A selection of my favorite readings & watchings throughout the years (in alphabetical order.) Those with * next to them are my top picks.

Books and Articles

  • A Long and Happy Life by Reynolds Price*

  • All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy*

  • Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott*

  • Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

  • Click by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

  • Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

  • Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy*

  • Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

  • Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa*

  • Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford*

  • Goodbye Vitamin by Rachel Khong*

  • How to Do Great Work by Paul Graham

  • If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

  • JPod by Douglas Coupland*

  • Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro*

  • My Inner Sky by Mari Andrew

  • Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

  • Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise by David Foster Wallace

  • Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

  • That’ll Never Work by Marc Randolph

  • The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron by Rebecca Keegan*

  • The Idiot by Elif Batuman*

  • The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

  • The Red Notebook by Paul Auster*

  • The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

  • Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel by Robert Gipe

  • Watership Down by Richard Adams*

  • When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Movies and Shows (Director/Creator)

  • Always Be My Maybe (Nahnatchka Khan)

  • American Psycho (Mary Harron)

  • Anora (Sean Baker)

  • Boyhood* (Richard Linklater)

  • Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater)

  • Didi (Sean Wang)

  • Drive* (Nicolas Winding Refn)

  • Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)

  • Gattaca (Andrew Niccol)

  • Gilmore Girls (Amy Sherman-Palladino)

  • Hacks (Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, Jen Statsky)

  • Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb)

  • Last Holiday* (Wayne Wang)

  • Love Actually (Richard Curtis)

  • Lust, Caution (Ang Lee)

  • Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh)

  • Masterchef (Brian Smith; features my favorite version of Gordon Ramsay)

  • Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)

  • Notting Hill (Roger Michell)

  • Past Lives (Celine Song)

  • Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Destin Daniel Cretton)

  • Smoke* (Wayne Wang)

  • Super Troopers (Jay Chandrasekhar)

  • The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)

  • The Florida Project* (Sean Baker)

  • The Secret of My Success (Herbert Ross)

  • The Wedding Banquet (Andrew Ahn)

  • Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund)

  • WALL-E* (Andrew Stanton)

  • What We Do in the Shadows (Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi; the show is also A+)

  • Worth It (Steven Lim; the only YouTube show I’ve watched)