Jordan Ellenberg's Reading List

"J. Robert Lennon's great new novel, 'Subdivision,' which I just finished."

"'The Lying Lives of Adults,' by Elena Ferrante. People are kind of down on The Novel these days; Ferrante reminds you that the traditional virtues we're taught to expect from novels... are not exhausted — they still work! As long as the book is great."

"People know David Plotz but I think not so much his amazing book 'The Genius Factory,' in which he uncovers the hidden history (and complicated afterstory) of the so-called Nobel sperm bank."

"Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's 'I Do Not Come to You by Chance' is a very funny and very timely novel about truth and lies and the internet; I think it has a lot of readers in other countries but not so many in the United States."

"I loved Elif Batuman's 'The Idiot,' and not only because it has very funny math scenes in it."

"From 'Surrender on Demand,' a World War II memoir by the American secret agent/literary figure Varian Fry, I learned about the strange unsettled conditions of southern France in 1940."

"Trollope's 'He Knew He Was Right,' which I just did reread."

"I got my son CJ, who's in ninth-grade American history, to read 'Big Trouble,' by J. Anthony Lukas, mainly so that I could read it in tandem with him and finally finish it. It's the entire history of the United States from the Civil War through the turn of the 20th century tied together through the story of the assassination by dynamite of a former governor of Idaho."

"'Seeing Like a State,' by James C. Scott. I learned a lot from it about the notion of 'legibility,' the way governments create formal structures that allow them to make sense of the messy world of people. The book teaches epistemic humility."

"What made me understand that a book could lift a cover off the world and show you how strange things were, especially normal things, were the novels of Daniel Pinkwater, especially 'Lizard Music.' I first wanted to become a writer to spread the gospel of 'Lizard Music.'"

"the two that made the biggest impressions on me were Douglas Hofstadter's 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' and 'The Bill James Baseball Abstract, 1982,' probably because neither one billed itself as a book about mathematics."

"my beloved English teacher gave me a copy of 'The Handmaid's Tale' to read and write about. I became obsessed and read all of Atwood's 1970s novels."