Out of all the books I’ve read in my life, a handful of them have given my mind and heart a sensation I had never felt before. Sometimes it arrived as a kind of enlightenment, a way of seeing the world, or of seeing life itself, that I never knew, barely knew, or had barely lived. Other times it was something as simple as a story that mirrored my own life so closely it left me baffled, amazed that someone from another part of the world, or another season of life entirely, could reach across all that distance and set my experience down in words.
Those books are my personal canon, the ones I rate most highly and the ones that left the deepest mark on me. They hold a personal significance for me. These books deserve a shelf of their own because they moved me.

By the way, it’s worth noting that these might not be the books I would easily recommend. You might not love a single one of them, and that’s perfectly fine, because these are simply my favorites based on my own preferences. So here they are, the books that earned their place on my personal shelf.

• A Man Called Ove — Fredrik Backman.
  The story of a man who feels worthless without his wife, while the world around him keeps insisting, at every turn, that his life is worth far more than he believes.

• The Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka.
  With every reread, Kafka tells a story and pours out emotion in the same breath, pressing us to question how we measure a person’s worth — success, status, income, appearance, all the things we’re raised to prize — and what saddened me most was seeing how the harshest judgment so often comes from the people closest to us, the ones who may never fully accept who we become as we grow and change.

• The Outsider — Albert Camus.
  Through Meursault, Camus reminded me how relentlessly society forces us all into rigid molds, upholding some unspoken standard of how we’re supposed to behave, react, and even feel.

• Orbital — Samantha Harvey.
  Harvey’s prose is deep, lyrical, and achingly beautiful as it circles our planet, human anxiety, and the slow, unstoppable passage of time.

• Martyr! — Kaveh Akbar.
  A richly layered portrait of human experience whose shifting narrative threads move through addiction and sobriety, the quiet weight of grief, the restless curiosity of artists, and the tangled terrain of family and cultural identity.

This list is not carved in stone. It lives and breathes alongside me that I’ll keep updating it as my reading journey stretches on. Some of these titles may loosen their hold on me over time; I may find that a book no longer speaks to who I’ve become, and I’ll let it go without regret. Others I haven’t even met yet will find their way here, earning their place as I keep reading, keep changing, and keep discovering the stories that shape me.

So think of this less as a finished blog post and more as a living record, a snapshot of the books that matter to me right now, always open to whatever comes next.