books
- The Little Prince (my spirit book kind of)
- A Man Called Ove (Backman)
- Seveneves (Stephenson): realistic scifi where everyone on earth tries to escape into space
- The Arc of a Scythe Trilogy (Neal Shusterman)
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Feynman)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
- The Book of Delights (Ross Gay)
- Frankenstein (Shelley)
- Animal Farm (Orwell)
- The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
- Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Audre Lorde)
- Giovanni's Room (James Baldwin)
plays & poems
- The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde)
- Those Winter Sundays (Robert Hayden)
- The Years (Alex Dimitrov)
- Night Herons (Amy Gerstler)
- Invictus (William Ernest Henley)
short stories
- Everything I Haven't Done (Morgan Thomas)
- Pet Milk (Dybek)
- A Temporary Matter (Lahiri)
- Folding Beijing (Hao JingFang)
- The Paper Menagerie (Ken Liu)
- Exhalation (Ted Chiang) (a collection of his stories). Particularly:
- Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom
- The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
- Wednesday's Child (Li Yiyun)
- A Narrow Room (Rosalind Brown)
essays
blogs
- A True (Non-Hierarchical, Shared) Love
- finding the right people (Nix)
- Becoming a magician (Autotranslucence)
- Life is Short (Paul Graham)
- What You Can't Say (Paul Graham)
- Cities and Ambition
- You don't need to work on hard problems | benkuhn.net (Ben Kuhn)
- it is okay to not know | MIT Admissions (Paolo A.)