Last updated: February 2023

Franz Kafka once wrote: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

In my podcast episode “Ice and Axes – What Makes a Favorite?”, I gave Kafka’s words some lengthy thought and concluded they make a lot of sense.  I’ve since abandoned having “favorites” and resolved to evaluate books in this new light.  When I read now, I see if a book a) gives me a new idea, b) causes me think about an old idea in a new way, or c) changes my life in some other way.  This is how I personally define an “axe” book.

The books below comprise a partial list of my “axes.”  Some of them are carryovers from my old favorites list, while others – not quite fitting the “favorite” label – have still impacted me.

My “Axe” Books – a non-exhaustive list in no precise order:

• Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
• Eugene Onegin – Alexander Pushkin
• The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Sherlock Holmes series – Arthur Conan Doyle
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
• The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
• Till We Have Faces – C. S. Lewis
• Magellania – Jules Verne
• Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
• The Painted Veil – W Somerset Maugham
• A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Sea and Poison – Shūsaku Endō
• Sachiko – Shūsaku Endō
• Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• The Holy Bible (KJV)
• The Unwomanly Face of War – Svetlana Alexievich