The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward
Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
How Will You Measure Your Life?, Clayton M. Christensen
The Idiot, Elif Batuman
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
The Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare
"Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance."
King Lear, William Shakespeare
Othello, William Shakespeare
"Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit, and lost without deserving."
Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare
Henry V, William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
"Brevity is the soul of wit."
The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
"A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are."
Picture Us in the Light, Kelly Loy Gilbert
The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin
"Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin
"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid."
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, Ted Chiang
Kane and Abel, Jeffrey Archer
Educated, Tara Westover
"My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs."
The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Ken Liu
"Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly. Does that thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human? We live for such miracles."
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
"And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside."
Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, Joshua Foer
"It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,“ Borges writes, “is to forget.”"
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng
Turtles All the Way Down, John Green
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J.D. Vance
The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own."
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
"And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it."
When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi
"I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything.""
I Am the Messenger, Markus Zusak
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman
"I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy."
Evil Under the Sun, Agatha Christie
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
"I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right."