Fifteen Books That Made Me
- Lex Enrico Santí, LCSW, MFA
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 9 hours ago
Lex Enrico Santí, LCSW, MFA
Books have been my most loyal companions. I’ve been reading since I was old enough to understand that the world was bigger than my family, bigger than the town where I grew up, bigger even than the United States. Books were my way out and my way in. They taught me how to live, how to argue, how to be tender. They’ve never once ghosted me, though I’ve been guilty of ignoring them. Below are fifteen that shaped me. Not in some linear list, not as a curriculum—but as the stacked-up friends and ghosts that walk alongside me, whispering.
If I trace the thread of purpose in my life—the urge to live with fire, to refuse mediocrity—it goes back to this book. Malcolm’s story taught me that writing is not simply a record but a resurrection. I was young when I first read it, and I remember the shock of its directness, its moral clarity. Even now, when I wonder whether my words matter, I hear his voice reminding me: it’s not about comfort, it’s about truth.
This memoir showed me how the fragments of a youth could be made into something artful and strange. It was a fever-dream of beauty as it crafted fragments of youth. Frank Conroy was a legend in teaching creative writing at the Iowa Workshop, I truly wish I had met him. Conroy took the raw material of growing up and turned it into a kind of dream. I read it before I understood what my own writing voice might sound like—and it gave me permission to see my own messy life as material, not waste.
Before he became my mentor, Bausch was simply a name on a spine in a bookstore. His stories taught me that restraint is a kind of generosity. He showed me how to write without spectacle, how to cut to the marrow of an ordinary moment. Meeting him later only confirmed what I had already suspected from his prose: wisdom hides in humility.
To read this book was to feel my father’s shadow beside me. Paz gave me words for something that had been haunting me all my life—what it means to be Latino, to belong and not belong. My father devoted much of his own scholarly work to Paz, and in reading it I found not only an intellectual kinship but a bridge to him. It is one of the rare books that feels like family. It is my father's life work to share his work--I carry this forward in my own life.
Morrison’s work didn’t just teach me about narrative possibility; it taught me about moral gravity. Her sentences carry the weight of history but move with the grace of breath. Reading Morrison is like being apprenticed to someone who has already endured the world’s most devastating truths and still insists on beauty. Her characters taught me that love can be a salvaged thing, a fierce and trembling declaration that we are still here.
Freire’s “banking model” of education—that brutal metaphor of students as empty accounts waiting to be filled—changed me. It forced me to think about the power dynamics in every classroom, every institution. His work isn’t just theory; it’s a manual for dignity. Whenever I find myself frustrated by systems that grind down the people they’re meant to serve, I think of Freire’s call to flip the script.
Graduate school was full of books I read and promptly forgot. Habermas was the exception. Legitimation Crisis gave me a model for understanding why societies fracture, why public trust evaporates, why political structures collapse. It was dense, yes, but in its way it was also a lifeline. I finally had language for the drift of alienation I felt everywhere around me.
by Frank O’Hara
O’Hara’s poems gave me permission to see the world as both fleeting and profound. I love the way he writes as if he’s just talking to you on a walk—oh, and by the way, here’s the secret pulse of the universe. His poetry helped me understand that writing doesn’t have to be thunderous to be holy.
Hacker’s work met me in a place of fragility I didn’t yet have language for. Roxi Hamilton taught her work at HWS with such power, such grace that I remember those sonnets moving me to tears. Her poems on illness, survival, and the body’s stubborn will are both clinical and gutting. Hacker writes the way a surgeon cuts: clean, precise, devastating. She showed me that a poem can be both scalpel and balm, that grief and intellect can share the same breath.
Where O’Hara gave me quicksilver wit, Hafiz gave me devotional fire. He told me, a young poet--I can write a poem about anything and sometimes, I just needed to camp up and just do that. Reading him feels like opening a window and having love rush in, uninvited and impossible to refuse. In darker seasons, his words reminded me that joy isn’t frivolous—it’s survival.
Of all the scriptures I’ve stumbled through, the Gita is the one that has stayed with me most. Arjuna’s battlefield crisis, Krishna’s unflinching counsel—these feel less like distant myth and more like my daily reality. It taught me that connection to others, to the divine, to the work itself, is not optional. It’s the only way forward.
If the Gita is philosophy set on a battlefield, Ramakrishna is lived wisdom, laughter, paradox. His words—recorded by disciples, full of metaphor, parable, and love—taught me more about connecting with others than almost anything else I’ve read. Reading it felt like sitting with a teacher who sees straight through your defenses, but who responds only with love.
This book found me when I was alone in Romania as a Peace Corps volunteer, doubting my own sanity. Simon’s story of choosing six months of solitude in the Arctic made me realize that my loneliness was not unique—and that sometimes surviving solitude is itself an act of courage. His ordeal, his strange joy, kept me company in my own small exile.
Oliver gave me the reminder I forget most often: to go outside. To look at a tree. To be astonished. Her poems are small, patient acts of noticing—the kind of noticing that becomes a way of living. Oliver taught me that spirituality doesn’t have to be grand or abstract. It can be the warm animal of your body breathing in a field at dusk. She’s the voice I hear when I need to slow down.
If Malcolm X taught me about truth, Hemingway taught me about silence. The Sun Also Rises revealed that what is unsaid can be louder than what’s on the page. For a young writer, it was a revelation: meaning happens between the lines, in the breath you take before the next sentence. The book drove me mad, it had a subtle message and seemed like a koan to try to figure out. You never read about people on the wrong path, the Sun Also Rises broke that and it almost broke my mind.
Bukowski gave me permission to laugh at the absurdity of it all. His poems and prose are crass, drunk, despairing—and yet hilarious. He showed me that humor is not a detour from pain but a way through it. When I started to find my own voice as a writer, I carried his irreverence with me like a flask in my coat pocket.
In a coffee shop in Prague while I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I found Hrabal’s Total Fears at a moment when my own sense of reality was wobbling. His letters, raw and unflinching, showed me what it looks like to live under constant pressure—political, existential, personal—and still find a voice that laughs in the face of it. Hrabal gave me an Eastern European lesson in survival: humor is not an accessory to fear, it is what keeps you breathing through it.
Vonnegut, in his dark and funny way, gave me a vision of the cosmos as both absurd and sacred. Reading The Sirens of Titan was the first time I understood that literature could bend space and time without losing its human heart. He showed me that satire could be a kind of prayer.
Menéndez’s stories helped me understand diaspora not as a wound but as a rhythm. Her characters exist in the afterlives of displacement, where humor and longing live side by side. She was the first Cuban voice I read which matched mine. I found in her work a model for writing about identity without performing it, for writing about Cuba without sliding into nostalgia or cliché. She showed me that a short story can be an entire homeland folded into twelve pages.
Closing
This list is incomplete, of course. Every reader knows the secret: the next book might be the one that changes everything. But these fifteen (and a sly sixteenth) form my constellation.
They are the voices I still hear when I sit down to write and the writers whose views shaped me
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