in response to multiple asks regarding books that have meant and still mean a great deal to me, i am creating a list of them (that i will continue to update as much as i can) that i will link on my page. thank you to those of you who are interested! :)

these texts have altered [positively] the way in which i view the world and behave [toward myself and others]—of course, this list and my [our] evolution is always in transition; these texts, however, should be helpful to the soul and mind no matter your nature/nurturing. 

enough. onward!

• Letters to a Young Poet (Rilke)
• The Dharma Bums (Kerouac)
• Mexico City Blues
• Book of Blues
• Big Sur
• Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
• The History of Sexuality:  Vol. 1 (Foucault)
• Discipline and Punish
• Madness and Civilization
• Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud)
• The Interpretation of Dreams
• On Dreams
• Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
• The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir)
• Feminist Criticism:  From Margin to Center (Bell Hooks)
• On Crimes and Punishments (Beccaria)
• The Essential Rumi
• Franny and Zooey (JD Salinger)
• Nine Stories
• Catcher in the Rye
• Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters
• A Coney Island of the Mind (Ferlinghetti)
• Pictures of the Gone World
• i:  six nonlectures (ee cummings)
• The Poetry and Prose of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Picnic, Lightning (Billy Collins)
• Ballistics
• Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (Bukowski)
• Play the Piano Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit
• The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
• The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe)
• Mother Night (Vonnegut)
• Cat’s Cradle
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• Welcome to the Monkey House
• Bluebeard
• Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons
• Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann)
• Everything In This Country Must
• Structure, Sign, and Play (Derrida)
• Discourse within the Novel (M. Bakhtin)
• The Screwtape Letters (CS Lewis)
• The Great Divorce
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (D Adams)
• Restaurant at the End of the Universe
• Next (M Crichton)
• Sphere
• Congo
• Jurassic Park
• The Lost World
• The Andromeda Strain
• How the Water Feels to the Fishes (Dave Eggers)
• Hard to Admit and Harder to Swallow (Mary Szybist)
• Consider the Lobster (David Foster Wallace)
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
• The Broom of the System
• Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury)
• Brave New World (Huxley)
• The Doors of Perception
• The Motorcycle Diaries (Che Guevara)
• The Bolivian Diary
• Le Fleurs du Mal (Baudelaire)
• Paris Spleen
• The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
• The Colossus and Other Poems
• Ariel
• [The Collected Poems]
• The Unabridged Journals
• 33 1/3:  Nas’s Illmatic (Matthew Gasteier)
• What Learning Leaves (Taylor Mali)
• The Last Time As We Are
• Traveling on Credit (Daniel Halpern)
• Ordinary Genius (Kim Addonizio)
• How to Rap:  The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC (Paul Edwards)
• Lynch on Lynch (Chris Rodley)
• Stanley Kubrick Interviews (Gene D. Phillips)
• The Poetics of Space (Gaston Bachelard)
• The Modern Element:  Essays on Contemporary Poetry (Adam Kirsch)
• Heavier than Heaven:  Kurt Cobain (Charles Cross)
• Jim Morrison:  Life, Death, Legend (Stephen Davis)
• Muscular Music (Terrance Hayes)
• Hip Logic
• Wind in a Box
• Lighthead
• Slow Lightning (Eduardo C. Corral)
• Goat in the Snow (Emily Pettit)
• Jazz 101 (John F. Szwed)