In the endpapers is a list of books that are discussed throughout the book. They are, in alphabetical order by author's last name:
- Baghdad Diaries by Nuha al-Radi
- The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
- Emma, Mansfield Park and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- The Dean's December and More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
- Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
- Shamela and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
- The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller and Washington Square by Henry James
- In the Penal Colony and The Trial by Franz Kafka
- The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville
- Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading and Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
- My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad
- The Language Police by Diane Ravitch
- The Net of Dreams by Julie Salamon
- Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
- One Thousand and One Nights by Scheherazade
- The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
- The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
- The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Skvorecky
- Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
- Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
- Address Unknown by Katherine Kressman Taylor
- A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Back When We Were Grownups and St. Maybe by Anne Tyler
- Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
