Originally scribbled on a piece of paper and given to her nephew Griffin Dunne, who in turn shared it with then titled brainpickings.org (now themarginalian.org) - we give you Joan Didions’favourite books:

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Victory by Joseph Conrad

Guerrillas by V.S. Naipaul

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

The Novels of Henry James: Washington Square, Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw

Speedboat by Renata Adler

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood

Collected Poems by Robert Lowell

Collected Poems by W.H. Auden