Michael Sorkin

Architect / United States / Michael Sorkin Studio

Michael Sorkin’s Book List

This is not a list of the 25 “best” books I can think of—but rather a list of 25 books that opened doors for me. Most were first read a long time ago. The list will be different tomorrow. 

25 books
Aristotle

A book that took away much adolescent fuzziness in thinking about the idea of the good.

Jane Austen

Tender, precise, and perfect.

J. G. Ballard

I do have a tooth for dystopia and this is a coolly familiar one.

Reyner Banham

Confirmed my modernist bent, offered the first picture seen of Michel de Klerk’s post office, and—via its shimmery prose—made the idea of writing about architecture plausible.

Rachel Carson

The origin point of systematic and political green thinking.

Don DeLillo

A really funny, brilliant book that makes fiction continuingly relevant and possible.

Friedrich Engels

The man was a remarkable straight talker. No better summary of the commodification of space.

Sigmund Freud

The first of Freud’s books I read and therefore the portal to vast worlds.

Allen Ginsberg

I am a sixties guy and this was a key anthem.

Fred Gipson

The first book to make me cry.

Paul A. Jackson

The young boy’s handbook of functionalist aesthetics and representation.

Jane Jacobs

As succinct and singular an explanation of urban causality as there is.

James Joyce

The most sustained act of literary invention of all time, one of those works after which things are simply not the same.

Immanuel Kant

A first serious critical armature for sorting out the meaning of taste.

Jack Kerouac

Another anthem. Captures the double dream of imaginative and spatial freedom.

Henri Lefebvre

In which it is made clear that our relationship to cities is not just functional but imaginative.

Lewis Mumford

Given to me by my mother when it was first published, this is the book that gave me my first real clues about urban history and the relationship of form and social life. It also made me a modernist.

Robert Musil

Never has a cultural condition been caught so deadpan dead to rights.

Vladimir Nabokov

America unpacked with hilarious, amazingly fluid style.

Plato

The book through which I learned how to read closely and had my utopian streak nicely jazzed.

William Shakespeare

Well, Shakespeare was the greatest writer ever. In a saturnine mood today, so I pick my favorite comedy.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Has the dilemma of modernity been better expressed?

Shikibu Murasaki

From which I learned much about both the universality and particularity of literature. (Includes one of the greatest weepy scenes in literature.)

William L. Shirer

The book that brought the swastika to the living room of every Jewish family in America also launched my fascination with the ur-porno of those incomprehensible events.

Laurence Sterne

The funniest book ever written.

comments powered by Disqus