“Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

One’s library can be the most haunting and transforming aspect of a person’s life, and is why, I believe, can be the most telling characteristic of an individual. The following books in my library have opened my eyes and ears and curiosity. Many of them have turned me inside out – sometimes in a good way, and others not so. Each one, however, has inspired me to look past the grain.

Novels
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
Choke
Rant
Invisible Monsters
Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler
Memoris of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Moby Dick
Bartleby, the Scrivener
The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville
The Claim of Sleeping Beauty I/
Beauty’s Punishment II/
Beauty’s Release III by Anne Rice
Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm
Cassandra by Christa Wolf
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, ph.d.
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Mao II by Don DeLillo
Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent
The Emperor’s Babe by Bernardine Evaristo
Mrs. Dalloway
Moments of Being
A Room of One’s Own: And Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf
Far Away Caryl Churchill
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Dictionary of Superstitions by David Pickering
White Oleander by Janet Fitch
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier
Brick Lane by Monica Ali
City of the Mind by Penelope Lively
Multatuli by Max Havelaar
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Bouvard and Pecuchet
Madame Bouvary by Gustave Flaubert
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
Hope Leslie by Catharine Maria Sedgwick
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Everything by Edgar Allen Poe
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy
The Divine Comedy: Hell, Purgatory, Paradise by Dante Alighieri
Poetics by Aristotle
Republic by Plato
The Way Through Doors by Jesse Ball
Less Than Zero
American Psycho
The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile by Geraint Anderson
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Joy of Sex 21st century edition by Alex Comfort
Indian Love Paintings by Hilde Bach
Story of O by Pauline Reage
Master/Slave by N. T. Morley
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey
S/M 101: A Realistic Introduction by Jay Wiseman

Poetry
This Connection of Everyone with Lungs by Juliana Spahr
Poems by Maya Angelou
People From Bones by Bron Bateman and Kelly Pilgrim
Feminine Gospels by Carol Ann Duffy
Cloud 9 by Caryl Churchill
The First Four Book of Poems by W. S. Merwin

Collegiate
Aristotle: The Politics and The Constitution of Athens edited by Stephen Everson
The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke by Suze Orman
An Introduction to Political Philosophy by Jonathan Wolff
Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories by Griselda Pollock
Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic by Elisabeth Bronfen
Through Other Continents by Wai Chee Dimock
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler
Gustav Klimt: Art Nouveau Visionary by Eva di Stefano
Egon Schiele: Life and Works by Jane Kallir
Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills by Peter Galassi and Cindy Sherman
Our Bodies, Ourselves: A New edition for a New Era by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and Judy Norsigian
Phenomenology of Spirit by G. W. F. Hegel
Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio and Ph.D. Betty Dodson