On Being Formed by Reading
Reading is a way of experiencing the world vicariously. I have never been to Russia but I have experienced Russia through the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Reading breaks down the space-time continuum so that you can be anywhere at anytime in history provided that someone has written about it. Sometimes fiction can take you time-traveling much better than non-fiction but I love a written history of a place, a people or a period in time.
Reading has significantly shaped my worldview. Whether it be fiction or non-fiction, nothing can replace reading for a well-rounded view of the world. Following is a list of my top-ten books in several categories.
Reading Non-Fiction (Philosophy)
Apology — Plato
The Republic — Plato
Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
Twilight of Idols — Friedrich Nietzsche
The Antichrist — Friedrich Nietzsche
Essays and Aphorism — Arthur Schopenhauer
Logico Tractatus Philosophicus — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations — Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction — Walter Benjamin
Being And Time — Martin Heidegger
Civilization and Its Discontents — Sigmund Freud
Moses and Monotheism — Sigmund Freud
The Need for Roots — Simone Weil
Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
To Have or To Be ? — Erich Fromm
Maps of Meaning — Jordan B. Peterson
Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle — Carl Jung
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World — Iain McGilchrist
Reading Non-Fiction (History and Human Experience)
The Origins and History of Consciousness — Erich Neumann
A Short History of Nearly Everything — Bill Bryson
Sapiens — Noah Yuval Hariri
Guns, Germs and Steel — Jared Diamond
Between the World and Me — Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Moveable Feast — Ernest Hemingway
Paris-Athènes — Vassilis Alexakis
Kitchen Confidential — Anthony Bourdain
Down the Highway: the Life of Bob Dylan — Howard Sounes
The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk
Freakonomics: the Hidden Side of Everything — Steven Levitt
The Great Railway Bazaar — Paul Theroux
DMT: The Spirit Molecule — Rick Strassman
The Doors of Perception — Aldous Huxley
Walden — Henry David Thoreau
The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin
Reading Non-Fiction (Theology)
Non-Fiction (Theology)
Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 - Paul Tillich
Systematic Theology, Vol. 2 - Paul Tillich
Systematic Theology, Vol. 3 - Paul Tillich
The Dynamics of Faith — Paul Tillich
The Courage to Be — Paul Tillich
Love, Power and Justice — Paul Tillich
The Shaking of the Foundations — Paul Tillich
Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality — Paul Tillich
Christianity and the Encounter of World Religions — Paul Tillich
Paul Tillich’s Radical Social Thought — Ronald H. Stone
Dialogues of Paul Tillich — Mary Ann Stenger and Ronald H. Stone
What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church — John D. Caputo
Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism — Alain Badiou
Letters and Papers from Prison — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A Black Theology of Liberation — James H. Cone
Reading the Bible Again For the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally — Marcus J. Borg
Confessions — Saint Augustine
Christus Victor — Gustaf Aulen
The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church — Vladimir Lossky
A Summa of the Summa — Thomas Aquinas (Edited by Peter Kreeft)
Works of Love — Soren Kierkegaard
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism — Max Weber
Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
How to Inhabit Time — James K.A. Smith
Paul's Summons to Messianic Life: Political Theology and the Coming Awakening — L.L. Welborn
For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy — Alexander Schmemann
The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness and Bliss — David Bentley Hart
Reading Fiction/Poetry
Fiction/Poetry
East of Eden — John Steinbeck
The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov
August 1914 — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A Farewell to Arms — Ernest Hemingway
The Wasteland — T.S. Eliot
Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold — Stephen Fry
The Great Divorce — C.S. Lewis
Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien
The Fellowship of the Ring — J.R.R. Tolkien
Siddhartha: An Indian novel — Herman Hesse
All Quiet on the Western Front — Erich Maria Remarque
Soldier’s Pay — William Faulkner
La Gloire de mon père — Marcel Pagnol
You Can’t Go Home Again — Thomas Wolfe
Native Son — Richard Wright
Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe
The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway
Slaughterhouse-Five — Kurt Vonnegut
Gilead — Marilynne Robinson
Thus Spoke Zarathustra — Friedrich Nietzsche
Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald