This week in my religion class (yawn!—Shia?!) we began discussing the final essay we’ll be writing this semester, a piece of literary or cultural criticism. Here’s the list of the topics my students brought to class, with—I hope—useful links.

Shia LeBoeuf’s #allmymovies conceptual art piece

Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude

Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss

Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects

Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me

The biblical story of King Saul

Nelson George’s A Ballerina’s Tale (review)

J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

Rebecca Sugar’s Steven Universe

Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere

John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”

Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen’s Inside Out

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (and more)

Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash

J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan

Shonda Rhimes’s How to Get Away with Murder

Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion (commentary)

Hume’s Natural History of Religion (commentary)

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (film review)

Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (commentary) (other writing)

Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible