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Fiction Reading

Fiction is massively underestimated. It can sometimes be even more informative and enriching than non-fiction books. Reading fiction has been scientifically proven to increase empathy, and in my personal experience, has been absolutely formative in developing my worldview. Here's a list of the fiction that has shaped my thinking over the years:

My favourite novelists, and which books of theirs I have read

James Baldwin - Go Tell it on the Mountain, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Giovanni's Room

Octavia E. Butler - Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents

Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote

Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go, The Remains of the Day, The Buried Giant, Klara and the Sun, When We Were Orphans, and Nocturnes

Toni Morrison - Beloved, Sula, A Mercy, Recitatif, and The Bluest Eye

Kim Stanley Robinson - The Ministry for the Future, The Mars Trilogy and New York 2140

John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men

Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina

My favourite playwrights, and plays of theirs I have seen or read

Rob Drummond - Quiz Show, Bullet Catch

Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House, Ghosts, The Pillars of Society, 

Martin McDonagh - The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Pillowman, The Lonesome West

William Shakespeare - The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, King John, Richard II, Henry IV pt. 1 + 2, Henry V, Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Anthony and Cleopatra

Climate Fiction

Richard Powers - Bewilderment

Kim Stanley Robinson - The Ministry for the Future, Red Mars and New York 2140

John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath

Feminist Fiction

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale and Surfacing

Eve Ensler - The Vagina Monologues and The Apology

Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House

Sarah Moss - Ghost Wall

Queer Fiction

James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room

Jackie Kay - Trumpet

Ali Smith - Girl Meets Boy

Fiction to learn about the rest of the world

Lesley Nneka Arimah - What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

Louise Erdrich - The Night Watchman

Mohsin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Paulo Scott - Nowhere People

Poetry

Anonymous - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

William Blake - Songs of Experience

Joshua Clover - Red Epic

Terrence Hayes - American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin

Homer - The Odyssey (translated by Emily Wilson)

John Milton - Paradise Lost

Claudia Rankine - Citizen: An American Lyric and Don't Let Me Be Lonely

Percy Bysse Shelley - The Collected Works (particularly Prometheus Unbound, Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem with Notes, Hellas and The Mask of Anarchy)

Gertrude Stein - Tender Buttons

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