The Sacred Canopy – Peter Berger

I read this right when my conservative, evangelical faith started to seem less certain than I had been taught it was. Berger took that certainty, lit it on fire, threw it out the window, pissed on it, lit it on fire again, and then ran over it with an eighteen wheeler. That was in 1995. Maybe one day I will recover.

Memoir from Antproof Case – Mark Helprin

Not my favourite book of all time, but the book of my all-time favourite reading experience: I was twenty-two, single, lonely, sitting on top of the dryer in the storage room of my basement apartment on Furby Street in Winnipeg, drinking the cheapest bottle of champagne I could find, reading Helprin. Best reading moment ever.

A Soldier of the Great War – Mark Helprin

Gorgeous brain candy.

The Shallows – Nicholas Carr

Evidence to suggest that sitting there reading this goofy blog might actually be making you dumber.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – David Foster Wallace

Required reading for anyone planning a week long vacation on a cruise ship.

Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco

I’d estimate that I understood somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of what’s going on here, but I still had to read it through to the end.

Journey of the Universe – Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker

However well-intentioned the authors may have been, if this is the most hopeful sort of response we can come up with outside of any of the traditional religious responses to the perennial problems of being human, we’re doomed.

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

Can’t say that I really liked it, but the tone and imagery stuck in my imagination for months.

A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers

Because “A Funny, Compelling, Self-indulgent Memoir by a Navel-Gazing Twenty-Something” somehow isn’t quite as catchy.

Childhood Under Siege – Joel Bakan

We teach our kids, “Don’t take candy from strangers,” but we readily let them take junk pharmaceuticals, junk videogames, junk schooling, and junk sexuality from smiling corporate strangers who are far more likely than some creepy balding guy in a white van to kidnap them and hijack their imaginations.