 | Self-Reliance and Other Essays (Dover Thrift Editions) by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Buy new: $3.50 / Used from: $0.01 Supposedly it's dangerous to read any book the way fundamentalists read the bible, but whatever that's how I read this book. I wish I could inject it into my veins.
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 | Blow-Up: And Other Stories by Julio Cortazar
Buy new: $11.20 / Used from: $2.43 This is not as exhausting as Hopscotch. There's a story about a man who vomits up baby rabbits.
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 | The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel by Mark Leyner
Buy new: $10.40 / Used from: $1.77 This is the way David Foster Wallace would write if he hadn't been picked on in school.
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 | Falling in Place by Ann Beattie
Buy new: $17.10 / Used from: $0.01 I doubted that a woman other than Atwood could write a big orchestral modernist novel until I read this.
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 | The End of Vandalism: A Novel by Tom Drury
Buy new: $11.20 / Used from: $0.21 This is the same, like big and overwhelming and absorbing. Also, he reminds me of Richard Yates. Someone chronicling marriage and smalltown life in America.
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 | Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel (P.S.) by Michael Chabon
Buy new: $11.16 / Used from: $2.83 WHAT IF... the Great Gatsby was written in the 80s (decade of crappier decadence than the 20s) and it had a sense of humor? Michael Chabon will tell you what if.
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 | Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism by Daniel Pinchbeck
Buy new: $10.19 / Used from: $8.44 This book makes me want to go to Africa and do the really serious religious-ritual psychedelic drugs. But if you never make it there, dreaming at night is the same thing. Especially with a bottle of cough syrup before bed.
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 | How to Write by Gertrude Stein
Buy new: $11.66 / Used from: $3.50 She's like an alien who uses language in a totally different way than humans do, learns English and messes with it.
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 | The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Oprah's Book Club) by Carson McCullers
Buy new: $9.86 / Used from: $0.01 I just realized both she and Flannery O'Connor were southern women writers who died at around age 30 and who wrote really serious deep stories. She takes writing as seriously as Hemingway does, but she isn't as cold.
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 | Underground River and Other Stories (Latin American Women Writers) by Ines Arredondo
Buy new: $15.00 / Used from: $0.37 YES. Mexico's most important woman writer, I think. (I'm not the one to ask.) "The great lovers of history don't have children." Etc. The great lovers in history don't have sex.
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 | Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $0.99 Malcom X replied to Joni Mitchell, "What the f$&* you talking about. Read this." And Joni Mitchell said, "Okay, it looks good," and she NEVER DID. I'm glad I didn't make the same mistake.
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 | Paradise (American Literature Series) by Donald Barthelme
Buy new: $11.01 / Used from: $3.27 What if Hugh Hefner was as thoughtful and observant and loved absurdity as much as Barthelme does? He would write this book. I almost wanted to mail it to the mansion, but who would read it? Not Kendra, not Holly, not Hef. Do people who go on reality shows read?
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 | Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion
Buy used from: $0.66 She likes her own persona too much. Am I allowed to criticize Didion? But this is as wonderful as they say.
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 | Voices (Spanish Edition) by Antonio Porchia
Buy new: $11.90 / Used from: $6.09 "If I did not believe that the sun looked at me a little bit, I would not look at it."/// "Yes, I will go. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you."/// "I would go to heaven but I would take my hell; I would not go alone."
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