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A Bend in the River

V.S. Naipaul

Flawed but very powerful story of post-colonialism in Africa.

A Distant Mirror

Barbara Tuchman

More than you wanted to know about the 4 horsemen in the 14th century.

A Frolic of His Own

William Gaddis

Badly in need of copy editing.

A Hero of Our Time

Mihail Lermontov

Greater than the sum of its parts, and very Russian.

A Modern Instance

William Dean Howells

Excellent 19th Century American social problem novel.

A Severed Head

Iris Murdoch

Cynical and amusing.

Adam's Diary/Eve's Diary

Mark Twain

Good yucks.

Against Criticism

Susan Sontag

Very dry, not very rigorous.

Among the Believers

VS Naipaul

Aspects of the anti-Enlightenment.

Animal Family, The

Randall Jarrel

Charming fantasy.

Atonement

Ian McEwan

Well written and researched, but somehow forgettable.

Autobiography

Benjamin Franklin

Venery for health, but not to excess.

Autobiography

Charles Darwin

Stick to the major works.

Autobiography

Dalai Lama

A sheltered childhood.

Autobiography

W B Yeats

Fairies in the garden of a tone-deaf laureate, but fascinating nonetheless.

Belinda

Maria Edgeworth

Didactic but intriguing. I preferred the characters before they reformed…

Benito Cereno

Herman Melville

Tabloid material transformed by genius.

Bible

Ywh

A popular religious text.

Black Prince, The

Iris Murdoch

Dark, strange and brilliant.

Brothers Karamazov

Dostoyevsky

Remember the TV series with Fred MacMurray?

Castle Rackrent

Mariah Edgeworth

Delightful 18th Century Anglo Irish satire.

Chaos

James Gleick

Like a good 3 part New Yorker article.

Collected Poems of

Elizabeth Bishop

2nd rate

Confessions

Jean Jaques Rousseau

A fascinating document about a not very nice man with a persecution complex.

Conformist, The

Alberto Moravia

Fascism anatomized.

Consciousness Explained

Daniel Dennett

An amusing materialist.

Continental Op, The

Dashiell Hammett

Bad early stories. Read The Dain Curse or Red Harvest instead.

Crowds and Power

Elias Canetti

Polyymathic brilliance from the original of Iris Murdoch’s magus figure.

Death Comes For the Archbishop

Willa Cather

Good enough to overcome the anti-Catholic bias I acquired in parochial school.

Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Carl Sagan

People believe the goddamndest piffle. Carl deplores this at tedious length.

Devils of Loudun, The

Aldous Huxley

The spiritual biography of a deranged exorcist by an admirer. Bludgeoning erudition brought to bear on the evils of intellectual pride.

Education of Henry Adams

Henry Adams

Fascinating, dripping with ideas and beautifully written, a surprise hit.

Epitaph of a Small Winner

Machado de Assis

19th Century Brazil's foremost, a philosophical fantasy narrated by the deceased protagonist.

Evelina

Fanny Burney

Solidly engaging, and occasionally startling in its depiction of a violent, vulgar and amoral era.

Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev

Short and almost perfect.

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

Not bad for a 19 year old girl.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

James Baldwin

An impressive meeting of the King James Bible and Freud.

Guns, Germs and Steel

Jared Diamond

Firstest with the mostest.

Heartbreak House

G B Shaw

For once a drama richer than the didactic purpose stated in its preface.

His Monkey Wife

John Collier

Exquisite irony.

House of Mirth

Edith Wharton

Very fine.

Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain

Several novels about a boy.

Innocents Abroad

Mark Twain

The Ugly American.

Insurgent Mexico

John Reed

Participatory journalism by a romantic.

Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino

Metaphysical candy fluff.

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte

Great! Read Villette too, which is even better!

Jurgen

James Branch Cabell

A monstrous clever fellow.

Language, Truth and Logic

A. J. Ayer

Clever, clever, clever...

Life of Charlotte Bronte

Mrs Gaskell

A Gothic biography of a gothic novelist. Duty over pleasure.

Lives of A Cell, The

Lewis Thomas

Biological belles lettres.

Lucky Jim

Kingsley Amis

Big yucks.

Man Who Loved Children, The

Christina Stead

Unique and wonderful book by an unclassifiable writer. Her Letty Fox, Her Luck is also great.

Martian Time Slip

Phillip K. Dick

Another head-twister from the master paranoiac.

McTeague

Frank Norris

Not a pretty picture, but sticks to your ribs.

Memoirs of US Grant

Ulysses S. Grant

Another surprise hit: terrific prose, great sincerity and character.

Mind of A Mnemonist

A. J. Luria

Fascinating study of a man whose extraordinary memory seemed of little benefit.

Moby Dick

Melville

Many novels centering on a whale.

Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf

I prefer Orlando .

Mysteries of Winterthurn, The

Joyce Carol Oates

Repulsive and inept 19 ^th century gothic pastiche.

Nicholas Nickelby

Dickens

Didactic and sentimental.

No Man Knows My History

Fawn Brodie

Bio of Joseph Smith, the man who found God in his hat.

No Man’s Land

Harold Pinter

I saw the original production with Gielgud and Richardson.

Nothing

Henry Green

A minor 20th C. English writer with a unique style and sensibility.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Jeanette Winterson

Slight.

Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The

George Meredith

18 ^th century style, 19 ^th century psychology.

Our Mutual Friend

Charles Dickens

Characters you will never forget. The Master.

Palace Walk

Mahfouz

Solid 19 ^th century novel.

Pere Goriot

Honore de Balzac

Oddly disappointing and sentimental. Read Droll Stories instead.

Posession

A. S. Byatt

Talent misused. The 19th C. pastiche is clever, the 20th C. satire tedious.

Professor and the Madman, The

Simon Winchester

An ok version of a terrific true story.

Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Freud

The book that introduced the "Freudian slip" into popular culture. Ponderously Teutonic but fascinating.

Rasselas

Samuel Johnson

Exquisite style and charming story. 18th C.

Rats, Lice and History

Hans Zinsser

Our friend the plague. Fascinating.

Redburn

Melville

A potboiler by a genius

Remains of the Day

Ishiguro

Honest but forgettable.

Roderick Random

Tobias Smollett

A comic masterpiece.

Savages

Joe Kane

Journalism re South American Indians and oil politics. Well done.

Seven Years in Tibet

Heinrich Harrer

Someone was ready when opportunity knocked.

Six Character in Search of an Author

Luigi Pirandello

No doubt a novel exercise in it’s day. Seems dated now.

Some Buried Caesar

Rex Stout

Classic murder mystery.

Songlines

Bruce Chatwin

Excellent travel book on Australia , In Patagonia is even better.

Souls of Black Folks

W.E.B. Du Bois

Sad but true.

Sylvie and Bruno

Lewis Carroll

Twee. Odd. Twee.

Ballad of the Sad Café, The

Carson McCullers

Disappointing Southern Gothic.

Beast in the Jungle, The

Henry James

Short and almost perfect.

Betrothed, The

Allesandro Manzoni

Italy 's Sir Walter Scott. Scene of ruffians carousing atop a wagonload of plague victims astonishing.

Death of Ivan Illich, The

Leo Tolstoy

Short and almost perfect.

Egoist, The

George Meredith

A Jane Austen plot and a very elaborate prose s cup of tea, but I liked it.

Girls of Slender Means, The

Muriel Spark

Elegant! read "The Comforters", "Memento Mori" and "Ballad of Peckham Rye" while you’re at it.

Good Soldier, The

Ford Madox Ford

A painful gem. Also read his modernist masterpiece Parade's End .

Hobbit, The

Tolkien

A better if more modest work than the trilogy.

Killer Inside Me, The

Jim Thompson

The author is a very sick man.

Masterpiece, The

Emil Zola

Bleak and powerful.

Monk, The

Matthew G Lewis

Torture, incest, rape, necrophilia, transvestism, Satanic posession and clerical incelibacy: how can you go wrong!

Old Regime and the French Revolution , The

Alexis de Toqueville

A very smart guy, with some very deep insights.

Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The

George Meredith

18 ^th century style, 20 ^th century psychology.

Oresteia, The

Aeschylus

All in the family, Greek style.

Sea and the Jungle, The

H M Tomlinson

Terrific travel book, and a real vocabulary builder.

Things They Carried, The

Tim O'Brien

Vietnam

Virginian, The

Owen Wister

Smile when you say that.

Warden, The / Barchester Towers

Anthony Trollope

A 2 piece comic gem.

Theory of the Leisure Class

Thorsten Veblen

Absolutely brilliant! One of the great satires, and a profoundly insightful work of sociology at the same time!

Tiny Alice

Edward Albee

A disturbing theological puzzle.

Tragic Muse

Henry James

Very minor James.

Travels of

Marco Polo

An utterly prosaic business man goes to another planet, and for 500 years is believed a liar.

Travels With A Donkey

Robert Louis Stevenson

One of the prose masterworks of the 19th C. Absolutely delightful!

Tristes Tropiques

Claude Levi-Strauss

Intellectually scintillating, stylistically superb, another pick hit!

Under Milkwood

Dylan Thomas

Music to the ears.

Undiscovered Self, The

Carl Jung

A highly implausible political speech which proposes direct experience of God as the only alternative to Soviet style totalitarianism, style good, content incoherent.

USA

John Dos Passos

Unique modernist masterpiece and sociological document at once.

Valleys of the Assassins

Freya Stark

An English broad with serious chutzpah (and a good prose style) wanders around Persia in the early 1930's.

Voyage of the Beagle

Charles Darwin

Everyone loved this: excellent plain style, fascinating observations, and a delightfully modest narrator.

Voyages of Dr Dolittle

Hugh Lofting

Wonderful, and thankfully not bowdlerized in my copy!

Wapshot Chronicle, The

John Cheever

Perhaps the finest American stylist of the post WWII era. A very funny book.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

Skip this and read After Leaving Mr Mackenzie.

Wind in the Willows, The

Kenneth Grahame

Poetically wonderful, albeit with some disturbing political angles when read as an adult.

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

Dostoievski

Witty, Burkean pan-Slavism, believe it or not.

Woman in White, The

Wilkie Collins

Great 19th C. mystery. The Moonstone is also terrific.

Wonderful Life

Stephen J. Gould

Pretty unreadable. His essay collections are much better.

You Must Remember This

Joyce Carol Oates

Surprisingly good sex scenes.

Young Torless

Robert Musil

Fin de Siecle S&M in a military academy. Skip this and read The Man Without Qualities .

21 Balloons

William Pene Du Bois

Delightful text and pictures.

44: The Mysterious Stranger

Mark Twain

For devotees of textual variants.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Jules Verne

A great novel virtually devoid of psychology.

Undaunted Courage

Stephen Ambrose

Bipolar exploration.

A Coffin for Dimitrios

Eric Ambler

The pattern tale of Balkan suspense.

Quark and the Jaguar, The

Murray Gell-Mann

A Nobelist lucid on how complexity derives from simplicity.

Decline and Fall

Evelyn Waugh

Cruel, funny and very well written.

Possessed, The

Dostoyesvsky

Surprisingly funny, psychologically brilliant, politically deplorable, a masterpiece.

Circular Staircase, The

Mary Roberts Rinehart

An old dark house mystery from the golden age.

Story of My Experiments With Truth, The

Ghandi

Crank diets and sexual anxiety lead to Indian independence.

Mysterious Island, The

Jules Verne

Men without women. Utopia. Darn that volcano.

Travels With Charley

John Steinbeck

An articulate boy and his dog.

Iris Murdoch, A Life

Peter J. Conradi

So she screwed around. Read the novels instead.

The Turn of the Screw

Henry James

Scary.

The Sixth Extinction

Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin

Dead critters.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakspeare

Whimsical.

Betrayal

Harold Pinter

See the film!

Selected Letter of Gustave Flaubert

ed/trans Francis Steegmuller

Hard to tell if he was leading or following the trends.

Journal of the Plague Year

Defoe

Further proof of intelligent design. Amazing.

Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War

Barbara Ehrenreich

Read her sources, including Canetti, instead.

V.

Thomas Pynchon

Terrifying intelligence, occasional silliness. "Mondaugen's Story" will leave permanent scars.

Miles, the Autobiography

Miles Davis

Listen to the music, and skip this narcissistic piece of crap.

The Three Musketeers

Alexandre Dumas

Best villainess in literature!

Memoirs of a Polyglot

William Gerhardie

Fascinating memoirs of a British upbringing in pre-Soviet Russia..

My Name is Red

Orhan Pamuk

A colorful and intelligent novel of ideas.

Two Years Before the Mast

William Henry Dana

California before the real estate boom, and well before OSHA.

Palimpsest

Gore Vidal

Written in a hurry, presumably for money. Some amusing gossip, lots of dishing.

The Greek Coffin Mystery

Ellery Queen

Enough plot for 4 mysteries. Still under the shadow of SS Van Dine.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

Howard Rheingold

If one must read ephemera, it should be current. This was not.