Ruban

Thus an old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: "No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you."

Carl Jung

I love discovering other people's reading lists, so here's mine. This is a selection of books I recommend, with those I found particularly impactful marked with a . These recommendations have shaped my thinking and I hope you might find something worthwhile among them.

My full reading list can be found on Goodreads.

  1. Asian Literature
    1. Runaway Horses, Yukio Mishima
    2. Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
    3. Ramayanam, Valmiki
    4. The Complete Stories of Lu Xun, Lu Xun
    5. Beauty and Sadness, Yasunari Kawabata
  2. Western Literature
    1. Soumission, Michel Houellebecq
    2. The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati
    3. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
    4. A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
    5. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
  3. Biography
    1. The Fish That Ate the Whale, Rich Cohen
    2. American Prometheus: Robert Oppenheimer, Kai Bird
    3. Napoleon: A Life, Andrew Roberts
    4. Deng Xiaopeng and the Transformation of China, Ezra Vogel
    5. Boy and Going Solo, Roald Dahl
  4. History & Politics
    1. Patton, Montgomery, Rommel: Masters of War, Terry Brighton
    2. The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama
    3. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich
    4. The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, Gary Bass
    5. China & Japan: Facing History, Ezra Vogel
    6. Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, Katja Hoyer
  5. Science Fiction
    1. Remembrance of Earth's Past: The Three-Body Trilogy, Liu Cixin
    2. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin
    3. The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin
    4. The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
    5. The Player of Games, Iain Banks
    6. Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein
    7. Red Rising Saga, Pierce Brown
    8. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller Jr.
    9. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula Le Guin
  6. Fantasy
    1. The Kingkiller Chronicle, Patrick Rothfuss
    2. The Witcher Series, Andrzej Sapkowski
    3. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
    4. Narnia #5 - The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis