- Arch Hades
Reading List
My top recommendations

Here are my recommendations. Of course, there are hundreds, thousands of great reads, but I wanted to narrow it down to these personal favourites: (in alphabetic order by author surname)
My top recommendations:
Joseph Brodsky – Uncommon Visage
A stunning essay about aesthetics that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he deserves it.
W Somerset Maugham – The Painted Veil
Maugham was the highest paid author of his time and I get why. The way he captures emotional evolution within each character is stunning.
Ivan Turgenev – First Love
An enchanting description of a boy falling in love for the first time, with a tragic end, typical of first love.
Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse 5
The most interesting depiction of time and human life within it.
Poetry
Anna Akhmatova
William Blake
Joseph Brodsky – Collected Poems in English
Robert Burns
Lord Byron (George Gordon) - especially Childe Harold
Emily Dickinson
Arch Hades – High Tide (obviously)
Homer – Iliad; Odyssey, best translations are by Robert Fitzgerald (pretty much all the best translations of the classics can be found in the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press)
Jonathan Keates – The Major Works
John Milton - Paradise Lost
Philip Larkin
Edgar Allen Poe
Rumi
William Shakespeare – Love Sonnets; The Tempest; Twelfth Night; Romeo & Juliet; McBeth; Hamlet
Tracy K Smith – Wade in the Water
Edward Thomas
Oscar Wilde
W B Yeats
Fiction
Mitch Albom - Tuesdays with Morrie (read if you're sad)
Paul Bowles – The Sheltering Sky; Let it come down; The Spiders House (the endings are a bit of a whirlwind, but you have to appreciate the writing)
Joseph Brodsky – On Grief and Reason: Essays
Ivan Bunin – Dark Avenues; The Village
Lewis Carroll – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass
Castiglione – The Book of the Courtier
Anton Chekov – Short Stories (especially The Lady with the Little Dog)
Agatha Christie – Miss Marple short stories
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; Notes from Underground; The Idiot; Demons; White Nights (don’t read if you are depressed, only read when you’re in a good mood, this can send you spiralling)
Alexander Dumas – The Count of Monte Cristo
Umberto Eco – Foucault’s Pendulum; On literature; On Beauty (he writes fiction and non-fiction)
Nicolai Gogol – Diary of a Madman and other short stories
John Green – Looking for Alaska (my favourite YA book)
Thomas Hardy – Tess of the d’Urbervilles (hard to read but the lesson on society’s double standards is important)
Herman Hesse – Steppenwolf (the ending is absurd, but the rest of the story about self-imposed isolation is stunning)
Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis; the Castle (don’t read if emotionally fragile, Metamorphosis will crush you)
Yasunari Kawabata – Beauty and Sadness; Snow Country (won the Nobel Prize for Literature)
Lampedusa – the Leopard (the fall of Sicily’s aristocracy)
Mikhail Lermontov – A Hero of our Time
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude; The General and his Labyrinth; Love in the Time of Cholera (google what magical realism is before you start reading)
W. Somerset Maugham: The Painted Veil; Cakes and Ale; Of Human Bondage; Short Stories 1,2,4 (avoid 3)
Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood; Kafka on the Shore (avoid his short stories, not his best)
Vladimir Nabokov – The Luzhin Defensive
George Orwell – 1984; Animal Farm
Joseph Roth – The Radetzky March (amazing story of three generations of Austrian men who live through the fall of the Empire)
J D Salinger – Catcher in the Rye (you’ll get tired of the word ‘phoney’ but it’s a very good teenage-angsty read)
William Makepeace Thackeray – Vanity Fair
JRR Tolkien – The Silmarillion; The Hobbit; The Lord of the Rings (the greatest fictional universe created)
Ivan Turgenev – First Love; Spring Torrents; Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands
Jules Verne – Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; Around the World in Eighty Days
Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle; Slaughterhouse 5
Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead Revisited; Vile Bodies
Oscar Wilde – the Picture of Dorian Gray
Non-Fiction
Boethius – The Consolations of Philosophy (hey do you like the dark ages?)
Alain de Botton: Religion for Atheists; Consolations of Philosophy; Status Anxiety
Confucius – The Analects
Fritjof Capra – The Tao of Physics
Dale Carnegie - How to win friends and Influence people ```
Helen Castor – Joan of Arc
Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species
Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene; The God Delusion
Rene Descartes – Meditations; Discourse on Method
Jared Diamond – Collapse
Albert Einstein – Relativity
Niall Ferguson – Empire
Richard Feynman – Surely, you’re joking Mr Feynman; Lectures on Physics
Galileo Galilei – Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
Howard Gardner – Frames of Mind
Malcolm Gladwell – The Tipping Point
Daniel Goleman – Emotional Intelligence
Brian Greene – The Elegant Universe
Christopher Hibbert – The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici; The House of Borgia
Gwyn Jones – The Vikings
Carl Jung – Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Primo Levi – The Periodic Table
Daniel Levitin – The Organised Mind
Michael Lewis – Boomerang
Walter Pater – The Renaissance (studies in Art and Poetry)
Steven Pinker – How the Mind works; The Blank Slate
Plato – best translations are by Benjamin Jowett
Sue Prideaux – I am Dynamite! (A stunning biography of Friedrich Nietzsche)
Fiona MacCarthy – Byron, life and legend (Incredible biography of Byron)
Mark McCormack – What they Don’t teach you at Harvard Business School
John Stuart Mill – On Liberty and Other Essays
Alice Miller – The Drama of being a Child
Friedrich Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Birth of Tragedy; The Will to Power
Simon Sebag Montefiore – Jerusalem; The Romanovs
Hans, Ole & Anna Rosling – Factfulness: why things are better than you think
Carlo Rovelli – Seven Lessons on Physics
Bertrand Russell – The History of Western Philosophy
Timothy Taylor – The Instant Economist
Torgrim Titlestad – Viking Legacy
Sun-Tzu – The Art of War
Robin Sharma - The Monk who sold his Ferrari
Seneca – How to Die
Voltaire – Candide, on optimism
David Wallace Wells – The Uninhabitable Earth
Happy reading