BY MARIA POPOVA

The most reliable portal into another’s psyche is the mental library of that person’s favorite books — those foundational idea-bricks of which we build the home for our interior lives, the integral support beams of our personhood and values. And who doesn’t long for such a portal into humanity’s most robust yet spacious minds? Joining history’s notable reading lists — including those of Leo Tolstoy, Susan Sontag, Alan Turing, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Stewart Brand, Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson — is Gabriel García Márquez (March 6, 1927–April 17, 2014).

Woven into Living to Tell the Tale (public library) — the autobiography that gave us the emboldening story of García Márquez’s unlikely beginnings as a writer — is the reading that shaped his mind and creative destiny. “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it,” García Márquez writes, and kindred-spirited readers instantly know that memorable books are the existential markers of life’s lived and remembered chapters.

Here are the books that most influenced García Márquez — beginning with his teenage years at boarding school, of which he recalls: “The best thing at the liceo were the books read aloud before we went to sleep.” — along with some of the endearing anecdotes he tells about them.

1. The Magic Mountain (public library) by Thomas Mann
2. The Man in the Iron Mask (free ebook | public library) by Alexandre Dumas
3. Ulysses (free ebook | public library) by James Joyce
4. The Sound and the Fury (public library) by William Faulkner
5. As I Lay Dying (public library) by William Faulkner
6. The Wild Palms (public library) by William Faulkner
7. Oedipus Rex (free ebook | public library) by Sophocles
8. The House of the Seven Gables (free ebook | public library) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
9. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (free ebook | public library) by Harriet Beecher Stowe
10. Moby-Dick (free ebook | public library) by Herman Melville
11. Sons and Lovers (free ebook | public library) by D.H. Lawrence
12. The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights (free ebook | public library)
13. The Metamorphosis (public library) by Franz Kafka
14. The Aleph and Other Stories (public library) by Jorge Luis Borges
15. The Collected Stories (public library) by Ernest Hemingway
16. Point Counter Point (public library) by Aldous Huxley
17. Of Mice and Men (public library) by John Steinbeck
18. The Grapes of Wrath (public library) by John Steinbeck
19. Tobacco Road (public library) by Erskine Caldwell
20. Stories (public library) by Katherine Mansfield
21. Manhattan Transfer (public library) by John Dos Passos
22. Portrait of Jennie (public library) by Robert Nathan
23. Orlando (public library) by Virginia Woolf
24. Mrs. Dalloway (public library) by Virginia Woolf

Living to Tell the Tale is a glorious read in its entirety — the humbling and infinitely heartening life-story of one of the greatest writers humanity ever produced. Couple it with Old Lady Woolf on how one should read a book.