Bookshelf · AntiheroesPreview

Frasier Crane.

Frasier · 1993–2004

Seattle radio psychiatry meets Old World snobbery. Frasier’s library is Freud, Jung, and every wine atlas his brother sneers at.

"I’m listening." — and reading.

3 booksCurated · cited · cross-referenced

The shelf, decoded

Why this list.

Frasier Crane has a library, an opinion about your library, and a radio show in which he gives unsolicited opinions about libraries. The list below is the actual psychiatric canon plus the wine and opera coffee-table books that fill the rest of the shelves at the Elliott Bay condo.

The reading list

3 books for Frasier.

No. 01Character fit
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud
Frasier’s holy text. Ritually re-read.
CitationCharacter-fit
No. 02Character fit
Man and His Symbols
Carl G. Jung
The Jungian counterweight on the second shelf.
CitationCharacter-fit
No. 03On screen
The World Atlas of Wine
Hugh Johnson
Niles owns the same edition. Each pretends not to notice.
CitationSet design

Closing note

I’m listening.

Don Draper

Cover of Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara

Mid-century Madison Avenue’s most reluctant reader. The books we see in Don’s hands — Marcus Aurelius, Frank O’Hara — are the only place he is honest.

Read the list

American PsychoSoon

Patrick Bateman

Cover of The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump

Cover of Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Wall Street’s most-quoted aesthete reviews Genesis, Whitney Houston, and (somewhere on the shelf) Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal. Read alongside the satire, not against.

Preview the list

Fight ClubSoon