immediately started reading it again, finishing for the second time after dawn. Dick's paranoia about the complex hidden systems that run the world would eventually lead me to Pynchon, and his stoner-friendly hole-poking in the nature of reality would prime me for a deep and abiding relationship with Borges, but you always remember your first time getting your mind blown.
19 years old · 2008 · The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
I'd already read Kerouac, and the first section of The Savage Detectives seemed to me like a more exciting version of that: young bohemians running around, driving in cars, searching far and wide for something they can't explain, smoking, drinking, screwing, reading and writing and talking about reading and writing like they are the most important things in the world. A young man in Mexico City joins a crew of outsider poets called the visceral realists, whose two most important figures operate more like gang members than the leaders of a literary vanguard. At 19, I wanted nothing more than to join that sort of gang. The book's long middle section and its conclusion complicate all this youthful energy, coloring it with disappointment and an almost existential dread, but that only makes the initial yearning more striking. Literature won't save us after all, but what else can we believe in?
20 years old · 2009 · Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
There are lines in this book that might as well be tattooed on my eyelids, I've read Jesus' Son so many times. There's the one about knowing every raindrop by its name; the one about wishing you could be back in the bar at 9 a.m., telling lies so far from God; and you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you. These are stories about normal people making stupid decisions and coming to terms with the fact that, after the worst day of your life, your life keeps going. I think this is something most people start taking to heart in their 20s.
21 years old · 2010 · A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
If Jesus' Son wasn't proof enough, here was Flannery O'Connor to make the case that grace is available to even the ugliest sinners. I myself recall feeling and behaving pretty grotesquely at 21, and receiving grace I did not deserve.
22 years old · 2011 · Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
I think it's in the introduction to this book (maybe it's The White Album) that Didion confesses to nerves every time she picked up the phone, which came as a major reassurance to me, as I was finding my panic about calling strangers to ask them questions a major impediment to my new job at the student newspaper. I couldn't be as cool as Didion, and I sure couldn't write that well, but if she was half-faking that confidence I could at least try to pretend. Her unsympathetic portrait of counterculture dissolution in the title essay further helped shake me of any affinity I had for psychedelics or for being part of a scene, any scene at all. What a bunch of dorks. I wanted to write like her, sure. The picture of Didion — clear-eyed, self-possessed, self-reliant, knew how to hold a cigarette — with the Corvette was almost as important. Don't let anybody tell you that being cool doesn't matter.
23 years old · 2012 · Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan
A lot of us millennial men who submitted essay-type stories to magazines in the 2010s, myself included, were just doing bad impressions of Sullivan.
24 years old · 2013 · American Tabloid by James Ellroy
Ellroy's staccato cadence and the grimness of his subject matter — bad men working the violent underground spanning the FBI, the Mafia, and the White House in the 1950s and '60s — may have matched my manic angst about everything to do with 2013, a strong contender for the worst year of my life. But mostly I just think this book rocks. Ellroy turns trash into high art, recasting modern American history as the bloody, pulpy crime story it always has been.
25 years old · 2014 · The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Ivan Karamazov's intellectual and moral case against the existence of God is basically airtight, and Alyosha, the innocent believer, doesn't try to argue against it. After the drama of "The Grand Inquisitor," Alyosha's response is to plagiarize the Christ of the story with a kiss for his brother. And despite the torrent of words that Dostoevsky unleashes about free will and morality and much more for hundreds of pages, it's this silent gesture that carries the most weight, so that by the time you reach the end of the book and Alyosha is telling the neighborhood boys they will all be reunited with their dead friend one day after the Resurrection, you believe he is telling the truth. It's your sensible head vs. your irrational heart, and over the course of reading The Brothers Karamazov across many sweaty nights on my patio in the summer of 2014 in Galveston, Texas, I felt for at least a little while like my heart was winning.
26 years old · 2015 · Poems 1959–2009 by Frederick Seidel
There's a mushy core somewhere inside the whole "edgelord prince of the Upper West Side" act Seidel puts on, but his ruthlessness (another word for honesty) is a huge part of the appeal. In fact, a wealthy, materialistic aesthete is maybe better positioned than others to grasp the contours of a beautiful and degraded world increasingly driven by consumption. Going deep on Seidel finally got me into poetry (Plath, O'Hara, William Carlos Williams and the other modernists, but also Whitman and Dickinson) in a big way. Poetry's embrace of experience, of life as it's lived, the world as itself, meant a lot to me as my reality — like everyone else's — was becoming increasingly mediated by phones in this era.
27 years old · 2016 · The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
"You must change your life," instructs Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo," a line that hits like a lightning bolt when you're getting sober, exercising, and meditating for the first time in your life. Most language around recovery is cliched and corny for good reason: at least a little bit of earnestness is a prerequisite to cleaning your act up. While the Big Book and the Tao Te Ching couldn't take all the cynic out of me, Rilke's mysticism made me want to move to the woods and get into crystal healing. "And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am."
28 years old · 2017 · The Power Broker by Robert Caro
Paired with Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of American Cities, this biography of urban planner Robert Moses doubles as an anatomical dissection of the American city and the nature of power. The Power Broker arrived for me in a brief moment when I had big ambitions for my city and for myself as someone who could write journalism about said city. I'm much less sanguine about my career and about Dallas these days, but it was a nice moment. And I can't wait to finally get to Caro's four-volume (and counting) biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Maybe next year.
29 years old · 2018 · Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
I spent this year tackling some of the big dogs I should have read in school: Anna Karenina, To the Lighthouse, The Grapes of Wrath, Ulysses. Pretty good! As a lover of doomed quests and nautical adventures, Moby-Dick remains my favorite of the impromptu classics course.
30 years old · 2019 · My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Among the Norwegian author's autofictional struggles in this six-book series that I became obsessed with: investing a typical bourgeois life with enough meaning and authenticity that digressive memories about teenage beer runs and kids' birthday parties carry life-and-death significance. Falling in love, having children — I think old Karl Ove's partly to blame for convincing me there are worse things than domesticity. Pity not the brooding middle-aged man, feeling a bit emasculated as he bops along at his toddler daughter's "Rhythm Time" dance class. His is a rich life.
31 years old · 2020 · My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
"Escapism" was the imperative for many of us amid COVID lockdowns, and that plus "too much spare time" led to memorable engagements with Lonesome Dove and The Count of Monte Cristo. Then I got to Ferrante, knocking down each of the four Neapolitan Novels in quick succession and bombarding my new fiancée with feverish thoughts on Lena and Lenu's complex relationship. I loved these characters like they were real people, and their attempts to outrun the gravitational pull of their upbringing in Naples struck a chord as it became clear to me I was unlikely to achieve escape velocity from my own hometown.
32 years old · 2021 · Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Like a globe-trotting French Bukowski running on spite and style, Céline makes clear at times that his misanthropy is similarly tempered by a big heart. I was old enough at this point to recognize that writers make poor role models — and that Céline makes a worse role model than most — but even at his nastiest and most hateful, he finds moments of real compassion.
33 years old · 2022 · The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
Roy Blount Jr. said that Portis "could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he'd rather be funny," which is correct. Not as moving as True Grit and not as funny as Norwood, this is nevertheless the one that strikes the best balance between Portis' sense of humor, defined by his keen sense of idiomatic American voices, and his understated emotional wallop.
34 years old · 2023 · Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Proof that McCarthy could actually be pretty funny when he wanted to, Suttree makes for a nice double-header with the works of Charles Portis and his wandering failures. A man leaves behind domesticity for a drunken existence on the Tennessee River, and finds that desperation and beauty are a part of life wherever and however you choose to live it.
35 years old · 2024 · The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry
I read this to my daughter in the weeks after she was born. I'm not sure what she got out of them, but for me, these old poems held the entire world.