Poems:

“That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

“The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot

“A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne

“Love (III)” by George Herbert

“Staying Power” by Jeanne Murray Walker

Nonfiction:

Inheriting Paradise by Vigen Guroian

Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

A Life Discarded by Alexander Masters

An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child by Anthony Esolen

The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis

“How to Live without Irony” by Christy Wampole

Forward to Witness by Whittaker Chambers

Plays:

The Tempest by William Shakespeare

Wit by Margaret Edson

Novels:

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

True Grit by Charles Portis

The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

The Lord of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (beginning with The Hobbit)

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (but only if you’re sixteen—that’s the window)

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton (also probably best if you’re around sixteen, which, incidentally, is a great time for reading)

Short Stories:

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

“The Ransom of Red Chief” by O. Henry

“The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Revelation” by Flannery O’Conner

Picture Books:

The Cozy Book by Mary Ann Hoberman

One Morning in Maine by Robert McCloskey

I Like You by Sandol Stoddard Warburg

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown

Periodicals:

The Quad

The Wall Street Journal Weekend Section

Vogue (for the clothes, not the words)

Granted, these lists are unbalanced and incomplete. I have the rest of my life the fill them out, though. In the meantime, have at my favorite children’s books.