|
|
|
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 Jarrell |
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 tin eared 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 style.
Not everyone'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. |
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. |
Uncle Tom's Cabin |
Harriet Beecher Stowe |
A solid 19th century novel which gives the devil some
of the best tunes. |
Turkish Reflections |
Mary Lee Settle |
Ms. Settle seems preoccupied with her place in the
pecking order of knowingness, and occasionally writes sentences that
aren't. |
Sirens of Titan |
Kurt Vonnegut |
This warped my juvenile mind, and holds up very well. |
A History of the End of the World |
Jonathan Kirsch |
The embedded text of the Book of the Apocalypse is far
more interesting than the trite commentary. |
Parzival |
Wolfram Von Eschenbach |
A surprisingly readable Medieval Arthurian romance. |
All the Shah's Men |
Stephen Kinzer |
The prototypical CIA "intervention", and a truly
unfortunate precedent. |
Hajji Baba of Ispahan |
J.J.Morier |
An hilarious amoral picaresque. |
The River of Doubt |
Candice Millard |
She never met a cliche she didn't like. |
The Bachelor of Arts |
R.K. Narayan |
A lovely bit of writing, doubly impressive since in the
author's second language. |
Dead Souls |
Nikolai Gogol |
Funny, Russian, unique. |
The Birth of Tragedy |
Friedrich Nietzsche |
Utterly improbable, but brilliant. |
Satanic Verses |
Salman Rushdie |
The consequences of being too famous to submit to an
editor. |
The Cheese and the Worms |
Carlo Ginzburg |
When belonging to a book group had consequences. |
West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American
Story |
Tamim Ansary |
A surprisingly uninteresting man from a very
interesting background. |
Coast of Utopia |
Tom Stoppard |
Read Isaiah Berlin's "Russian Thinkers" instead. |
Bury me standing : the Gypsies and their journey |
Isabel Fonseca |
Fascinating look into a genuinely alien culture, and a
test case for moral relativism. |
Angle of Repose |
Wallace Stegner |
Why do these dual historical/contemporary narratives
seem to do better at representing the past? |
The Wisdom of Crowds |
James Surowiecki |
Note recent counter evidence. |
John Adams |
David McCullough |
Workmanlike bio. |
King Hereafter |
Dorothy Dunnett |
Her usual astonishing erudition, and a plausible
representation of the mind of a political genius. |
Map of Another Town |
M.F.K. Fisher |
Neurasthenic sensibility, meticulous prose. |
The New Life |
Orhan Pamuk |
An endless, self indulgent, post-modern binge. |
Rabbit, Run |
John Updike |
He really could write. |
The Language of Clothes |
Alison Lurie |
Mildly amusing journalism. |
If Beale Street Could Talk |
James Baldwin |
Minor work by major writer. |
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise |
Abelard and Heloise |
Love letters from Abelard to himself. The pattern
intellectual male egotist. |
Disgrace |
JM Coetzee |
Depressive, morally incoherent, fascinating. |
The Buried Mirror |
Carlos Fuentes |
The book of the TV show meets the ramblings of the
autodidact. |
American Lion : Andrew Jackson in the White House |
Jon Meacham |
Earnest, but preoccuipied with tabloid scandal. |
Billy Budd |
Herman Melville |
Motiveless evil, and a temptation to reductionism. |
The White Tiger |
Aravind Adiga |
Black humor, and a consistent narrative voice. |
The Canon |
Natalie Angier |
NY Times science journalist makes many feeble puns. |
The Wizard of Oz |
L. Frank Baum |
ICharming, but I prefer the movie. |
Cold Comfort Farm |
Stella Gibbons |
I saw something nasty in the woodshed. |
English Hours |
Henry James |
"...how veracious and courteous the fresh, pure
journals." |
Wise Blood |
Flannery O'Connor |
A most unusual disquisition on the spiritual life. |
Wind, Sand, and Stars |
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
A pre-modern sensibility enamored of modernity. |
The Franchise Affair |
Josephine Tey |
An excellent mystery without a death. |
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men |
James Agee |
Journalism and self abnegation. |
The Twelve Chairs |
Ilf & Petrov |
A very funny Soviet satire. Really! |
The Viceroy of Ouida |
Bruce Chatwin |
Not a travel book. Had he been reading "100 Years of
Solitude"? |
The Quiet American
|
Graham Greene
|
Cynical, wise and sad. |
The Lost World of the Kalahari
|
Laurens Van Der Post
|
Lovely writing about some ambitious but incompetent
travelers. |
Treasure Island
|
R.L. Stevenson
|
A gem. One of the best villains in literature. |
Up From Slavery
|
Booker T. Washington
|
Fascinating and still topical. |
Invisible Man |
Ralph Ellison |
A
modernist masterpiece, and yes, a shocking commentary on
race.Eerie to read so soon after Booker T. Washington |
Baltasar and Blimunda
|
José Saramago
|
Odd, lovely, cruel, and sad. |
The Demon in the House
|
Angela Thirkell
|
Comic gem that does not obscure the egotism of
childhood. |
Fabled Shore
|
Rose Macaulay
|
Portugal as it once was. |
My Antonia
|
Willa Cather
|
A masterpiece of unrequited love. |
Noble Savages
|
Napoleon A. Chagnon
|
A late career defense of the very good "Yanomamo, the
fierce people" (1964)
|
Five Children and It
|
E. Nesbit
|
Children's *literature*. |
The Waning of the Middle Ages |
Johan Huizinga |
Life was very different then, as the author makes
beautifully clear. |
The Invisible Man |
H.G. Wells |
Rustic comedy abruptly turns to moral tragedy. A great
read nonetheless. |
Cain |
Jose Saramago |
Biblical pastiche by brilliant Portugese eccentric. |
At the Back of the North Wind |
George MacDonald |
I am decidely neither a Christian nor a mystic, but I
loved this. |
A Movable Feast |
Ernest Hemingway |
Papa engages in nostalgie de la boue, and mocks the
infinitely superior writer Ford Madox Ford. |
Night and the City |
Gerald Kersh |
An interesting early novel by an interesting minor
writer. Very different in tone from the excellent film. |
The Crime of Father Amaro |
Eça de Queirós |
A 19th century Portugese anticlerical masterpiece on
the level of Flaubert. |
The Great Cat Massacre |
Robert Darnton |
Fine essays in cultural history. |
The Man in the High Castle |
Phillip K. Dick |
Eerie alternate history. |
Self-Consciousness |
John Updike |
Not quite the Confessions of Rousseau, but warts and
all. |
On the Marble Cliffs |
Ernst Jünger |
A fascinating anti-Nazi poetic parable by a right wing
nationalist, published in Nazi Germany. |
Lucky Jim |
Kingsley Amis |
A very funny angry young man. |
The Memoirs of Hadrian |
Marguerite Yourcenar |
A brilliant and plausible entree into the mind of a
Roman emperor who is a political genius. |
The Stammering Century |
Gilbert Seldes |
Cults and cranks of the 19th century U.S. Folly from the top down. |
Design for Living |
Noel Coward |
Brittle. Brittle. Brittle. The movie script by Ben Hecht is better. |
West with the Night |
Beryl Markham |
A lost world. |
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber |
Julian Rubinstein |
True crime as farce in post-communist Eastern Europe. |
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks |
Rebecca Skloot |
A piece of science history turns into a tragedy of familial dysfunction. |
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont | Elizabeth Taylor | Old age, death, and snobbery in a superb black comedy. |
100 Years of Solicitude | Gabriel Garcia Marquez | Loved this as a stoned college boy, found it annnoyingly arbitrary this time. |
Night and the City | Gerald Kersh | Interestingly less dark than the film, and perhaps less good, but a distinctive voice. |
Domestic Manners of the Americans | Mrs. Frances Trollope | Spiritual ancestors of the Trumpites anatomized. |
That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana | Carlo Emilio Gadda | Modernist/surrealist murder mystery set in Fascist Italy. Unique. |
The devil in the white city | Erik Larson | An unfortunate collision between architetcural/cultural history and true crime. Should have been 2 shorter books. |
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court | Mark Twain | Terrific piece of storytelling. |
Naples '44 | Norman Lewis | An observant young Briton's wonderfully written journal of the Allied occupation of Italy, as managed by Lucky Luciano. |
A Study in Scarlet & The Sign of the Four | Arthur
Conan Doyle | Holmes. |
Into the Heart of Borneo | Redmond O'Hanlon | Recreational hell-holing. Hilarious if you like loathesome diseases and parasites. |
The Bottle Factory Outing | Beryl Bainbridge | Polished style and black humor. |
The Shellfish Gene | Richard Dawkins | A clever if not entirely convincing thought experiment. |
She | H. Rider Haggard | Masterpiece of mystical adventure. |
Pack My Bag | Henry Green | Memoir by the modernist novelist. Worthwhile, but the fiction is better. |
The School for Scandal | Richard Brinsley Sheridan | Wit and construction at an exalted level. |
The Bramble Bush | Karl N. Llewellyn | Good plain style on the why and wherefore of the Law. |
Numero Zero
|
Umberto Eco
|
|
Unreliable Memoirs
|
Clive James
|
The Antipodean youth of a very funny man.
|
Lament for a Maker
|
Michael Innes
|
A brilliant mystery told in Scots dialect.
|
According to Queeney
|
Beryl Bainbridge
|
Meta-biography of Samuel Johnson from the POV of his patron's daughter.
|
Tough Trip Through Paradise
|
Andrew Garcia
|
Memoirs of a sqaw man. Vivid idioms.
|
Casino Royale
|
Ian Fleming
|
Memorably disturbing torture scene, surprisingly inept secret agent, massive plot holes.
|