Over the past couple of years I have received a number of requests to publish a reading list. I am humbled and honored that my feeble, scrambled mind is deemed worthy of such a request. Well, I have finally got around to doing this. In turn, I only request one thing from you. Please don’t buy these books on Amazon. Support your local bookshops!

Cultural Criticism / Essays

The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch

This prophetic 1979 masterpiece about our narcissistic culture catapulted Lasch to international fame at the time of its publication. I first read it in grad school in my Cultural Criticism course taught by Robert Boyers, a favorite professor of mine and an incredible thinker. It resurfaced a couple of years in a casual conversation with my friend Finn MacTaggart. I decided to reread it and was blown away by how accurately it described our Instagram-driven culture. One of the books main points was that the American society and culture encourage and rewards narcissistic behavior. I saw echoes of it everywhere - with Donald Trump in politics, Kanye West in pop culture, and Elon Musk in business. I cannot tell you how many copies of this book I must have sold by screen-shotting quotes from it. This is an absolute must for anyone trying to make sense of our revolting, shallow culture. The book prompted my viral Highsnobiety article, “Is Streetwear a Machine That Turns Insecurity Into Money?”

The People’s History of the United States, 1492 - Present by Howard Zinn

This book is an excruciating summary of all the injustices the United States, or rather its ruling class, has perpetrated on everyone from Native Americans to countless countries around the world. It will make your blood boil. It will give your hypertension. It’s classic and a must read for those of you who want to be truly informed. Consult your health provider before reading.

The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom

If you think the woke authoritarianism that has wrought immense damage on the intellectual life in the United States, particularly on its liberal education is a new phenomenon, read this 1980s best-seller that rocked America. In it, the preeminent American intellectual and the University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, who as a young professor at Columbia University witnessed the Stalinist tactics of the proto-woke. The book is a forceful argument against the degradation of intellectual life, and particularly of the liberal curriculum in American universities in favor of inclusivity tokenism. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, Bloom was attacked by the New Left and his ideas have been highjacked by the intellectual right wing. It is high time that we reclaimed them. The book is still influential, spurring such best-selling tomes like the 2018 The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America by Robert Hughes

This 1994 polemic by arguably the most formidable art critic who has ever lived takes a close, hard look at the American art scene and how the traditional ideas of excellence of mastery in art have been damaged by the therapeutic hogwash of “inclusivity” on the one hand and by the evangelical posturing on the other, resulting in mediocrity and self-censorship that has overwhelmed the art world then and doubly so now. It will undoubtedly sound familiar to those of you who have been following what’s going on in the art world today. Hughes, deft and hilarious, dishes it out equally to the left and to the right. If you don’t read the entire book, its central essay, Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy is a must.

The Tyranny of Virtue by Robert Boyers

The aforementioned Robert Boyers has been somewhat of a mentor to me. I have always been astonished by his supple, deep way of thinking. So when this hardcore liberal intellectual from a Jewish working class has found himself in the same “old white man” boat, he wrote this slim volume. Its considerate, careful, methodical, thoughtful dismantling of the claims of the woke moral hysteria is a perfect antidote to the Twitter-level arguments permeating our current cultural and political discourse.

Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

This French 1980s classic about how representation has become more important than reality is dense but slim. What Baudrillard saw in the rise of the mass media during the ‘70s was nothing compared to the illusory, Internet-driven hyperreality we live in now. It’s a perfect companion to Lasch.

The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

This 1967 classic that analyzes how popular culture has turned us into passive spectators and consumers while subtly maintaining the status quo can be considered a precursor to Baudrillard.

Discipline & Punish by Michel Foucault

Ok, I don’t exactly expect you to finish this, so don’t be discouraged if you find this seminal 1975 book that traces the genealogy of the way the Western society disciplines and punishes its members too daunting. But its main ideas that describe how the methods for limiting our freedom that have first spread in the penal system of our “civilization” - measuring, monitoring, reviewing, disciplining, have spread to all realms of our life - family, work, school, politics, the media and how the constant anxiety of being disciplined has resulted in a self-policing, self-censoring culture of today. This world is Foucault’s Panopticon and we all just live in it. As a primer, consider listening to this episode of the Philosophize This podcast.

There Is Simply Too Much to Think About by Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow is my favorite American novelist. His astonishing mind has impressed me since I read the first page of his novel, Herzog, years ago. Upon reading it, I tore through Bellow’s oeuvre like a starving wolf through a carcass. His deftly written essays from the ‘60s and ‘70s, however, are as much of a draw as his fiction. In them he keenly (and ruefully) summarized the decline of the intellectual life in America, where poets have ceded power to technocrats and where matters of the soul have been suppressed with devastating results for our human side.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

Wallace was the voice of Generation-X - the over-educated, disillusioned, self-conscious generation, the first one that became keenly aware that people no longer have the power and that resistance to late capitalism is futile. E Unibus Plurum - the central (and best) essay in this collection is a surgical examination of pop-culture and irony, the last, self-defeating weapon youth culture used against the forces of consumer society.

No Logo by Naomi Klein

Klein’s book was the last stand against big business that hijacked and exploited youth culture for its nefarious purposes. That world is gone. The idea of selling out no longer exists and today’s youth culture rushes in to selling out. But, not everyone, and for those who don’t Klein goes pretty deep into exploring how corporations latch on to youth culture. You’ll have a hard time lionizing companies like Nike and adidas after reading it.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

I cannot adequately describe the impact this book has had on me. Nor can I describe what genre this mix of philosophy and travelogue is. But if you want to know how I think about design, read this book. It subverts the postmodern notion that we cannot objectively tell what is good and what is bad as far as creativity goes. It’s too complicated to describe in a couple of sentences, but you can read my tribute to Pirsig here.

Literature

Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Before you consider tackling Crime and Punishment or Brothers Karamazov, read this much more accessible and underrated 1864 masterpiece about an embittered, downtrodden public servant who in his loneliness and isolation tackles some fundamental problems of the human condition.

Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov

I tell people that if you want to understand America, read Saul Bellow. If you want to understand the Soviet Union, read Bulgakov. This short masterpiece - for decades banned by the Soviet sensors - is set in post-Revolutionary Moscow. It tackles the absurdities of the newly formed Communist order through a heart-breaking combination of humor and humanity, and asks the ever-important question - what happens when one power structure is replaced by another power structure that is ignorant and unequipped to govern. For those looking on with dismay about the changing power structures in today’s academia and the art world it will sound painfully familiar.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

By turns uproariously hilarious and tragically sad, Bulgakov’s magnum opus is an inverted Faustian story in which the devil comes to the 1920s Moscow to expose the phoniness and the moral bankruptcy of its supposedly enlighten cultural leaders. Featuring a big black fat cat with a philosophical streak, perhaps my favorite personage in the history of literature.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

This masterpiece that tells a story of a sophisticated, educated, and morally bankrupt European engaging in sexual relationship with a tween is essential reading for those who understand the value of literature, which is to render the complexity of human relationships to the fullest. Nabokov set out to dupe our moral compass by depicting a perfectly charming, sympathetic character. His prose is masterful and a living proof that an immigrant can master English language better than pretty much any native speaker, and his portrayal of a sophisticated European encountering American cultural coarseness is utterly hilarious.

Herzog by Saul Bellow

It’s hard to pick the best novel of someone so gifted like Saul Bellow. Herzog is the first one I’ve read and remains my favorite. It traces the meanderings of a humanities professor who is losing a grip on his life, engaging in an argument in a series of letters to dead philosophers as he gradually realizes that his intellectual upbringing has left him utterly unequipped to deal with the coarse, shrewd realities of the American life. The book is a paean for a life of intellectual pursuit and its inability to fulfill its lofty goal, which is to provide meaningful answers to contemporary life.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

There is probably no play, or for that matter another work of fiction, that tackles head on the cruelty of American societal order. The book examines the relentless, naive American optimism that has wrought enormous, and largely unspoken about, damage on the American psyche. Its protagonist is unable to grasp his sinking life, desperately shielding himself with an elaborate web of fantasy and lies of American success, which, of course, does not prevent his tragic end.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

An unhinged, drug-fueled romp in the most disgusting and most quintessential of American cities, Thompson’s cult classic tears through the facade of American civilization, exposing its greed and prudishness, but also its possibility.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

If you want to understand how the power structures of New York work, read this book. A Wall Street trader, a self-described Master of the Universe, accidentally kills a young boy with his car and quickly finds out who holds real power in the city when the political and media machine chew him up and spit him out. If you think we don’t have aristocracy in America, this book will disabuse you of that notion.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

I suppose this cult classic needs no introduction, but if it does, well, just read it. One of the first looks at how contemporary culture forms a senselessly cruel mind of a teenager, and then wreaks further damage on it.

Requiem For a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.

The world is divided into those who have read Hubert Selby Jr. and those who haven’t. If you are in the former category, you have unlocked the next level of cult literature. This novel of quintessential American failure and of lives ruined by drugs is an absolute must. Even if you’ve seen the terrific film adaptation by Darren Aronofsky, you should still read the book. After you are done, pick up Selby’s other gruesome masterpieces, Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Room.

The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde has the dubious achievement of being the most misquoted author on earth, thanks to people who get their education on quote.com and Twitter. Still, I consider Oscar Wilde my patron saint. His erudition and his wit dance on page with such deft lightness that makes you almost forget how serious the matters are that he puts under the microscope of his mind. I recommend pretty much everything he’s ever written, but this novel of narcissistic cruelty remains my favorite.

Collected Stories by Franz Kafka

Kafka’s surreal, terrifying novels that address human impotence in the face of the modern bureaucratic order are masterpieces. Read Metamorphosis, the Trial, and the Castle, and weep. But his short stories are as equally engaging in tackling the same subjects, and are more accessible.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

You can try tackling Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake - there is no shame in failure. But before or after you fail, consider this quintessential novel of a young man in search for artistic meaning in a society - represented by family and religion - hellbent on denying him one.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This had to be the last of my recommendations. Heartbreakingly human, uplifting, a confirmation of everything that is good and important in us, read it by yourself and read it with every child you know. It’s Ok to cry.