A lot of these posts are meant for my daughters at some point. In case they ever care to ask “I wonder why he thought that way?” Hopefully they’ll be able to ask me whatever they want for as long as they are curious to ask, but who knows what’s around the bend.

This is a canon of books; it’s mine. These books helped shape my thinking, and they helped shaped my idea of what art is. I’m just going to do it from memory at first and then add to it as time goes on. Any misspellings have nothing to do with a lack of respect for the authors or their work.

Le Canon de BDJ:

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Iliad by Homer

The Odyssey by Homer

Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe

Beckett’s Trilogy by Samuel Beckett

Dubliners by James Joyce

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

Beowulf by a bunch of dead people

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

All the Sherlock Holmes Stories (these got me through my deployment in Saudi Arabia)

Song of Napalm by Bruce Weigl

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Dispatches by Michael Herr

Barn Burning by William Faulkner (other stories of his too, but this one was the best for me).

The Stick Soldiers by Hugh J. Martin

The Quail Who Wears the Shirt by Jeremy T. Wilson

Okay, and that is it for now. I’ll do a canon of movies and music as well, but this is more than enough for one day.