I'm a voracious (if slow) reader. Here are some of my all-time-favorites:
Essays
- Anthony Lane: Only Mr. God Knows Why. The Meaning of the Eurovision Song Contest. The New Yorker.
- Johan Galtung: Structure, culture, and intellectual style. An essay comparing saxonic, teutonic, gallic ond nipponic approaches. Transcend.
- Michael Hobbes: Stop Trying to Save the World. Big ideas are destroying international development. New Republic.
Nonfiction
- Noel Riley Fitch: Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation
- Holm Friebe & Sascha Lobo: Wir nennen es Arbeit: Die digitale Boheme oder: Intelligentes Leben jenseits der Festanstellung
- Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- Sheryl Sandberg: Lean In
- Charles Duhigg: The Power of Habit
- Dan Harris: 10% Happier
Contemporary Fiction
- Jonathan Littell: Die Wohlgesinnten (The Kindly Ones)
- Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections
- Patrick deWitt: The Sisters Brothers
- Jonathan Safran Foer: Everything is Illuminated
- Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex
- Haruki Murakami: Naokos Lächeln (Norwegian Wood)
- Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
- Lukas Bärfuss: Hundert Tage (One Hundred Days)
- Dave Eggers: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Classics
- Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks
- Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust I
- Friedrich Schiller: Don Carlos
- Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha
- Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast
- Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Jean Giono: Der Mann der die Bäume pflanzte (The Man Who Planted Trees)
[If the title is in German, I read it in German. :)]