RECOMMENDED READING
The books listed here have not only touched me deeply at different moments in my life, but continue to be powerful forces which exert influence on my work, and will probably do so to the end of my life. I have no favorites. They are all golden and timeless. They are all reasons to live.
Douglas Adams – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
James Agee – Let us Now Praise Famous Men
Edward Albee – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Sherman Alexie
– The Toughest Indian in the World
– The Lone Ranger & Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
– Reservation Blues
Jaime Angulo – Indian Tales
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh – The Inquisition
Gregory Bateson – Steps to An Ecology of Mind
Mary Catherine Bateson
– Peripheral Visions
– Full Circles, Overlapping Lives
Thomas Berger – Neighbors
Bergier and Pauwells – The Dawn of Magic
Ambrose Bierce-The Complete Short Stories
William Blake – collected poetry
R.H. Blythe (trans) – Haiku
William Boyd -Nat Tate: An American Artist
Joseph Boyden – Through Black Spruce
Stewart Brand – The Whole Earth Catalog
Richard Brautigan
– Confederate General from Big Sur
– Trout Fishing in America
Dee Brown– Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Lennie Bruce – How to Talk Dirty and Influence People
Bill Bryson – A Short History of Everything
Charles Bukowski – poems and prose
Joseph Campbell – The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Lewis Carroll– Alice in Wonderland &Through the Looking Glass
Joyce Cary – The Horse’s Mouth
Bruce Chatwin – The Songlines
Leonard Cohen – Beautiful Losers
Jacques Cousteau – The Silent World
e.e. cummings – collected poems
Dante – The Inferno
Samuel Delany – Dahlgren
Robert S. De Ropp – Drugs and the Mind
Christopher Dewdney – Acquainted with the Night
T.S. Eliot – The Wasteland
M.C. Escher – The Graphic Work of M.C.Escher
Richard Farina – Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
Frederick Forsyth – The Shepherd
John Gardner
– The Art of Fiction
– Jason & Medea
Allen Ginsberg – Howl
Jay Griffiths – A Sideways Look at Time
Brothers Grimm – The Complete Fairy Tales
Woody Guthrie – Bound for Glory
Yuval Noah Hararri – Homo Deus
Jim Harrison
– The Road Home
– The Shape of the Journey
Hermann Hesse
– Steppenwolf
– Magister Ludi
Arthur Heidel (trans) – The Epic of Gilgamesh
Joseph Heller
– Catch-22
– Picture This
Michael Herr – Dispatches
Douglas Hofstadter – Godel, Escher and Bach
Homer – The Odyssey
Nick Hornby – Juliette, Naked
Siri Hustvedt – A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women
Aldous Huxley
– Collected Essays
– The Doors of Perception
John Irving
– The World According to Garp
– A Prayer for Owen Meany
– A Widow for a Year
Alison Jolly – Lemur Behavior
James Joyce – Finnegans Wake
C.G. Jung – Memories, Dreams and Reflections
Jack Kerouac
– On the Road (Scroll)
– Desolation Angels
– Dharma Bums
– Satori in Paris
Philip Kerr
– Berlin Noir
– Prussian Blue
Ken Kesey
– One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
– Sometimes a Great Notion
James Keyes – Only Two Can Play This Game
Omar Khayyam – The Rubaiyat (Fitzgerald trans)
W.P. Kinsella
– Box Socials
– The Fencepost Chronicles
Theordora Kroeber – Ishi
Lao Tzu – The Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell trans.)
Thomas Mann – Dr. Faustus
T.C. McLuhan – Touch the Earth
Greil Marcus – The Old Weird America
Edgar Lee Masters – Spoon River Anthology
Cormac McCarthy – The Border Trilogy
Larry McMurtry
– Texasville
– Duane’s Depressed
James Michener – The Drifters
Henry Miller
– The Rosy Crucifixion
– Tropic of Cancer
– Quiet days in Clichy
A. Milne
– Winnie the Pooh
– The House at Pooh Corner
David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas
Scott Momaday – The Way to Rainy Mountain
William Least Heat Moon – Blue Highways
Michael Moore – Stupid White Man
Gurney Norman – Divine Right’s Trip
P.D. Ouspenski – The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution
Zeese Papanikolas
– Trickster in the Land of Dreams
– American Silence
Kenneth Patchen – Journal of Albion Moonlight
Robert Payne (trans) – The White Pony
Mervyn Peake – The Titus Trilogy
Robert Pirsig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Ezra Pound – The ABCs of Reading
Richard Powers – The Overstory
Paul Reps (trans) – Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
Matt Ridley – Genome
Tom Robbins
– Another Roadside Attraction
– Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
James M. Robinson (ed.) – The Nag Hammadi Library
Philip Roth – The Plot Against America
J.D. Salinger – Catcher in the Rye
Vikram Seth – An Equal Music
Sam Shepard
– Motel Chronicles
– Cruising Paradise
Leslie Marmon Silko
– Ceremony
– Almanac of the Dead
– The Turquoise Ledge
Spenser Brown – The Laws of Form
Mark Spragg – The Fruit of Stone
Neal Stephenson
– Cryptonomicon
– The Baroque Cycle
Hyemeyohsts Storm – Seven Arrows
Robert Tallant – Voodoo in New Orleans
Studs Terkel – American Dreams
Hunter Thompson – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
H.D. Thoreau – Walden Pond
Tolkien
– The Hobbit
– The Lord of the Rings
Michael Ventura
– Shadow Dancing in the U.S.A.
– Letters at 3 a.m.
Michael Ventura and James Hillman
– We’ve had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy
– and the World’s Getting Worse
Kurt Vonnegut
– Slaughterhouse Five
– Cat’s Cradle
– Galapagos
Irving Wallace – The Fan Club
Frank Waters – Book of the Hopi
Alan Watts
– The Book
– In My Own Way
Wavy Gravy – Something Good for a Change
William Wharton
– Scumbler
– Tidings
Richard Wilhelm and Cary Baynes (trans) – I Ching
Colin Wilson – The Occult
Thomas Wolfe – You Can’t Go Home Again
Wayland Young – Eros Denied
Howard Zinn
– A People’s History of the United States
– Declarations of Independence
Gary Zukav – The Dancing Wu Li Masters
