These are the books that I loved when I first read them, that influenced my thinking in one way or another and that continue to linger in the back of my mind.
Georges Perec: La vie. Mode d'emploi
David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest
Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire
Claude Lévi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques
James Joyce: Ulysses
Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland
Roberto Calasso: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
Don DeLillo: Underworld
Djuna Barnes: Nightwood
Marcel Proust: À la recherche du temps perdu
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophische Untersuchungen
Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems
Uwe Johnson: Jahrestage
Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths/Fictions/The Aleph
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Vasily Grossman: Life and Fate
Thomas Bernhard: Alte Meister
Thomas Bernhard: Das Kalkwerk
Italo Calvino: If On a Winter's Night a Traveller
Mark Z. Danielewski: House of Leaves
Olivier Rolin: L'Invention du monde
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
J.G. Ballard: The Atrocity Exhibition
Ali Smith: How To Be Both
David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas
Tom McCarthy: Remainder
Nicholson Baker: The Mezzanine
Michel Houellebecq: Les Particules Elémentaires
John Fante: Ask the Dust
Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
Cees Nooteboom: Rituelen
W.F. Hermans: Nooit meer slapen
W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz
Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Helen Macdonald: H Is for Hawk
Mikhail Shiskin: The Light and the Dark
Joe Brainard: I Remember
Spinoza: Ethics
Ted Chiang: Stories of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang: Exhalation