Start with high-confidence essay collections books, then narrow by subgenre or adjacent topics.
Essays
Michel de Montaigne, J. M. Cohen
The Book of War
John Keegan
The Portable Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jeffrey S. Cramer
A Last Supper of Queer Apostles
Pedro Lemebel, Gwendolyn Harper
Ideas and Opinions
Albert Einstein
Ex Libris
Michiko Kakutani
Uncertain Ground
Phil Klay
Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited
Andrew Holleran
China in a Polycentric World
Yingjin Zhang
Books to Die for
John Connolly, Declan Burke
Far and Away
Andrew Solomon, Simon & Schuster Audio
Essays: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Collected Schizophrenias
Esmé Weijun Wang
The Wave in the Mind
Ursula K. Le Guin
Casey Ryan
B.M. Bower
Distant Reading
Franco Moretti
One Aladdin Two Lamps
Jeanette Winterson
Constant Reader
Dorothy Parker, Sloane Crosley
Optimism
Helen Keller
