The recent, tragic passing of chef and TV personality Anthony Bourdain left library shelves bare of his books, as long-time fans and the newly curious snapped up available copies. Bourdain’s output of memoirs, essays and, before he was famous, crime novels, was prodigious, especially considering his famously busy and televised travel schedule. Bourdain was also, not surprisingly, an avid reader. References to books and his literary heroes can be found throughout his work, and his own wry voice, in his writing and shows, was clearly marked by a diversity of influences.

To celebrate his life in the best way we know how, we’ve put together a list of Bourdain’s book recommendations, culled from interviews he gave during the nearly two decades that followed the publication of his popular Kitchen Confidential. Bourdain's reading tastes tended towards 20th-century archetypes—bohemians, adventurers, rockers, spies, existentialists, cowboys, addicts—who lived lives of creativity, appetite, and adventure; writers like Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Dashiell Hammett and Lydia Lunch. His own life, full of both adversity and unbelievably good fortune, often seemed like an ode to the anti-heroes he so loved to read and read about.

Nonfiction/memoir

    

Agitator by Tom Mes (an overview of the films of Takashi Miike)  

Churchill and Orwell by Thomas Ricks

How to Live by Sarah Bakewell (on the life and work of Montaigne)

I Am the Wolf by Mark Lanegan (lyrics and writings)

Ways of Escape by Graham Greene (memoir)

The White Album: Essays by Joan Didion
 

Fiction

    

Agents of Innocence by  David Ignatius

Ashenden: Or the British Agent  by W. Somerset Maugham  

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James   

Crash by J.G. Ballard

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock  

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins

Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter

Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith

Roman Tales by Alberto Moravia

Smiley's People by John Le Carre

Stoner by John Williams

True Grit  by Charles Portis

The Wind in the Willows by Susan Hill

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
 

Author Recommendations

the books of Eve Babitz  

the collected works of Milton Caniff     

the books of John Gregory Dunne

the books of Jim Harrison

the books of Elmore Leonard

the books Lydia Lunch

the books of Edward St. Aubyn

the books of William T. Vollmann  

the books of Daniel Woodrell
 

On Food and Cooking

When You Lunch with the Emperor and La Bonne Table by Ludwig Bemelmans

La Cuisine du Marche by Paul Bocuse

Daniel: My French Cuisine by Daniel Boulud

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford

The Kitchen and the Cook by Nicolas Freeling

The Ivy by AA Gill

Nose To Tail Eating by Fergus Henderson

The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller

Between Meals: An Appetite For Paris by A. J. Liebling

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

The Epicurean by Charles Ranhofer

Le Bernardin Cookbook by Eric Ripert

White Heat by Marco Pierre White

The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola