This is an evolving list. I’m not sure I will ever get to these books, but it takes a little pressure off to write them down. Please feel free to recommend books here too!

Recent Additions:

• The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krauss
• Capital by Thomas Piketty (Bill Moyers recommends)
• Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman
• Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thessinger
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Writing/Grammar Books:

• 20 Master Plots and How to Build Them by Ronald B Tobias
• The Grammar Book by Marianne Celce-Murcia and Diane Larsen Freeman
• Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language by Marianne Celce-Murcia and Marguerite Ann Snow
• Writing Creative Nonfiction edited by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard
• Grammar in Use by Betty Azar and Raymond Murphy
• The Subversive Copy Editor
• Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar by David Crystal
• The Prodigal Tongue by Lynne Murphy
• The Editor’s Companion by Steve Durham
• The Copy Editor’s Handbook by Amy Kinsohn
• The Perfect English Grammar Workbook by Lisa McLendon
• It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences by June Casagrande
• Everybody Writes by Ann Handley
• Writing Without Bullshit by Josh Bernoff
• Writing Science in Plain English
• Content Rules by Ann Handley and CC Chapman
• Woe Is I by Patricia O’Conner
• The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation by Jane Straus
• The Sense of Style
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser

General Non-Fiction Work-Related:

• Lights Out: The Electricity Crisis, the Global Economy, and What It Means to You by Jason Makansi
• The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World by Philip F Schewe
• From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity by Richard Munson
• Understanding Today’s Electricity Business by Bob Shirely
• Damned If We Don’t! Ideas for Accelerating Change Around Water by Christopher Peacock (wateranthology.com)
• The Value of Water Book Project by Donna Vincent Roa (www.thevalueofwater.org)

Books Related to India

• Not Only the Things That Have Happened by Mridula Koshy
• The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh
• Chronicles of a Corpse Bearer by Cyrus Mistry
• God’s Little Soldier by Kiran Nagarkar
• Serious Man by Mann Joseph
• The Lost Flamingos of Bombay by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghri
• The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• A Matter of Rats by Amitava Kumar
• The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri
• Our Moon Has Clots by Rahul Pandita
• The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar
• Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar
• Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh
• Shiva Trilogy by Armish
• Jejuri by Arun Kolatkar
• English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee
• A Free Man by Aman Sethi
• The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger
• A Strange Kind of Paradise by Sam Miller
• The Mountain Shadow by Gregory David Roberts
• Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
• A Fire Balance by Rohinton Mistry
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
• A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
• Kim by Rudyard Kipling

General Non-Fiction

• The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L Shirer
• Flu by Gina Kolata
• Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Enrenreich
• New Jack by Ted Conover
• Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
• The Immaculate Invasion by Bob Shacochis
• Chasing the Sea by Tom Bissell
• Winter by Rick Bass
• The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
• The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean
• Dispatches by Michael Herr
• True Notebooks by Mark Saltzman
• Driving Mr. Albert by Michael Paterniti
• Aspects of the Novel by EM Forster
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley
• Ways of Seeing by John Berer
• Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf
• Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
• The Silent Woman: Silvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm
• John Adams by David McCullough
• Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft by Lyndall Gordon
• Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers
• Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
• Essays by Michel de Montaigne
• Getting Personal by Phillip Lopate
• Virgin Time by Patricia Hampl
• Reasonable Creatures (essays) by Katha Pollit
• About This Life (essays) by Barry Lopez
• Blues of Cannibals (essays) by Charles Bowden
• Readings (essays) by Sven Birkerts
• The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul
• Under the Sign of Saturn (essays) by Susan Sontag
• Confessions by Rousseau
• Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy
• Halls of Fame by John D’Agata
• The Next American Essay (anthology) edited by John D’Agata
• The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray
• On Being Blue by William Gass
• Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
• Enough About You by David Shields
• Confessions of an Opium Eater by Thomas DeQuincy
• Out of Place by Edward Said
• My Mother’s House by Colette
• Fourteen by Stephen Zanichkowsky
• Speak, Memory by V.S. Nabokov
• The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster
• Not Even Wrong by Paul Collins
• Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman
• The Lover by Marguerite Duras
• A Death in the Family by James Agee
• Old School by Tobias Wolff

General Literature:

• Angle in Repose by Wallace Stegner
• Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver
• Atonement by Ian McEwan

• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• The Bookseller of Kabul
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• Brothers K by David James Duncan

• Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime by Mark Haddon
• Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis De Bemier
• Confederacy of Dunces by John K Toole
• Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• Camulod Chronicles by Jack Whyte

• Demanding Dignity: Young Voices From the Front Lines of the Arab Revolutions edited by Maytha Alhassen and Ahmed Shihab-Eldin
• Don’t Tell by Karen Rose
• Dune by Frank Herbert

• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

• Handmade’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Heart of a Dog by Bulgakov
• A History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
• House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

• I, Claudius by Robert Graves
• In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

• A Journal of the Plague of Years by Daniel Defoe

• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

• Lajja by Taslima Nasrim
• The Last Empress by Anchee Min
• Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

• The Magic Tree House book series
• Mating by Norman Rush
• Microserfs by Douglas Coupland
• The Mists of Avalon by Marion Z Bradley
• The Mortal Instrument series by Cassandra Clare

• Narcissus and Goldman by Hermann Hesse
• Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
• Our Moon Has Blood Clots by Rahul Pandita

• The Plague by Albert Camas
• Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
• The Pioneer Woman by Ree Drummond
• A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
• The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds

• Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
• Russian Forest by Leonid Leonov

• Secret History by Donna Tartt
• School for Fools by Sokolov
• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
• Shibumi by Trevanian
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick
• Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
• Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi

• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Hurston
• Transitions Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges
• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
• To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal

• The Villiage by Ivan Bunin

• Walking Across Egypt by Clive Edgerton
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• The World of Andrei Sakharov: A Russian Physicist’s Path to Freedom by Gennady Gorelik
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

• Zhuangzi