(Programming note: I’m planning to focus my energies on some other projects for the next few weeks. To keep posting weekly, I’m going to post a few lists that will live on the Home page and which I’ll try to keep updated.)

I am a big proponent of public libraries. I have shamelessly stolen my friend’s philosophy that you don’t live somewhere until you have a library card. Simultaneously, I am an opponent of owning things and will avoid buying anything I don’t need. Which essentially just means that if I can get away without owning a book, I won’t, and with library access, I can get away without owning many books.

This was an even easier position to maintain back when I was constitutionally opposed to rereading books. But one day, I remembered this scene in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden can’t bring himself to throw a snowball a car. I reread that scene and then the whole book. I was grateful to own a copy at the time, so I didn’t have to wait to go to the library and check it out.

Which gave me the idea of the Dream Library. The Dream Library is a personal (and not yet fully realized) library holding books that I think about and want to reference often enough and don’t want to have to wait until they’re available at the public library. Books that are in the Dream Library are not necessarily just my favorite books. They are not a subset of books I own or have read. There are plenty of other books that I love or copies that were gifts that also mean a lot to me too. I also think of them as the books I hope my guests judge me by. This is also just a long-winded, fantastical way of saying these are the books I want to own.

* Have not read

+ Do not own

Fiction

• Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters; Franny and Zooey; Nine Stories; The Catcher in the Rye+ by JD Salinger
• Siddhartha+; Beneath the Wheel by Hermann Hesse
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s+ by Truman Capote
• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
• Breakfast of Champions+ by Kurt Vonnegut

Non-Fiction

• Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
• The Big Book of Brain Games by Ivan Moscovich
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
• The Elements of Style+ by Strunk and White
• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• How To Travel With A Salmon by Umberto Eco
• The Chairs Are Where The People Go+ by Misha Glouberman (and Sheila Heti)
• Slouching Towards Bethelehem by Joan Didion
• On Photography+; Regarding the Pain of Others*+ by Susan Sontag

Other

• Calvin and Hobbes+ by Bill Watterson
• Frog and Toad+ by Arnold Lobel
• The Far Side+ by Gary Larson
• Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat
• A Field Guide to American Houses*+ by Virginia and Lee McAlester
• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• A Series of Unfortunate Events+ by Lemony Snicket
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky