There are books for the morning and books for the evening, and then there are books for late hours — the ones that only make sense after eleven, when the house is quiet and the day's noise has finally stopped echoing.
These are five we keep returning to.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — Annie Dillard. 1974. A young writer spends a year watching a creek in Virginia and notices everything. It won the Pulitzer and reads like she wrote it in a single, very long, very awake night.
The Snow Leopard — Peter Matthiessen. 1978. A Buddhist naturalist walks across the Himalayas looking for a snow leopard he doesn't find. The book is about what he finds instead. There's no other book quite like it.
Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky. 1864. The original anti-hero, a hundred and sixty years before the term existed. Short, mean, brilliant. Best read in one sitting, late, with no one to interrupt.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost — Rebecca Solnit. 2005. Essays on navigation, blue, longing, and the productive value of not knowing where you are. The kind of book that makes you put it down every few pages and stare at the wall for a while.
The Tao Te Ching — Lao Tzu. ~6th century BC. Eighty-one short verses on how to live. There are dozens of translations. The Stephen Mitchell version reads beautifully. The Ursula K. Le Guin version is the one to keep on the nightstand.
Read one. Slowly. Don't check your phone.
— Sapere Aude