Several years ago I quit my job and started writing a novel. Since then, I’ve spent a good chunk of every weekday reading, writing and thinking about that story. To stay focused, I put together a reading list and wrote brief reviews of those books.

Though it took twice as long as I thought it would – and I ended up reading twice as many books – my first novel is now complete. The reading list was so integral to my development as an author that I wanted to do it all over again. Below is the list I’ll tackle as I start writing the next book … a sort of post-graduate do-it-yourself MFA reading list:

1. The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
2. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
3. The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis
4. Swimming in the Volcano by Bob Shacochis
5. The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
6. The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
7. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
8. The Shadow of the Shadow by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
9. Returning as Shadows by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
10. Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
11. The Sinaloa Story by Barry Gifford
12. The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar
13. At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcon
14. The City and the City by China Miéville
15. Truth Like the Sun by Jim Lynch
16. Querencia by Stephen Bodio
17. Provinces of Night by William Gay
18. Damascus Gate by Robert Stone
19. In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust
20. Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
21. Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta
22. Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
23. The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya
24. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
25. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
26. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
27. Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru
28. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
29. C by Tom McCarthy
30. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
31. The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
32. Personae by Sergio de la Pava
33. The Deadly Percheron by John Franklin Bardin
34. A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews
35. The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West
36. The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
37. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
38. Nightmare Alley by William Lindsey Gresham
39. A Scanner Darkly by Phillip K. Dick
40. Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
41. The Body Artist by Don DeLillo
42. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
43. Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
44. Atonement by Ian McEwan
45. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
46. Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
47. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
48. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
49. Room by Emma Donoghue
50. Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden
51. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
52. The Mexico City Reader by Rubén Gallo