A few books that that left an impression — in alphabetical order:

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Jordan B. Peterson, 2018

642 Things to Write About, San Francisco Writers Grotto, 2012

A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilbur, 2001

A Civil Action, Jonathan Harr, 1995

A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson, 2015

A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle, 1991

All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley, 2023

All The Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy, 1992

Atlas Shrugged, Anne Rand, 1957

Beautiful and Pointless, David Orr, 2011

Bluets, Maggie Nelson, 2009

Breath, James Nestor, 2020

Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1961

Damascus Station, David McCloskey, 2021

Duck, Death and the Tulip, Wolf Erlbruch, 2007

Gone Girl: A Novel, Gillian Flynn, 2012

Horizon, Barry Lopez, 2019

Hot Zone, Richard Preston, 1994

Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018, Peter Schjeldahl, 2019

Justine (Alexandria Quartet 1), Lawrence Durrell, 1957

Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain, 2000

Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, 1992

Only Don’t Know: Selected Teaching Letters of Zen Master Seung Sahn, Seung Sahn, 1982

Possession, A. S. Byatt, 1990

Quiet, Susan Cain, 2012

Ready Player One, Ernst Cline, 2011

Reality Is Not What It Seems, Carlo Rovelli, 2014

Red Notice, Bill Browder, 2015

Solaris, Stanislaw Lem, Bill Johnston – translator, 2011

Something in the Water, Catherine Steadman, 2018

The Cartel, Don Winslow, 2009

The End of the Affair, Graham Greene, 1951

The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje, 1992

The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer, 1979

The Fall, Albert Camus, 1956

The Forever War, Dexter Filkins, 2008

The Lincoln Lawyer, Michael Connelly, 2005

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943

The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli, 2017

Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan, 2011

Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy, 2022

The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham, 1944

The Red Book, Carl Jung, 1914-1917

The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles, 1949

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John LeCarre, 1963

The Stand, Stephen King, 1978

The Stranger, Albert Camus, 1942

The Sympathizer,Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2014

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, 1984

The Word Is Murder: A Novel, Anthony Horowitz, 2018

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 1960

When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought, Jim Holt, 2015

Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright, 2017

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed, 2012

World War Z, Max Brooks, 2006

Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pursig, 1974