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. 

11 books
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Has the dilemma of modernity been better expressed?

J. G. Ballard

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

Vladimir Nabokov

America unpacked with hilarious, amazingly fluid style.

Robert Musil

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

Fred Gipson

The first book to make me cry.

Jack Kerouac

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

Jane Austen

Tender, precise, and perfect.

Shikibu Murasaki

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

Laurence Sterne

The funniest book ever written.

James Joyce

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

Don DeLillo

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

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