1. Secret Son by Laila Lalami n+#*
2. A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart n#
3. Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson r+#
4. More Watery Still by Patricia Young p+
5. What I Remember from My Time on Earth by Patricia Young p
6. Dogs and Goddesses by Jennifer Crusie, Anne Stuart & Lani Diane Rich n+ (nb: I’ve read one previous book by Rich)
7. The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus n+
8. Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen n+
9. Back Roads by Tawni O’Dell n+#
10. The End of East by Jen Sookfong Lee n+#
11. T is for Trespass by Sue Grafton n#
12. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami m+#
13. Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley n+#
14. Peril Over the Airport by Helen Wells n
15. An Unkindness of Ravens by Ruth Rendell n#
16. Not in the Flesh by Ruth Rendell n#
17. Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy n
18. The Glass Cell by Patricia Highsmith n#
19. Anything Considered by Peter Mayle n
20. The Lighthouse by P.D. James n
21. In the Fold by Rachel Cusk n+
22. The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook by Jaden Hair r+#
23. Turning Life into Fiction by Robin Hemley nf+

Comprehensives (Essays, Articles, Books)

1. “Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the art of simulation” by Espen Aarseth
2. “The problem of speech genres” by Mikhail M. Bakhtin
3. “The hero, and the position of the author with regard to the hero, in Dostoevsky’s art” by Mikhail M. Bakhtin
4. “Author and hero in aesthetic activity” by Mikhail M. Bakhtin
5. “What is an author?” by Michel Foucault
6. “A lie that tells the truth: Memoir and the art of memory” by Joel Agee
7. “Reading in a digital age” by Sven Birkerts
8. “Fiction tells all” by Henry Seidel Canby
9. “Is Google making us stupid? What the internet is doing to our brains” by Nicholas Carr
10. “Bookishness: A brief introduction” by Jonathan Freedman
11. “The art of self: Autobiography in an age of narcissism” by William H. Gass
12. “The aesthetic of bookishness in twenty-first-century literature” by Jessica Pressman
13. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
14. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative by Mieke Bal
15. Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory by Patrick O’Neill
16. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative by Gerald Prince
17. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” “The Death of the Author” & “From Work to Text” in Image, Music, Text by Roland Barthes
18. “Ludology meets narratology: Similarities and differences between (video)games and narrative”  by Gonzalo Frasca
19. Understanding Me edited by Stephanie McLuhan & David Staines
20. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by Walter Ong
21. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields

Ratings Code:

a anthology
e essays
m memoir
n novel
nf non-fiction
p poetry
s short stories
r recipes
+ first book by this author
# will read more by this author
* best on this list