Since Candy Minx and I started The Agency podcast, we’ve talked about quite a number of books in various contexts. We thought some listeners would appreciate a reference document to them, so here is The Agency Reading List.

I’ll update the list every time another book is discussed during an episode of The Agency.

Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
The Art of War by Sun Szu
Gallery of Clouds by Rachel Eisendrath
The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow
Journey to the East by Herrmann Hesse
Indians on Vacations by Thomas King
The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn
The Big Picture by Sean Carroll
How the One-armed Sister Sweeps her House by Cherie Jones
The Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry
The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History by Molly Caldwell Crosby
All the Rage by Brad Fraser
Dylan and Me: 50 Years of Adventures by Louie Kemp
Cognition in the Globe by Evelyn Tribble
Useful Delusions by Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler
Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots
Long Time Coming by Michael Eric Dys
Life by Keith Richards
Miss O’Dell by Chris O’Dell
Just Kids by Patti Smith
The Man Who Carried Cash by Julie Chadwick
On Writing by Stephen King
How Music Works by David Byrne
The House of All Sorts by Emily Carr
The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carré
Dangerous Rivers by R.M. Patterson
The Singing Wilderness by Sigurd F. Olson
The Girl on a Train by Paula Hawkins
The Monster Show by David J. Skal
Scar Lover by Harry Crews
Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver
Anatomy of a Fisherman by Robert Traver
Trout Madness by Robert Traver
The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes
Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes by Paula L. Woods
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Erin Meyer and Reed Hastings
How to think like Shakespeare by Scott Newstok
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Giants – The Global Power Elite by Peter Phillips
State of Siege by Eric Ambler
The Bulldog and the Helix by Shayne Morrow
The Wallander novels by Henning Mankell,
How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X Kendi
Killshot by Elmore Leonard
Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard
The Mulching of America by Harry Crews
Chess Story by Stefan Zweig
The Girl Who Played Go by Shan Sa
The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata
Our Kind by Marvin Harris
Bad Company – Drugs, Hollywood and The Cotton Club by Steve Wick
Maus by Art Spiegelman (graphic novel)
This is Serious: Canadian Indie Comics (various – exhibition catalog)
Hollywood from Vietnam to Regan by Robin Wood
Stranger than we can Imagine: making sense of the Twentieth Century by John Higgs
Enrico Baj: Dada Impressionist by Herbert C. Lust
Hitchcock’s Films Revisited by Robin Wood
Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky
Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line by Ben Hamper
This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein
Squeeze Box Man: The Lazy Allen Stories by Eugene Knapik
Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould
Eating Vietnam – Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table by Graham Holliday
Trainspotting by Irvine Walsh
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Tijuana by John Price
The Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel
The Red Cavalry Stories by Isaac Babel
Mushrooms of Ontario and Eastern Canada by George Barron
Permanent Record by Edward Snowdon
Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora
The Mushroom Hunters – On the Trail of an Underground America by Langdon Cook
American Splendor by Harvey Pekar
Leaving Richard’s Valley by Michael Deforge
Bastard by Max de Radiguès
My New York Diary by Julie Doucet
On the Clock – What low wage work did to me and how it drives America insane by Emily Guendelsberger
Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
How to Change your Mind by Michael Pollan
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare
Dog of the South by Charles Portis
True Grit by Charles Portis
Norwood by Charles Portis

SUBLIST: The Books on Paterson’s bookshelf in the film Paterson:
Consider the Lobster and other Essays by David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
Selected Prose and Poetry by Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall by Albert Camus
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Collected Earlier Poems by William Carlos Williams
Paterson by William Carlos Williams
The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery
Howl and Other Poems by Allan Ginsberg
On the Great Atlantic Rainway by Kenneth Koch
Alone and not Alone by Ron Padgett
The Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens
Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The Walk by Robert Walser
Collected Poems by John Ashbery
Kill All Your Darlings by Luc Sante
Save the Last Dance for Satan by Nick Tosches
This Planet is Doomed: The Science Fiction Poetry by Sun Ra
Gone Man Squared by Royston Ellis
The Baltimore Atrocities by John Dermot Woods
Prophetica Book I by Sun Ra
Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson
I Fought the Law: The Life and Strange Death of Bobby Fuller by Miriam Linna