Many of these are so great and I thought many thoughts and felt many feelings, but I have bolded texts that I especially recommend. Also, for the record, I especially recommend NOT reading Moby Dick.
BOOKS!
How Fiction Works - James Wood
You Have the Wrong Man - Maria Flook
The Fall - Albert Camus
Last Evenings on Earth - Roberto Bolaño
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage - Alice Munro
Girl With Curious Hair - David Foster Wallace
Jesus’s Son - Denis Johnson
The Lying Life of Adults - Elena Ferrante
A Lucky Man - Jamel Brinkley
The Art of Subtext - Charles Baxter
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - Danielle Evans
The Half Known World - Robert Boswell
Taking Care - Joy Williams
Sylvia - Leonard Michaels
Snows of Kilimanjaro - Ernest Hemingway
The Art of Fiction - John Gardner
My Struggle Volume Two - Karl Ove Knausgaard (re-read)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Days of Abandonment - Elena Ferrante
My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
Story of a New Name - Elena Ferrante
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay - Elena Ferrante
The Story of the Lost Child - Elena Ferrante
Recollections of my Nonexistence - Rebecca Solnit
The Broom of the System - David Foster Wallace
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
Ghost Wall - Sarah Moss
Topeka School - Ben Lerner
Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner
10:04 - Ben Lerner
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Amsterdam - Ian McEwan
The Idiot - Elif Batuman
Summer - Karl Ove Knausgaard
Ardor - Roberto Calasso
Catapult - Emily Fridlund
Airships - Barry Hannah
Sudden Traveler - Sarah Hall