Every Book and Author Mentioned in Sigrid Nunez's Novel, The Vulnerables

one author's reading list

Recently, on episode #117 of Books Are My People, I recommended Sigrid Nunez’s novel, The Vulnerables. This is a wonderful, slim and thoughtful book about a woman who is asked to parrot-sit for an acquaintance in the city during the pandemic. The unnamed narrator is struggling with her own writing, and much of the prose is an exploration of her interiority, reflecting on works of literature and writers she admires.

As promised on that episode, I’ve compiled a list of all of the works of fiction as well as all of the writers and poets Nunez mentions in The Vulnerables. I think this list makes an incredible resource for any reader or writer out there.

If a book is in parentheticals, I’ve added it simply to give an example of that particular writer’s work. If there’s a star next to it, it means I’ve read it.

My list is written in the order in which the books or writers’ and poets’ names appear in the novel:

The Years by Virginia Wolf

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

*Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

M. Coetzee (The Master of Petersburg)

*T.S. Elliot (The Essential T.S. Elliot)

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

*Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Marianne Moore (The Poems of Marianne Moore)

Joseph Brodsky (Nativity Poems: bilingual edition.)

Edna O’Brian (In the Forest)

Jean-Jaques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

*Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)

Joan Didion “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” article

Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song)

*Allen Ginsberg (Howl and Other Poems)

*Chekov (Lady With A Dog) aside: When I read this, I could have sworn it was called Lady with a Lapdog.)

Borges (The Rigor of Angels)

Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit)

Louis-FerdinandCeline (Journey to the End of the Night)

*Flannery O’Connor (A Good Man Is Hard To Find)

Alan Bennett (The Uncommon Reader)

John Banville (The Singularities)

*Gabrielle Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

H.L. Mencken (On American Literature)

John Maynard Keynes (Essays in Persuasion)

Mythology by Edith Hamilton

Frederich Nietzche (The Best of Frederich Nietzsche)

*Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Stendhal (The Red and The Black)

Georges Perec (An Attempt at Exhausting A Place in Paris)

Thomas Hood (The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood)

Phillip Larkin (Phillip Larkin The Completed Poems)

The Collection Blanche by Editions Gallimard

*The Stranger by Albert Camus

Nausea by John Paul Sartre

*On the Road by Jack Keruak

William Faulkner (*The Sound and the Fury)

Salman Rushdie (*Midnight’s Children)

Samuel Beckett (*Waiting for Godot)

Bertolt Brecht (Selected Poems)

Elizabeth Barret Browning (The Collected Poems)

Annie Ernaux (Shame)

Antoine Gallimard

Marcel Proust (Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time)

Christopher Isherwood (A Single Man)

Elizabeth Bishop (Poems)

Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

I have so much reading to do in this lifetime! Any favorites from this list? Has anyone else read The Vulnerables?

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