10 books:
- Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick
- The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
- Some Ether, Nick Flynn
- Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer
- We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Philip Gourevitch
- Othello, William Shakespeare
- Song and Dance: Poems, Alan Shapiro
- The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
Little Stories 
If I could add to this: Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” Ernesto Sabato’s “The Tunnel,” and James Agee’s “A Death in the Family”
Nice posts.Thanks for the titles! “The Idiot” is one of my favorite books, though others I have to read 🙂
See also, “The Trouble With Being Born” – Emil Cioran. Brrr.