Lyle is an avid reader, and many of his favorite books fall into one of four categories: those so exciting he wishes he could read again with fresh eyes, those which have beautiful style or substance, those which inspire him to improve himself, and those which transport him into the great world beyond. Friend him on Goodreads!

 
 

“For men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has a right to say to himself: I've carried out God's sacred will on earth.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Wishes he could read again for the first time

  • Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote

    • IV: Mojave

  • Ubik by Philip K. Dick

  • A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

  • The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

  • The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

  • Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse

  • Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

  • A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

  • The Aspern Papers by Henry James

  • Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

  • The Dark Forest and Death’s End by Cixin Liu

  • A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin

  • Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

  • In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

  • The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

  • Normal People by Sally Rooney

  • The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss

  • Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling

    • The Prisoner of Azkaban

    • The Order of the Phoenix

    • The Deathly Hallows, Ch 33: The Prince’s Tale

  • Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

  • The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

  • The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

  • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

  • A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

  • To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

 
 

“O, I can throw my cap at who I like because it's leap year.” – James Joyce, Ulysses

Love of style or substance

  • 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

    • The Part about the Critics

    • The Part about Archimboldi

  • Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

  • The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan

  • Ulysses by James Joyce

    • Part II, Episode 13: “Nausicaa”

  • The Trial by Franz Kafka

  • Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

    • Part Two: Hema and Kaushik

  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

  • The Giver by Lois Lowry

  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

  • Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

  • Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

  • Traveler of the Century by Andrés Neuman

  • William Shakespeare

    • Hamlet

    • Macbeth

    • Othello

    • Henry IV

    • Antony and Cleopatra

    • King Lear

  • East of Eden by John Steinbeck

  • The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson

  • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

  • Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

  • The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

 
 

“If you do everything, you’ll win” – LBJ

Growth education

  • The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

  • Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

  • The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan

  • A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

  • Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

  • Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

  • Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

  • The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova

  • The Greater Journey by David McCullough

  • The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, and Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

  • Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

  • The Snowball by Alice Schroeder

  • Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

  • A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

 
 

“the first sip is joy the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.” – Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

The Wide World

  • The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

  • Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang

  • Paris in Winter by David Coggins

  • The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

  • The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

  • Tun-huang by Yasushi Inoue

  • Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

  • The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

  • Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

  • 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

  • Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

  • Divergent by Veronica Roth

  • I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki

  • Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

 
 

“And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.” – Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch