»In his letters to Theo, he weaves together the sacred and profane, describing his spiritual and creative strivings and his unrequited obsessions. In his reading, he tested his values and desires. We get a sense of how Van Gogh’s reading complemented his pious, yet romantic nature in the list of some of his favorites, below, compiled by the Van Gogh Museum.

• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
• Jules Michelet, L’amour (1858)
• Émile Zola, L’Oeuvre (1886)
• Alphonse Daudet, Tartarin de Tarascon (1887)
• The Bible
• John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes (1820)
• George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1887)
• Hans Christian Andersen, What the Moon Saw (1862)
• Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (1471-1472)
• Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851-1852)
• Edmond de Goncourt, Chérie (1884)
• Victor Hugo, Les misérables (1862)
• Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (1835)
• Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami (1885)
• Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysanthème (1888)
• Voltaire, Candide (1759)
• Shakespeare, Macbeth (c. 1606-1607)
• Shakespeare, King Lear (1606-1607)
• Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)
• Emile Zola, Nana (1880)
• Emile Zola, La joie de vivre (1884)«

(via Open Culture: Vincent Van Gogh’s Favorite Books)