Susan Sontag lived in many realms. She played into the conditions of mayhem.

An uncompromising thinker and prolific reader, describing Sontag feels more like writing fiction than depicting a life.

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 Sontag's unpublished essays on Sartre.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 woman, 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: 

Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad

The Divine Comedy by Dante

The Journals of André Gide by André Gide

The Immoralist by André Gide

Faust by Goethe

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

On the Nature of Things by Lucretius

Three Lives: Stories of the Good Anna, Melanctha, and the Gentle Lena by Gertrude Stein

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibz

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

The Trial by Franz Kafka

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot