Every once in a while, you read a book that rocks your world. Not all good novels have to do that, of course. But I was never quite the same after I read these books, and own pretty much everything their authors have written.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
Continental Drift, Russell Banks
Black Robe, Brian Moore
Black Narcissus, Rumer Godden
The Blue Lenses, Daphne du Maurier
Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
The Progress of Love, Alice Munro
The Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andric
Collected Stories, Katherine Mansfield
Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Beijing Coma, Ma Jian
The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula le Guin
The Brothers Karamazov, Doystoyevsky
Solaris, Stanislaw Lem
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
Some of these non-fiction works I just happened upon, and some were research. But all ended up shaping how I see the world, and how I write about it.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West
The Crippled Tree, Han Suyin
The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks
The Proper Study of Mankind, Isaiah Berlin
Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez
Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk
Sarajevo, Exodus of a City, Dzevad Karahasan
To Save Everything, Click Here, Evgeny Morozov
Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges
Writer in the Middle 