Reading
A selection of books that have earned a permanent place.
- Wolf Hall trilogy — Hilary Mantel
- The closest thing to time travel that prose fiction allows.
- Rubicon — Tom Holland
- The Invention of Nature — Andrea Wulf
- Shogun — James Clavell
- Clavell builds a world so completely that you emerge from it slightly disoriented, uncertain which century you belong to.
- The Swerve — Stephen Greenblatt
- A Gentleman in Moscow — Amor Towles
- A novel about confinement that somehow manages to feel like the most spacious reading experience on this list.
- The Wager — David Grann
- The Name of the Rose — Umberto Eco
- Endurance — Alfred Lansing
- The Bright Sword — Lev Grossman
- Alexander of Macedon — Peter Green
- The Crossing — Cormac McCarthy
- McCarthy at his most stripped — a book about loss that never once uses the word.
- The Long Goodbye — Raymond Chandler
- Stoner — John Williams
- The Peregrine — J.A. Baker
- The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov
- Moby Dick — Herman Melville
- Chasm City — Alastair Reynolds
- Reynolds takes physics seriously enough that the speculation earns its place — science fiction for people who find most science fiction insufficiently honest about the universe.
- The Order of Time — Carlo