Reading can be a spiritual practice, and libraries and independent bookstores can be houses of worship. Some of my favorite and most transformative reading experiences have been with this very abbreviated list of books in no particular order:
- Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, David Wojnarowicz
- Funeral Diva, Pamela Sneed
- Countersexual Manifesto, Paul Preciado
- Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead
- Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, Delores Williams
- Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel R. Delany
- The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet, Rubem Alves
- Trauma Stewardship, Laura van Dernoot with Connie Burk
- anybody, Ari Banias
- Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson
- Living in the Shadow of the Cross, Paul Kivel
- Bestiary, Donika Kelly
- Absolute Solitude, Dulce Maria Loynaz
- In the Presence of Absence, Mahmoud Darwish
- Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong
- Eve Out of her Ruins, Ananda Devi
- The Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid
- The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, Wayne Koestenbaum
- A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Roland Barthes
- “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde
- The Ends of the World, Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
- Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, Saidiya Hartman Anachronic Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood