Top Dogs:

• • The Painter of Modern Life — Charles Baudelaire
  • Tarzan of the Apes — Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • Tracks –Robyn Davidson 
  • “Howl” — Allen Ginsberg
  • Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse
  • Demian — Hermann Hesse 
  • Realm of the Elderlings Series — Robin Hobb
  • The Obstacle is The Way — Ryan Holiday
  • Find a Way — Diana Nyad
  • Waiting for Lefty — Clifford Odets
  • Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke
  • Letters from a Stoic — Seneca
  • The Begum’s Milions — Jules Verne

More…

Fiction/Classics: 

• Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe
• Henderson the Rain King — Saul Bellows
• Ender’s Game — Orson Scott Card
• A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Adam Douglas
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Dean’s Watch — Elizabeth Goudge
• The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway
• Realm of the Elderlings Series — Robin Hobb
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame — Victor Hugo
• Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
• Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka
• Pickman’s Model — H.P. Lovecraft 
• Kafka on the Shore — Haruki Murakami
• The Kings of Mulberry Street — Donna Jo Napoli
• Down and Out in Paris and London — George Orwell
• The Name of the Wind — Patrick Rothfuss
• Dracula — Bram Stoker
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy — J.R.R. Tolkien
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea — Jules Verne

Nonfiction Books:

• The Discourse of Epictetus — Arrian 
• Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
• Meditation — Sri Chimnoy
• Unbeatable Mind — Mark Devine
• Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl
• Ego is the Enemy — Ryan Holiday
• Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
• Confessions of a Guilty Bystander — Thomas Merton
• The Cool School: Writings from America’s Hip Underground — Glenn O’Brien
• Letters from a Stoic — Seneca

Books about Adventure:

• No Picnic on Mount Kenya — Felice Benuzzi
• A Walk Around the World: The Complete Story — Ffyona Campbell
• Paris Vagabond — Jean-Paul Clébert
• Tracks –Robyn Davidson 
• Empty Roads and Broken Bottles: In Search of the Great Perhaps — Charlotte Eriksson
• Microadventures— Alastair Humphreys
• Moods of Future Joys — Alastair Humphreys
• Ultramarathon Man — Dean Karnazes
• Eat and Run — Scott Jurek
• As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning — Laurie Lee
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running — Haruki Murakami
• Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle — Dervla Murphey
• Finding Ultra — Rich Roll
• Miles From Nowhere — Barbara Savage
• How to Be an Explorer of the World — Keri Smith
• Fresh Air Fiend, Travel Writings — Paul Theroux

Books about Writing:

• Zen in the Art of Writing — Ray Bradbury
• How to Write Like Chekhov — excerpts from Anton Chekhov, edited by Piero Brunello and Lena Lencek
• The Artist’s Way — Julia Cameron
• On Writing— Stephen King
• Draft No. 4 — John McPhee
• Henry Miller on Writing — Henry Miller
• Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life–Dani Shapiro
• Why Poetry? — Matthew Zapruder

Short Stories:

• “Hills Like White Elephants” — Ernest Hemingway
• “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” — Gabriel García Márquez
• “The Wall”— Jean-Paul Sartre
• Skin and other Stories — Roald Dahl

Poetry:

• “Tonight” — Agha Shahid Ali
• “Casabiana” — Elizabeth Bishop
• “The Man Moth” — Elizabeth Bishop
• “Kubla Khan” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Horoscopes for the Dead — Billy Collins
• “The Colored Soldiers” –– Paul Lawrence Dunbar
• “Howl” and other Poems — Allen Ginsberg
• “Reville”–A.E. Housman
• “Return”–Robinson Jeffers
• “The End of the World” — Archibald MacLeish
• “Rooms”–Charlotte Mew
• “Ave”–Diane di Prima
• “Entrance” — Rainer Maria Rilke
• “Aince Upon a Day” — William Soutar
• “Love is a Lunatic City” — C.K Stead
• “The Poet” — Alfred Lord Tennyson
• “A Noiseless, Patient Spider” — Walt Whitman
• “Song of Myself” — Walt Whitman

Spoken Word Poetry:

• “My Name is Hiwot” — Hiwot Adilow
• “Period Poem” — Dominique Christina
• “Angry Black Woman” — Porsha O.

Plays: 

• Death of a Salesman — Arthur Miller
• Long Day’s Journey into Night — Eugene O’Neill
• Julius Ceasar — William Shakespeare
• Henry IV Part 1 — William Shakespeare
• Oedipus Rex — Sophocles
• The Glass Menagerie — Tennessee Williams
• The Importance of Being Earnest — Oscar Wilde

Essays:

• The Painter of Modern Life — Charles Baudelaire
• “Tradition and the Individual Talent” — T.S. Eliot
• “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”–Jack Kerouac
• “On Stories” — C.S. Lewis
• “Why I Write” — George Orwell
• “Politics and the English Language” — George Orwell
• “On Shooting an Elephant” — George Orwell
• Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke

Speeches:

• Barack Obama’s Farewell Address 
• “The Man in the Arena” — Theodore Roosevelt