I have been reading ravenously for so long that trying to say why I read is equivalent to trying to describe why I pull myself upright each morning and walk into the day. I can. I do. I know I must have that other voice in my head. In pre-literate, pre-written word eras, perhaps that is why storytellers and bards were accorded such honors. They were the creators of those other voices we need to stay connected to some larger reality than that of our tiny, lonely tribes. And thus, for many, the book becomes one apparatus that lessens estrangement.
The paradox: for me, the voices that rise from books need silence to appear fully formed, reading being another way to step away from the hive-mind of social media and news and the infestation of politics into every nook and cranny of our 
21st century consciousness. Conversely, they break up the internal silence with which we often struggle, that emptiness that suggests to us that our own thoughts and experiences are too weird to be universal. Therefore, both statements are true: I read, therefore I am a regular Joe or Jean. I read, therefore I am a man or woman apart, myself solitary and uncommon. Books are the bridge between.
As a rule, I keep three books going at a time — always a novel, then a history (usually a history) or memoir or piece of non-fiction and always a book of poetry. I do not know whether this is an indication of late blooming ADHD or another example of my ravening. It works for me.
Novels give me many eyes to see, my own being too often nearsighted, my age and skin color and gender and geography being so limiting as to be a trap if not for the eyes of fictional characters.
History gives me perspective and poses questions: What lasts? How did we come to these circumstances and conditions? What is good, and how can we clearly make out what is evil?
History and novels both answer my need for the dramatic, for the flourish, the bang and boom, for the conquest and the seduction, for the hunt and the defiance of the hunt.
Poems burrow inside, way under the skin, to secrets and their revelations and surprises.
All three provide beauty, that necessary drug. All three strengthen the heart through variation, through the taking on of the emotions of many and their mindsets and their wildness.
Moving on, I have changed the format of this list from those that came before.
From all the new books I read these past two years, I will list only those titles I can recommend, those books that gave me pleasure. I know you all have limited time to read so I will also place a star* next to a dozen or so titles that I would urge you to pick up today.
Before I do that, let me add a few books that are my foundational texts and therefore have appeared on close to every book list I have ever created.
These books have a totemic quality for me. I have read each multiple times at various stages of my life. Think of the actual book, that most beautiful object, metaphysically. Each title is at the center of a ring of emotional and experiential associations. For example, the first time I taught King Lear, I taught myself the play, a few scenes ahead of my classes, by listening to the Paul Scofield version on an old handheld portable cassette player. Late at night, earplugs in, working at a desk in a back room during a very snowy month, I stopped and started, rewound, listened again, took notes, practiced lines aloud. I remember the sense of total focus, the solitude of the desk lamp’s ring of light, the late hour, the actors’ voices in my ears, my eyes often closed in concentration, the play 
blossoming into understanding. King Lear and the manner in which I learned it, all of those details, are wrapped in a rich tapestry of sensations and emotions. Thus I cannot separate Lear from those winter nights or Moby Dick from my visit to Arrowhead or Ulysses from my Irish background and month hitchhiking there, Hamlet from the death of my father, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek from my first month in Montana wilderness and War and Peace from the two weeks it took me to first read it, a rapturous, hypnotic immersion. When I emerged, many flesh and blood human beings took some getting used to. Without exaggeration, they did not seem as real as Pierre or Natasha.
These books have come into me.
The other book lists are available here. There are many titles on those you will not find on this Post. That does not mean that I now reject them, but only that other books that I have read more recently take precedent.
Suggested Books: A Fallible Passionate List: Post 183
Suggested Books: Another Fallible Passionate List: Revised: Post 350
Books: Another Fallible Passionate List: Post 488
I hope you find books here that intrigue you. If so, I have just the place where you can purchase them. Come see me, and I’ll make you something special.
Children’s Books:
I have been doing a story time for infants to 4 year old’s for two years. These are the books I liked the most:
Sam and Dave Dig a Hole by Mac Barnett Wolf in the Snow by Matthew Cordell How To Heal a Broken Wing by Bob Graham Pax by Sara Pennypacker The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pickney Bear and Wolf by Daniel Salmieri Moon: A Peek Through Picture Book by Britta Teckentrup
New Poetry:
Saving Daylight by Jim Harrison
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes
Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World by Jane Hirshfield
*The Carrying: Poems by Ada Limon
Letters Composed During a Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers
Wade in the Water: Poems by Tracy K Smith Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey
Previous Poets and Titles:
Only those titles I would carry away from the book burners: The Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop New Selected Poems: 1966-1987 and Selected Poems: 1988-2013 by Seamus Heaney War Music: An Account of Homer’s Iliad by Christopher Logue Selected Poems by Wallace Stevens
Short Fiction and Novels:
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr *Varina by Charles Frazier. The book is worth its price for the section where Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson, is on the run across a blasted South. Quiet Until the Thaw by Alexandra Fuller I, Claudius by Robert Graves *Florida by Lauren Groff. No writer of literary fiction is better at showing the ominous in the ordinary. *Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid. Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy Munich by Robert Harris The English Major by Jim Harrison The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death Under Soviet Rule by Igort and Jamie Richards. A Graphic Investigation. Click on the title. Jesus’ Son: Stories by Denis Johnson Mischling by Affinity Konar White Tears by Hari Kunzru. Little Drummer Girl, A Legacy of Spies and A Delicate Truth by John Le Carre. There are some days when LeCarre becomes my favorite contemporary novelist. Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke. An African-American Texas Ranger. *Transatlantic by Colum 
McCann. What a weaving together — among other threads, Frederick Douglass’s visit to Ireland during the Famine. The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott Thirty Girls by Susan Minot The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead Warlight by Michael Ondaatje The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman. I do not like fantasy but this is an extraordinary imagining of souls, a weirdly right UK and what a portrait of goodness! The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy Imagining Argentina by Lawrence Thornton. Argentina during the Dirty War. Sing, Unburied Sing: A Novel by Jesmyn Ward. The Odyssey, trans by Emily Watson.
Nonfiction:
Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexievich Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bregman The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte *A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates * The Game: Harvard, Yale and America in 1968 by George Howe Colt 
Madness Visible: A Memoir of War by Janine di Giovanni Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt Gettysburg: The Last Invasion by Allen Guelzo Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando by Paul Kix The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography by Deborah Levy The Outrun: A Memoir by Amy Liptrot The Ghosts of Cannae by Robert O’Connell I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death by Maggie O’Farrell *Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone by Stephen Lloyd Parry Limits of the Known by David Roberts Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg
A Few Other Titles From Previous Lists That I Cannot Bear To Pass Over For Fear That They Will Be Lost To Memory (and also because the teacher in me must always say, “Oh look at this one and this one and over here, this one too.”)
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Mystery Train by Greil Marcus Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann Philip Roth: there, I’ve said it The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Cora is one of the great heroines of contemporary fiction. Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire and At Cannaan’s Edge by Taylor Branch. The brilliant and moving trilogy on the Civil Rights Struggle and on MLK, the best and greatest man of my lifetime.
Finally, some movies and shows I think may be worth your time — 1 from the deeper past:
Army of Shadows The Crown The Death of Stalin Free Solo The Grand Budapest Hotel Mad Max: Fury Road Sicario Silence The Terror They Shall Not Grow Old The Wire David Simon and Ed Burns: the best, ever.
