- Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad
- Charles Baxter, Gryphon
- Josephine Tey, Miss Pym Disposes
- David Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading
- Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
- David Mamet, The Old Religion
- Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars
- Francis Bacon, The Essays
- Emily Fox Gordon, The Book of Days: Personal Essays
- Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
- Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
- L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
- Muriel Spark, The Public Image
- Jane Carlyle, I Too am Here
- Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
- May Sarton, A Small Room
- David Markson, Epitaph for a Dead Beat
- David Markson, Epitaph for a Tramp
- Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show
- Ted Hughes, Poems
- Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness
- Sam Savage, Firmin
- Lawrence Weschler, Vermeer in Bosnia
- Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett, Death Rites
- Margaret Oliphant, The Perpetual Curate
- Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
- Rosy Thornton, The Tapestry of Love
- The Selected Poems of T’ao Ch’ien
- Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections
- Joshua Ferris, Then We Came To the End
- Sarah Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered
- Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
- Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
- Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
- Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
- Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
- Rosamund Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz
- Kathleen Norris, The Virgin of Bennington
- Louise Gluck, Proofs and Theories
- L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
- Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
- Lori Soderlind, Chasing Montana
- John Williams, Stoner
- Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
- Samuel Beckett, Molloy
- Lorna Sage, Bad Blood
- Elif Batuman, The Possessed
- Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps
- Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History
- The Bhagavad Gita
- Jane Austen, Emma
- Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
- Elizabeth George, Payment in Blood
- Jane Gardam, Old Filth
- David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
- W.G. Sebald, Vertigo
- Jacqueline Winspear, The Mapping of Love and Death
- Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
- Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette
- Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates
- Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind
- Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
- Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity
- The Best American Essays 2008
- Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper
- Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
- Miklós Vámos, The Book of Fathers
- Jenny Diski, The Sixties
- Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
Of Books and Bicycles 