Leo’s Recommended Books
By Leo Babauta
Don’t know what to read? Here are some of my favorites:
- Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett (start with this, but all of her books are great)
- The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
- Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer (all his stuff is great)
- The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery (then, Gourmet Rhapsody)
- City of Thieves, by David Benioff
- Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
- Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem (start with this, but all his books are great)
- Shibumi, by Trevanian
- The Discworld Series, by Terry Pratchett
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, by Douglas Adams
I also love books by Kurt Vonnegut, Nick Hornby, Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami, Raymond Chandler, William Gibson, Stephen King and John D. Macdonald.
Tougher but great books:
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
- Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
- Don Quixote, by Cervantes
- Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
As for non-fiction books … this list is a bit old but I still like the books here.