In no particular order:

The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong
Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu
The Red Night Trilogy of William S. Burroughs (Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, The Western Lands)
On the Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac
Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

I’m hanging on to my account until June 30th—so I can say a bittersweet goodbye to Reddit is Fun—and then I’m deleting it; Reddit is only going to get worse from here, and I don’t want to be around to see it. I’m grateful that this mess has driven so many of us to seek out kinder, more thoughtful communities, and I hope said communities can retain their exceptional cultures as the Reddit exodus continues to escalate.

Here’s a link to Cory Doctorow’s article on the ‘enshittification’ of TikTok, which reads as supremely relevant here.

For me, poetry has the greater allure;

My prose is unsure and immature—

I’ve spent more time designing rhymes;

It used to be a hobby of mine!

A few of my favorite poets that come to mind:

Charles Baudelaire

Arthur Rimbaud

Paul Verlaine

Ezra Pound

Gregory Corso

Sappho

Sylvia Plath

Li Bai

Dostoevsky is one of my all-time favorites! The Idiot made me weep the first time I read it.