Ken Burns's Reading List

"I don't know anything that floats my boat the way Anna Karenina does."

"I get up and literally within the first few minutes of my day I read this day's thing by Tolstoy."

"I am rereading for the third time overall and second time in three years A Farewell to Arms."

"I just love it."

"They're wonderful books with dense, rich plot and carefully drawn characters."

"I was really into Born to Run."

"It's a really wonderful book, imagining a less dystopian future. It does have disasters and climate change, but it also has sort of human adaptability, and it's really spectacular."

"His memoir is called Borges and Me. Their adventures are, to say the least, as great as any Borges story. It is great."

"When I was in college that book opened my head and my heart like a can opener. I'm never really too far away from that."

"Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written two or three novels that have rearranged my molecules."

"Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written two or three novels that have rearranged my molecules."

"I read the entire thing cover to cover in one sitting. And I just thought, Oh my God, what a great gift."

"I cannot say enough about Isabel Wilkerson. I think The Warmth of Other Suns and, most recently, Caste are really, really important books that are also incredibly accessible."

"I cannot say enough about Isabel Wilkerson. I think The Warmth of Other Suns and, most recently, Caste are really, really important books that are also incredibly accessible."

"If The Soldiers’ Tale gives you a sense of Sam’s reflective side, Flights of Passage gives you a sense of his goodness. It begins as a young man heads to a Minneapolis recruiting station, and becomes his story about learning to be a soldier. It really teaches you stuff. A wonderful book."

"Fussell was an infantryman in Western Europe, where the average life expectancy on the line was 17 days. He survived six months before being severely wounded. His intimate, moment-to-moment memoir is filled with the kinds of things you can’t believe a 19-year-old has ever seen."

"As a 19-year-old, Fussell was good at killing other people, and what that allowed him to do was provide the rest of us with some of the most searing observations about war I’ve ever come across. Like Sam Hynes, he’s now a professor. Wartime is a partly personal, partly scholarly look at battlefield realities."