“There is nothing more beautiful than the book – the paper, the font, the cloth. Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”

Patti Smith.

Punk poet.

Benjamin Moser's biography Sontag accounts for many of her accolades and experiences. Sontag's unpublished essays on Sartre. Her trysts with Robert Kennedy & Annie Leibovitz. Her dabbling in amfetamines, her visit to Berlin just as the Berlin Wall fell, her direction of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in wartorn Sarajevo, we could go on.

A fearless and uncompromising thinker, her published work Notes on Camp, Illness as Metaphor (following on from her cancer diagnosis) On Photography and Freud (a book she allegedly wrote, that her ex-husband took credit for) to name a few, have left an indelible mark on the literary landscape. Always challenging conventions and confronting uncomfortable truths. Sontag's work endures, but what did she read? What work did she admire? Pages have curated a list of books revered and re-read by Sontag. We give you Sontags' shortlist:

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse
The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Billy Budd by Herman Melville
Songs of Innocence by William Blake
The Wild Boys by William Burroughs 2666 by Roberto Bolano
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud
Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Villette by Charlotte Bronte
The Process by Brion Gysin
Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi
Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag
The Oblivion Seekers by Isabelle Everhardt
The Women of Cairo by Gérard de Nerval
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by J.D. Salinger
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Night of Serious Drinking by René Daumal
Swann in Love by Marcel Proust
A Happy Death by Albert Camus
The First Man by Albert Camus
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
Anything by H.P. Lovecraft
Anything by W.G. Sebald
The Thief’s Journal or anything by Jean Genet
The Arcades Project or anything by Walter Benjamin
Poet in New York by Federico García Lorca
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll
The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
Ice or Anything by Anna Kavan
The Divine Proportion by H.E. Huntley
Nadja by André Breton
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira
Anthology by Artaud
Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden
Songs of Innocence by William Blake
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Amulet by Roberto Bolaño
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Petting Zoo by Jim Carroll
Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Orphée by Jean Cocteau
The Divine Comedy by Dante (also rec’d by Susan Sontag)
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazaz
The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Four Major Plays by Henrik Ibsen
A Scarcity of Love by Anna Kavan
The Complete Fiction by H.P. Lovecraft
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck
Black Spring by Henry Miller
The Beach Café by Mohammed Mrabet
Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings by Vladimir Nabokov
A Dog of Flanders by Ouida
After-Dinner Declarations by Nicanor Parra
Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath
After Nature and by W.G. Sebald
Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
Hawk Moon by Sam Shepard
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag
The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
The Little Lame Prince by Rosemary Wells
Tractatus Logico by Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera by Bertram David Wolfe

“Essential to anyone in search of concrete delirium.” - In reference to the Petting Zoo

“Every time I read Bolaño I feel so inspired, I just want to write…He’s a genius – the expansiveness he creates, how he relates one book to another – he’s set a new template for writing.” -PS

“Now, I can tell you about some women writers who truly are fantastic. One is Anna Kavan. She writes stories like I approach Land of a Thousand Dances: she’s caught in a haze and then a light, a little teeny light, come through. It could be a leopard, that light, or it could be a spot of blood. It could be anything. But she hooks onto that and spirals out. And she does it within the accessible rhythms of plot, and that’s really exciting. She’s not hung up with being a woman, she just keeps extending herself, keeps telescoping language and plot.” -PS Scarcity of Love

“My copy of Ariel [was] given to me when I was twenty. Ariel became the book of my life then, drawing me to a poet with hair worthy of a Breck commercial and the incisive observational powers of a female surgeon cutting out her own heart. With little effort I visualized my Ariel perfectly. Slim, with faded black cloth, that I opened in my mind, noting my youthful signature on the cream endpaper. I turned the pages, revisiting the shape of each poem.” -PS

“At one time the three lengthy poems in this slim volume had such a profound effect on me that I could hardly bear to read them. Scarcely would I enter their world before I’d be transported to a myriad of other worlds.” -PS - After Nature

This list was compiled with the help of openculture.com & www.themarginalian.org