Reference Books for Writers

I have a big section of my books that when people thumb through them with a quizzical look on their faces, I promptly tell them "that's the reference section". The reference section for me, are books that I never intend to read from start to finish, but they contain a tidbit of information I found worthy of my shelves. They're usually non-fiction, but sometimes I'll buy a fiction book just because I like the blurb on the back. Blurbs are serious business afterall for writers. They help to sell your book(s).

Yes you should own the following:

1. A massive set of complete and unabridged dictionaries in whatever language you write in. I say you should, but I don't. I use the internet. Same thing for a thesaurus. I use the internet because it's much faster.

2. Encylopedias. Again, I say should, but I don't. I do however often fall into what I call "Wiki-wormholes" when I'm researching stuff. I of course verify my info through other sources. I'd personally love the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britanica.

3. A rhyming dictionary. Now some might say, you can find these online too and free. This is purely a psychological thing for me. When I used to write poetry I used to make long lists of words that rhymed until someone pointed out there were books full of these lists. I don't know which ones are better than others, but flipping through one is a rewarding way to have some fun with words, which can be vital when words really piss you off because you can't find any and worse when the problem is you just can't find the right one.

4. The Chicago Manual of Style. If only because you need to learn what the proofreaders are going to use when they proofread your work. I have the 12th edition, but apparently the 14th is supposed to be the holy of holies.

5. The Writer's Handbook and The Writer's Market. These books come out every year. In theory you should buy them every year until you have an agent. It's also, as Monsieur Redacteur says, a "good reality check". Wait until you realise how many agents are out there to reject you. Wait until you find the one agent your heart is really set on (for me it's Betsy Lerner). Open this book when you've told yourself you want to be published but not before you've hit your first dead end as a writer.

6. Strunk & White's Elements of Style. This book is mandatory for anyone who wants to write anything. Even if it's just a thank you note and not a novel. It's also been updated a lot. I in fact have no idea how many copies of this book I have, but I do know they're all different editions and the fact that I have different editions gives me some kind of cred. You know, amongst writers who like reference books anyways.

I found a great Flickr site with pictures of Penguin Reference book covers here.

7.  The Penguin Reference Books. I am in love and simultaneous awe of these books that I have only just discovered. I bought The Dictionary of Historical Slang in Amsterdam and have since discovered there are lots of Penguin Reference books I want. It's a great book and I couldn't find it on amazon.com, but there are lots of cheap copies on abebooks.com.

Here's an entry from the dictionary.
abaddon - a thief turned informer. 19th, 20th century. A pun on a bad 'un and the angel Abaddon.

Other Penguin Reference Books I want now:

The Penguin Dictionary of English Idioms (Amazon)
The Penguin Dictionary of Epigrams (Amazon)
Writer's Manual (Amazon)
The Penguin Dictionary of Surnames (Amazon) (because coming up with names is sometimes hard)
Penguin Guide to Synonyms and Related Words (Amazon)
Penguin Guide to Plain English (Amazon)
Penguin Guide to Punctuation (Amazon)

Now I'm going to stop the list here because I have to go to the grocery store for ingredients to perfect a recipe I'm working on for my cookbook, but I think this is a pretty solid list for any writer. If you've got great reference books to recommend, please leave recommendations in the comments. I'm always on the hunt for good reference books!

Read more >>

The Literature Behind Star Wars

1. Oedipus, Sophocles

Oedipus was a mythical Greek king that fulfilled a prophecy that said he would kill his father and marry his mother. Since Luke's mother was already dead and Lucas didn't want to go full incest, Luke ends up simply kissing his sister and then posing arrogantly about it afterwards. Laugh it up fuzzy Nerfherder. Oh wait, she really loves Han anyway. Still the fact that Luke and Leia didn't exchange "oh no we didn't glances" after he finds out Leia is not only his sister, but his twin sister was still fairly oooh gross.

No wonder why Anakin fell in love. Look at that blass-ter.

As Luke travels to Alderon he encounters Vader on an Imperial battleship. Then he journeys some more. Again he encounters Vader, who is his father. He searches his heart and knows it to be true. He ends up not killing him, but Vader dies anyways. Too bad Luke didn't make his way to Holland during his travels considering"vader" actually means father in greatest country in the world in Dutch. Vader's offspring don't kill each other now that he's gone. Instead they dance triumphantly with Ewoks on Endor. The End.

Later on Lucas provides further evidence that he suffers from what Freud called the Oedipus complex when we see Luke's mother and her bare midriff (apparently in the universe of Star Wars fashion sense is genetic, let's blame Midi-Chlorians, the Sith sure did). I bet if Luke had known his mom was so hot he wouldn't have kissed his sister and would have probably dispatched Vader out of envy long before Return of the Jedi.


2. The Greek Myths

When it comes to the Greek Myths, three books come to mind. Edith Hamilton's Mythology, Bullfinch's Mythology and The Greek Myths by Robert Graves. Unless you're intending to become a scholar of the Greek myths, I don't recommend Graves version. Start with Edith Hamilton's Mythology and if you're not sated then continue on to Bullfinch's, which is probably the most popular as it was intended for the general reader.

If you do chose Hamilton over Bullfinch (as I did), be sure to read another book of hers called The Greek Way.

Also, read one or all of these books before you read Campbell's book, which is number 3 on this list.

3. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

This books is Campbell's opus to the myth, specifically the monomyth (the word is borrowed from Joyce's book Finnegans Wake to which he wrote A Skeleton Key). The monomyth is based on the concept that every narrative regardless of the culture that it originated from display a basic pattern. There are 17 stages to this pattern with the first being the "Call to Adventure" - as Luke is called to adventure by discovering Leia's message in R2 while trying to clean him up and ends with "The Freedom to Live" - which not only Luke, the obvious hero in Star Wars secures for himself by beating the Dark Side, but also for everyone in that galaxy far, far away by defeating the Galatic Empire.

"The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is. 'Before Abraham was, I AM.' He does not mistake apparent changelessness in time for the permanence of Being, nor is he fearful of the next moment (or of the 'other thing'), as destroying the permanent with its change. 'Nothing retains its own form; but Nature, the greater renewer, ever makes up forms from forms. Be sure tnothing perishes in the whole universe; it does but vary and renew its form.' Thus the next moment is permitted to come to pass."

And if you've read this and raised an eyebrow, after I read the book and rewatched Star Wars I did too. Nothing about Luke convinced me that he would even comprehend what Campbell was saying and chances are if you tried to explain it to him he'd probably cut his hand off with his lightsaber and throw himself down a shaft except this time when he screamed like a bitch it would actually make sense.

Lucas and Campbell became friends after Star Wars came out because Campbell realised he just got the best publicity ever Lucas revived interest in his book. If you don't feel like reading the whole book, you can find a copy of the famous Memo written by Christopher Vogler here as well as the story behind it.

4. A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs

Before Burroughs gave us Tarzan, he gave us Dejah Thoris, the Martian Princess of Helium, who is courageous, resolute, and frequently in both mortal danger and the threat of being dishonored by the lustful designs of villains. Her main squeeze is a Virginian prospector/cowboy who is believed dead and entombed in a crypt only to be found alive later on in the story. Before he actually dies and gives the manuscript to Burroughs in the story, he relentlessly pursues Leia who can't seem to admit she loves him until its too late.



5. The Secret Doctrine; the Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, Helena Blavatsky

Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine" is an influential example of the revival of interest in esoteric and occult ideas in the modern age, in particular because of its claim to reconcile ancient eastern wisdom with modern science. I seriously doubt that Lucas read this two volume magnus opus, but even Blavatsky herself gave this wise advice regarding The Secret Doctrine:

"Reading the S.D. page by page as one reads any other book (she says) will only end us in confusion. The first thing to do, even if it takes years, is to get some grasp of the 'Three Fundamental Principles' given in the Proem. Follow that up by study of the Recapitulation - the numbered items in the Summing Up to Vol. I (Part 1.) Then take the Preliminary Notes (Vol. II) and the Conclusion (Vol. II)."  

So perhaps Lucas took her advice and read the book according to her instructions (which sounds more painful than trying to read Cortazar's Hopscotch) or someone said, "Hey Mr. Lucas you should read this great book that tries to reconcile eastern wisdom with modern science." Shortly after Mr. Lucas strangled the intern for making the suggestion while wearing an motorcycle helmet and some riding gloves. Never one to waste experience for the sake of his art, Lucas promptly edited his screenplay "The Journal of the Whills". Eventually this title would bring about the demise of other interns and be changed to Star Wars. When Reagan would later steal the name for his just as imaginary space program, Lucas would discover that Reagan had a force all his own that could not be defeated called "trickle down economics".

6. The Time Machine, HG Wells

Now those of us who have seen Star Wars know that the Millenium Falcon was the fastest thing in the universe, but even Han's baby (Imagine how badly you need to feel about your penis to hold such a grudge about losing your ship in a poker game. Yeah Lando, I mean you.) couldn't travel through time. What makes Wells' contribution to science fiction perhaps the greatest contribution of all time is that it was the first instance where a machine allowed its operator to travel purposely and selectively. Like the Falcon could do after Chewie would set the coordinates and Han goes down into a pit stupidly leaving tools on the edge of said pit while they're being blasted by TIE-Fighters and Imperial battleships trying to escape and finally R2 saves the day by fixing the coupling that had been sabotaged by jumping via lightspeed.

So yes, The Time Machine, though there is no time travel in Star Wars, made the Millenium Falcon possible and what would Star Wars and Han been without that bucket of bolts?

7. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung

Carl Jung was really into archetypes and by "really into" I actually mean obsessed.

"The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif - representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern ... They are indeed an instinctive trend".Thus for example "the archetype of initiation is strongly activated to provide a meaningful transition ... with a 'rite of passage' from one stage of life to the next such stages may include being parented, initiation, courtship, marriage and preparation for death."

According to Jung archetypes form a dynamic substratum common to all humanity, upon the foundation of which each individual builds his own experience of life, developing a unique array of psychological characteristics. Jung did not believe that people were born a blank slate, but instead possessed individual predestinies. Luke inherits Anakin's flying abilities, his Midi-Chlorians, and apparently his moodiness.

The idea of archetypes dates back to Plato, but Jung being obsessed and all had to go further. He went further to define the archetypes: hero, goddess, mother; but most importantly to Star Wars Jung proposed that:

"the archetype had a dual nature it exists both in the psyche and in the world at large. He called this non-psychic aspect of the archetype the "psychoid" archetype. He illustrated this by drawing on the analogy of the electromagnetic spectrum. The part of the spectrum which is visible to us corresponds to the conscious aspects of the archetype. The invisible infra-red end of the spectrum corresponds to the unconscious biological aspects of the archetype that merges with its chemical and physical conditions. He suggested that not only do the archetypal structures govern the behavior of all living organisms, but that they were contiguous with structures controlling the behavior of organic matter as well. The archetype was not merely a psychic entity, but more fundamentally, a bridge to matter in general. Jung used the ancient term of unus mundus; to describe the unitary reality which he believed underlay all manifest phenomena. He conceived archetypes to be the mediators of the unus mundus, organizing not only ideas in the psyche, but also the fundamental principles of matter and energy in the physical world."

Like Midi-Chlorians, light sabers, telekinesis, projecting yourself as a hologram from the realm of the dead, sending things, feeling the force, not feeling the force enough, and being able to telepathically communicate with someone because you need a ride and you no longer have a thumb to stick out.

Kidding aside, Jung's Collected Works in 20 volumes has some mind-boggling things within their numerous pages. Though it didn't seem to help Lucas much when it came time to create the psychology of young Vader.

8. The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer

This is not a book you read in a weekend. Considering it is a 12 volume study on mythology and religion, it's more like an encyclopaedia. In fact a case could be made that it is so extensive up to its 2nd printing when Frazer expanded it from 2 volumes to 12 that one could find anything they wanted to know about mythology and religion (specifically pagan, and Frazer did scandalise people by including the story of Jesus, implying Christianity was also a pagan religion). But if you're not a fan of books simply for reference sake, you might find Robert Graves The White Goddess an interesting read.
9. Mythologiques, Claude-Lévi Strauss

         Volume One: The Raw and The Cooked (Le cru et le cuit)
          Volume Two: From Honey to Ashes (Du miel aux cendres)
            Volume Three: The Origin of Table Manners (L'Origine des manières de table)
              Volume  Four: The Naked Man (L'homme nu)

I don't own all the volumes either in French or English of Strauss' Mythologiques, but I do own The Raw and the Cooked, widely considered the best of the four. The Raw and The Cooked contains almost 200 myths from South America, North America, and Europe. Strauss succeeded in presenting myths in a new light based on the idea that myths could not be understood in isolation, but rather had to be examined only as parts of a myth system. 

It's rather entertaining. Even more so if you read it, then watch Star Wars and realise that Lucas missed the point because when he set out to create his "myth" of the Jedis instead of presenting the myth system so that we could understand what was going on, he actually confused us more and more with every new Star Wars film.
10. Phantastes, George MacDonald

The story centers on the character Anodos (pathless or ascent in Greek) who is pulled into a dreamlike world. Anodos lives through many adventures and temptations (women in place of the Dark Side of the Force) while in this other world, until he is finally ready to give up his ideals.

I might be stretching it with this one, but it's worth a read anyway. If you don't believe me, then believe C.S. Lewis who said after reading Phantastes at the age of 16 that:

"That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me not unnaturally, took longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes."

Perhaps Mr. Lucas was visited by the same phantom menace (get it?) that possessed C.S. Lewis because we all know he didn't have the faintest idea what he was doing when he made The Phantom Menace and well we all hadn't the faintest notion what we had let ourselves in for by standing in line for eighteen hours to buy tickets to the midnight screening only to have the joy that Star Wars left in our childish hearts chased out by the grating voice of Jar Jar.

11. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

Of all the books on this list #11 and #12 are by far the most influential, but the LOTR triology was the best fantasy novel of all time that inspired the best science fiction novel of all time.

Just read it, Lucas be damned.

12. Dune, Frank Herbert

The best science fiction novel of all time. I cannot say this enough. I might type it again later on down the page just because every time I write it my fingers rejoice in the ring of truth they have just typed. More so when I explain to them that these words will be on the Internet and perhaps read by others who might also know this to be true. At one point the original screenplay for Star Wars was pretty much Dune with a few names changed, while ironically Dune is sort of LOTR with a lot of names barely changed at all.

But read it because it is the best science fiction novel of all time. Sorry, my hands got carried away a little there.

13. Sha-seki su (Zen Flesh, Zen Bones), Muju

#17 Stingy in Teaching

A young physician in Tokyo named Kusuda met a college friend who had been studying Zen. The young doctor asked him what Zen was.

"I cannot tell you what it is," the friend replied, "but one thing is certain. If you understand Zen, you will not be afraid to die..."

Now I've added this book to the list because Lucas himself has admitted that Buddhism and Zen in particular was a big influence on how he came up with the concept for "The Force". This particular koan continues when the physician decides to seek out a master and be completely humbled by him, similar to Luke being humbled by Yoda; but also if you notice the Jedis, Yoda and Obi-Wan specifically show no fear of death because they believe in The Force and apparently being a Jedi master not only makes you less afraid of death than Jesus, but it also makes you able to reincarnate yourself in case your buddies who aren't dead yet are stranded in the freezing temperatures of the Hoth system.

14. Tao te Tching, Laozi

Knowing others is wisdom;

Knowing the self is enlightenment.

Mastering others requires force;

Mastering the self requires strength;

He who knows he has enough is rich.

Perseverance is a sign of will power.

He who stays where he is endures.

To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.

On Knowledge and Humility

Try not read those lines without hearing Yoda's wise words to Luke. Oh wait - Do or do not. There is no try.

But no seriously, imagine the Tao te Ching translated from Chinese by someone who speaks broken English and voila! But no seriously, read it. You too might become as wise as Yoda. And ever present you will be.



15. The Wizard of Oz, Frank Baum

This book makes the list for two reasons: one because it is [somewhat] universally acknowledged that the film was a big influence on Lucas, but I argue that the book had some influence on Lucas as well.

Dorothy, much like Luke is living on a farm with her aunt and uncle at the start of The Wizard of Oz. She has a faithful companion (Toto). She encounters a metal man, a lion, and a scarecrow with no brains. Likewise Luke has his faithful companion, R2 (though he does wander off, doesn't he?), C3PO, Chewbacca, and well, you know who the scarecrow is, but he was rather handsome one. Incidentally both "scarecows" get a little lip action, if we, and we should, assume that Luke and Leia being twins are basically the same person, i.e. different aspects of Dorothy.

Where Lucas diverged, and thankfully so is that unlike both Luke and Leia Dorothy didn't rescue the scarecrow from a carbonite slab that was hanging in a really fat alien's fortress. Good thing too because I don't know if those pigtails and ruby slippers would have gone so well with Leia's metal bikini outfit*.

* I stand corrected. Apparently anything goes with Leia's metal bikini outfit. Merci Monsieur Redacteur! I forget most men's fantasies don't have any fashion sense.

Read more >>

Sexism in Literature

"This is going to sound sexist," he says warningly, "but American woman writers are just awful..."

Sexism, still alive and well in literature apparently.

He then proceeds to knock Eudora Welty, whom I consider a damn fine female writer, but my head is still spinning from the whole American woman writers bit. I am seriously offended. Eudora Welty is to me one of the best short story writers in American literature. Nevermind she was a she. Her work still holds it own in the male-dominated world of literature.

I ask for examples. He looks in a book of Welty's collected short stories. He reads until he is annoyed and stops. He blurts out "as full of himself as a colt". It's a metaphor I say and probably one she grew up hearing since she was from the South. He goes on saying Welty is "too clever, too effusive, trying to hard to be clever".

I don't want to sound snobby here but until you have examined a vast proportion of a writer's work you cannot judge their writing. You can judge the work on its own merits, but not the writer him-or-herself. I loved W. Somerset Maugham because the first thing I read were his short stories. Then I decided to read Of Human Bondage and didn't like it as much. Now that I've read nearly everything that Maugham ever wrote I can still earnestly and with authority say he is one of the best writers to ever write. Sure he's slightly outdated now, but I don't give a fig. I have yet to find a book that is as witty and sharp as The Razor's Edge. I can nearly recite his short story "Rain" verbatim.

He sits down in the chair and opens up a book of Alice Munroe's Selected Stories. He doesn't approve. He gives Munroe the same treatment he gave poor Eudora. The language is too precious he says.

Now he or you or I have as much right to not like a writer for whatever reason we want. The writing might not be to our tastes or the subject of the book or story might bore us. Yes, everyone might be named Rose. Yes they might write lines like "she understood Char was beautiful". But if you could hear what he's saying now (which basically boils down to backtracking faster than a politican), you'd probably feel the same way as I do which is, how dare you take my books off my shelf and then proceed to butcher some of my favourite writers (Well I'm not a fan of Munroe's. I bought her book because I wanted to see what happens when you take another writer's style and make no effort to reshape it into your own.)?!?!

I ask him, "Do you understand that Eudora Welty is considered one of the finest American writers of all time and a master of the short story?"

No, he doesn't care. He doesn't care about a writer's reputation.

"If you don't care about a writer's reputation, then why do you bother to read books that are recommended to you?"

It's who recommends them he says. And the work itself.  "Who's opinion is it", he asks, "and why do they deserve it?"

I ask him why he bothers to write down ever book ever mentioned in the works of Borges, Miller, or Colin Wilson, all of whom he's told me make the best recommendations for books.

"It's all about pleasure for me. I only read it because I like it."

So let's get away from the whole recommendations thing then. "How can you judge female American writers based on just Welty and Munroe?"

He doesn't. He likes Sylvia Plath and Amy Hemple. Still I refuse to let him off the hook because whereas I go out of my way to support female writers in general, his reading is predominantly male.

I tell him I don't understand why he'd make such a blanket statement. Why not he says.

Have you ever read Wharton I ask him? No.

What about Carson McCullers? She's genius he says. Harper Lee is also a genius apparently.

I keep at it, citing other female American writers. He conceeds. But in the end it doesn't matter does it? He prefers male authors. Is it because most books published are written by men? Does he think that female writers can't be as good as men?

Not at all he says. But he reads most male writers because he's a man and there's more of them. I certainly wish that we women had this luxury. Of the 100 books on Time's list of the All Time 100 Novels only 18 of the books were written by women and two of those 18 were written by Virginia Woolf.

So my question to my readers is, who are you favourite female authors? They obviously need our support.

Read more >>

Recent Acquisitions

Letters from Africa - Isak Dinesen
Heaven and Hell - Emanuel Swedenborg
The Roots of Coincidence - Arthur Koestler
The Betrothed - Alessandro Manzoni
The Sailor Who Fell from the Sea - Yukio Mishima
Bored of the Rings - The Harvard Lampoon
The Counterfeiters - Andre Gide
The Unvanquished - William Faulkner
The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Innocent Libertine - Colette
The Farewell Party - Milan Kundera
Deception - Philip Roth
Fathers and Sons - Alexander Roth
Youth and the Bright Medusa - Willa Cather
The Other Woman - Colette
The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
Cosmicomics - Italo Calvino
Demain - Herman Hesse
Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Seven Gothic Tales - Isek Dinesen
The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid - Octavio Paz
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Waves - Virginia Woolf
The Book of the Five Rings - Musashi
D.H. Lawrence - Anais Nin
Children of the Albatross - Anais Nin
A Spy in the House of Love - Anais Nin
Seduction of the Minotaur - Anais Nin
Orlando - Virginia Woolf
The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen
No Name - Wilkie Collins
Anatomical Drawings - Leonardo da Vinci
Les Belles Images - Simone de Beauvoir
Gravity - George Gamow
A House is Not a Home - Polly Adler
Chanel - Edmonde Charles- Roux
Letters Summer 1926 - Pasternak, Rilke, Tsvetayeva
A Beside Nature, Genius and Eccentricity in Science 1869 - 1953 (foreword by Stephen Jay Gould)
Memories of Childhood - Marcel Pagnol
The Flounder - Gunter Grass
Losing Battles - Eudora Welty
Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs
The Green House - Maria Vargas Llosa
Group Portrait with Lady - Henrich Boll
The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
The Mystic Masseur - V.S. Naipul
Leafstorm and Other Stories - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Delta Wedding - Eudora Welty
Creatures Great and Small - Colette
Tutankh-Amen and His Tomb - G. Elliot Smith
The Age of Fable - Thomas Bullfinch
Call It Sleep - Henry Roth
Travels with Charley - John Steinbeck
Anti-Memoirs - Andre Malraux
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and six more - Roald Dahl
Nijinsky - Nijinsky
The Search for Modern China - Jonathan D. Spence
The Best Cartoons from Punch
Histoire de Paris et des Parisiens
French Gourmet Cooking Volume I & II - Julia Child
Infinity and the Mind - Rudy Rucker
Lectures on Literature - Nabokov
Marquis de Sade - Simone de Beauvoir
Apocalypse - D.H. Lawrence
Psychology and Alchemy - C.G. Jung
Corydon - Andre Gide
Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges - Richard Burgin
The Captive Mind - Czeslaw Milosz
We - Eugene Zamiatin
American Power and the New Mandarins
Everything that Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor
Invitation to a Beheading - Nabokov
The Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino
Conversations about the End of Time - Eco, Gould, etc
The Intuitionist - Colson Whitehead
The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico - Bernal Diaz del Castillo
The Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Complete Poems - D.H. Lawrence
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Memoirs - Pablo Neruda
Closing the Gap - Chandler Brossard

Read more >>

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

I've just found this list on the Internet, it may or may not be the same as the ones in the actual book (if you know, post in comments).



Here is the list you requested. It was last updated on 7/20/2006. You can create your own version of this list by clicking the "clone" button at the end of the list.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

10001 Books to Read Before You Die

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
Saturday – Ian McEwan
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee
Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson
The Sea – John Banville
The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
The Master – Colm Tóibín
Vanishing Point – David Markson
The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd
Dining on Stones – Iain Sinclair
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle
The Colour – Rose Tremain
Thursbitch – Alan Garner
The Light of Day – Graham Swift
What I Loved – Siri Hustvedt
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time – Mark Haddon
Islands – Dan Sleigh
Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee
London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
The Double – José Saramago
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Unless – Carol Shields
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor
That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern
In the Forest – Edna O’Brien
Shroud – John Banville
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Youth – J.M. Coetzee
Dead Air – Iain Banks
Nowhere Man – Aleksandar Hemon
The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
Gabriel’s Gift – Hanif Kureishi
Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
Platform – Michael Houellebecq
Schooling – Heather McGowan
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
Don’t Move – Margaret Mazzantini
The Body Artist – Don DeLillo
Fury – Salman Rushdie
At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O’Neill
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
The Feast of the Goat – Mario Vargos Llosa
An Obedient Father – Akhil Sharma
The Devil and Miss Prym – Paulo Coelho
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost – Ismail Kadare
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
The Heart of Redness – Zakes Mda
Under the Skin – Michel Faber
Ignorance – Milan Kundera
Nineteen Seventy Seven – David Peace
Celestial Harmonies – Péter Esterházy
City of God – E.L. Doctorow
How the Dead Live – Will Self
The Human Stain – Philip Roth
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
After the Quake – Haruki Murakami
Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande
Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard
House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
Pastoralia – George Saunders
Timbuktu – Paul Auster
The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakuli?
Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy
Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb
The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
Elementary Particles – Michel Houellebecq
Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks
All Souls Day – Cees Nooteboom
The Talk of the Town – Ardal O’Hanlon
Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
Another World – Pat Barker
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Great Apes – Will Self
Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
Underworld – Don DeLillo
Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
The Life of Insects – Victor Pelevin
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
The Untouchable – John Banville
Silk – Alessandro Baricco
Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard
Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker
Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
The Ghost Road – Pat Barker
Forever a Stranger – Hella Haasse
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
The Clay Machine-Gun – Victor Pelevin
Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
Morvern Callar – Alan Warner
The Information – Martin Amis
The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth
The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald
The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Love’s Work – Gillian Rose
The End of the Story – Lydia Davis
Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster
The Folding Star – Alan Hollinghurst
Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
Land – Park Kyong-ni
The Master of Petersburg – J.M. Coetzee
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
Pereira Declares: A Testimony – Antonio Tabucchi
City Sister Silver – Jàchym Topol
How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
Felicia’s Journey – William Trevor
Disappearance – David Dabydeen
The Invention of Curried Sausage – Uwe Timm
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
Looking for the Possible Dance – A.L. Kennedy
Operation Shylock – Philip Roth
Complicity – Iain Banks
On Love – Alain de Botton
What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
The House of Doctor Dee – Peter Ackroyd
The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
The Emigrants – W.G. Sebald
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Life is a Caravanserai – Emine Özdamar
The Discovery of Heaven – Harry Mulisch
A Heart So White – Javier Marias
Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
Indigo – Marina Warner
The Crow Road – Iain Banks
Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
Jazz – Toni Morrison
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
The Heather Blazing – Colm Tóibín
Asphodel – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud
Arcadia – Jim Crace
Wild Swans – Jung Chang
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis
Mao II – Don DeLillo
Typical – Padgett Powell
Regeneration – Pat Barker
Downriver – Iain Sinclair
Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernieres
Wise Children – Angela Carter
Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard
Amongst Women – John McGahern
Vineland – Thomas Pynchon
Vertigo – W.G. Sebald
Stone Junction – Jim Dodge
The Music of Chance – Paul Auster
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
A Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham
Like Life – Lorrie Moore
Possession – A.S. Byatt
The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
The Midnight Examiner – William Kotzwinkle
A Disaffection – James Kelman
Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
Moon Palace – Paul Auster
Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow
Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
The Trick is to Keep Breathing – Janice Galloway
The History of the Siege of Lisbon – José Saramago
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
London Fields – Martin Amis
The Book of Evidence – John Banville
Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White
Wittgenstein’s Mistress – David Markson
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
The Swimming-Pool Library – Alan Hollinghurst
Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey
Libra – Don DeLillo
The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The Radiant Way – Margaret Drabble
The Afternoon of a Writer – Peter Handke
The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
The Pigeon – Patrick Süskind
The Child in Time – Ian McEwan
Cigarettes – Harry Mathews
The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
World’s End – T. Coraghessan Boyle
Enigma of Arrival – V.S. Naipaul
The Taebek Mountains – Jo Jung-rae
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Anagrams – Lorrie Moore
Matigari – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Marya – Joyce Carol Oates
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
The Old Devils – Kingsley Amis
Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt
An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
Extinction – Thomas Bernhard
Foe – J.M. Coetzee
The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel
The Parable of the Blind – Gert Hofmann
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
A Maggot – John Fowles
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
Contact – Carl Sagan
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Perfume – Patrick Süskind
Old Masters – Thomas Bernhard
White Noise – Don DeLillo
Queer – William Burroughs
Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
Legend – David Gemmell
Dictionary of the Khazars – Milorad Pavic
The Bus Conductor Hines – James Kelman
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
Empire of the Sun – J.G. Ballard
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
Blood and Guts in High School – Kathy Acker
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes
Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis
Shame – Salman Rushdie
Worstward Ho – Samuel Beckett
Fools of Fortune – William Trevor
La Brava – Elmore Leonard
Waterland – Graham Swift
The Life and Times of Michael K – J.M. Coetzee
The Diary of Jane Somers – Doris Lessing
The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek
The Sorrow of Belgium – Hugo Claus
If Not Now, When? – Primo Levi
A Boy’s Own Story – Edmund White
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Wittgenstein’s Nephew – Thomas Bernhard
A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro
Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally
The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
The Newton Letter – John Banville
On the Black Hill – Bruce Chatwin
Concrete – Thomas Bernhard
The Names – Don DeLillo
Rabbit is Rich – John Updike
Lanark: A Life in Four Books – Alasdair Gray
The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
July’s People – Nadine Gordimer
Summer in Baden-Baden – Leonid Tsypkin
Broken April – Ismail Kadare
Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Rites of Passage – William Golding
Rituals – Cees Nooteboom
Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
City Primeval – Elmore Leonard
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
Smiley’s People – John Le Carré
Shikasta – Doris Lessing
A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
Burger’s Daughter - Nadine Gordimer
The Safety Net – Heinrich Böll
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
The World According to Garp – John Irving
Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec
The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
The Singapore Grip – J.G. Farrell
Yes – Thomas Bernhard
The Virgin in the Garden – A.S. Byatt
In the Heart of the Country – J.M. Coetzee
The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
The Shining – Stephen King
Dispatches – Michael Herr
Petals of Blood – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
The Left-Handed Woman – Peter Handke
Ratner’s Star – Don DeLillo
The Public Burning – Robert Coover
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Cutter and Bone – Newton Thornburg
Amateurs – Donald Barthelme
Patterns of Childhood – Christa Wolf
Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel García Márquez
W, or the Memory of childhood – Georges Perec
A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell
Grimus – Salman Rushdie
The Dead Father – Donald Barthelme
Fateless – Imre Kertész
Willard and His Bowling Trophies – Richard Brautigan
High Rise – J.G. Ballard
Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow
Dead Babies – Martin Amis
Correction – Thomas Bernhard
Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
The Fan Man – William Kotzwinkle
Dusklands – J.M. Coetzee
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Fear of Flying – Erica Jong
A Question of Power – Bessie Head
The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G. Farrell
The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Italo Calvino
Crash – J.G. Ballard
The Honorary Consul – Graham Greene
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch
Sula – Toni Morrison
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
The Breast – Philip Roth
The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
G – John Berger
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
House Mother Normal – B.S. Johnson
In A Free State – V.S. Naipaul
The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
Group Portrait With Lady – Heinrich Böll
The Wild Boys – William Burroughs
Rabbit Redux – John Updike
The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima
The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark
The Ogre – Michael Tournier
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Peter Handke
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
Mercier et Camier – Samuel Beckett
Troubles – J.G. Farrell
Jahrestage – Uwe Johnson
The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard
Tent of Miracles – Jorge Amado
Pricksongs and Descants – Robert Coover
Blind Man With a Pistol – Chester Hines
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
The Green Man – Kingsley Amis
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
Them – Joyce Carol Oates
A Void/Avoid – Georges Perec
Eva Trout – Elizabeth Bowen
Myra Breckinridge – Gore Vidal
The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch
Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
The First Circle – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid – Malcolm Lowry
The German Lesson – Siegfried Lenz
In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
A Kestrel for a Knave – Barry Hines
The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf
Chocky – John Wyndham
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
The Cubs and Other Stories – Mario Vargas Llosa
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Pilgrimage – Dorothy Richardson
The Joke – Milan Kundera
No Laughing Matter – Angus Wilson
The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
A Man Asleep – Georges Perec
The Birds Fall Down – Rebecca West
Trawl – B.S. Johnson
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
The Magus – John Fowles
The Vice-Consul – Marguerite Duras
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
Giles Goat-Boy – John Barth
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
Things – Georges Perec
The River Between – Ngugi wa Thiong’o
August is a Wicked Month – Edna O’Brien
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector
Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
Come Back, Dr. Caligari – Donald Bartholme
Albert Angelo – B.S. Johnson
Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe
The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein – Marguerite Duras
Herzog – Saul Bellow
V. – Thomas Pynchon
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Graduate – Charles Webb
Manon des Sources – Marcel Pagnol
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
Inside Mr. Enderby – Anthony Burgess
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
The Collector – John Fowles
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
Labyrinths – Jorg Luis Borges
Girl With Green Eyes – Edna O’Brien
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
A Severed Head – Iris Murdoch
Faces in the Water – Janet Frame
Solaris – Stanislaw Lem
Cat and Mouse – Günter Grass
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor
How It Is – Samuel Beckett
Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino
The Country Girls – Edna O’Brien
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Rabbit, Run – John Updike
Promise at Dawn – Romain Gary
Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee
Billy Liar – Keith Waterhouse
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes
Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow
Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
Billiards at Half-Past Nine – Heinrich Böll
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Pluck the Bud and Destroy the Offspring – Kenzaburo Oe
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Bitter Glass – Eilís Dillon
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico
Borstal Boy – Brendan Behan
The End of the Road – John Barth
The Once and Future King – T.H. White
The Bell – Iris Murdoch
Jealousy – Alain Robbe-Grillet
Voss – Patrick White
The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
Blue Noon – Georges Bataille
Homo Faber – Max Frisch
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
The Wonderful “O” – James Thurber
Justine – Lawrence Durrell
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon
The Roots of Heaven – Romain Gary
Seize the Day – Saul Bellow
The Floating Opera – John Barth
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen
The Trusting and the Maimed – James Plunkett
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis
The Recognitions – William Gaddis
The Ragazzi – Pier Paulo Pasolini
Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
I’m Not Stiller – Max Frisch
Self Condemned – Wyndham Lewis
The Story of O – Pauline Réage
A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley
The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
Watt – Samuel Beckett
Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
Junkie – William Burroughs
The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
The Judge and His Hangman – Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar
Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
Foundation – Isaac Asimov
The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Rebel – Albert Camus
Molloy – Samuel Beckett
The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
The Abbot C – Georges Bataille
The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz
The Third Man – Graham Greene
The 13 Clocks – James Thurber
Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing
I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
The Moon and the Bonfires – Cesare Pavese
The Garden Where the Brass Band Played – Simon Vestdijk
Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
The Case of Comrade Tulayev – Victor Serge
The Heat of the Day – Elizabeth Bowen
Kingdom of This World – Alejo Carpentier
The Man With the Golden Arm – Nelson Algren
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
All About H. Hatterr – G.V. Desani
Disobedience – Alberto Moravia
Death Sentence – Maurice Blanchot
The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
Doctor Faustus – Thomas Mann
The Victim – Saul Bellow
Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
The Path to the Nest of Spiders – Italo Calvino
The Plague – Albert Camus
Back – Henry Green
Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
The Bridge on the Drina – Ivo Andri?
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
Loving – Henry Green
Arcanum 17 – André Breton
Christ Stopped at Eboli – Carlo Levi
The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham
Transit – Anna Seghers
Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
Dangling Man – Saul Bellow
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Caught – Henry Green
The Glass Bead Game – Herman Hesse
Embers – Sandor Marai
Go Down, Moses – William Faulkner
The Outsider – Albert Camus
In Sicily – Elio Vittorini
The Poor Mouth – Flann O’Brien
The Living and the Dead – Patrick White
Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
Between the Acts – Virginia Woolf
The Hamlet – William Faulkner
Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
Native Son – Richard Wright
The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene
The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
Party Going – Henry Green
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
At Swim-Two-Birds – Flann O’Brien
Coming Up for Air – George Orwell
Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
After the Death of Don Juan – Sylvie Townsend Warner
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson
Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Cause for Alarm – Eric Ambler
Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
U.S.A. – John Dos Passos
Murphy – Samuel Beckett
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Years – Virginia Woolf
In Parenthesis – David Jones
The Revenge for Love – Wyndham Lewis
Out of Africa – Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)
To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner
Eyeless in Gaza – Aldous Huxley
The Thinking Reed – Rebecca West
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
Wild Harbour – Ian MacPherson
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
Independent People – Halldór Laxness
Auto-da-Fé – Elias Canetti
The Last of Mr. Norris – Christopher Isherwood
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy
The House in Paris – Elizabeth Bowen
England Made Me – Graham Greene
Burmese Days – George Orwell
The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht
Novel With Cocaine – M. Ageyev
The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh
Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
Call it Sleep – Henry Roth
Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – Gertrude Stein
Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
A Day Off – Storm Jameson
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
A Scots Quair (Sunset Song) – Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
To the North – Elizabeth Bowen
The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett
The Radetzky March – Joseph Roth
The Waves – Virginia Woolf
The Glass Key – Dashiell Hammett
Cakes and Ale – W. Somerset Maugham
The Apes of God – Wyndham Lewis
Her Privates We – Frederic Manning
Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
Hebdomeros – Giorgio de Chirico
Passing – Nella Larsen
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
Living – Henry Green
The Time of Indifference – Alberto Moravia
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
The Last September – Elizabeth Bowen
Harriet Hume – Rebecca West
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau
Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
The Childermass – Wyndham Lewis
Quartet – Jean Rhys
Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh
Quicksand – Nella Larsen
Parade’s End – Ford Madox Ford
Nadja – André Breton
Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Tarka the Otter – Henry Williamson
Amerika – Franz Kafka
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Blindness – Henry Green
The Castle – Franz Kafka
The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek
The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence
One, None and a Hundred Thousand – Luigi Pirandello
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
The Making of Americans – Gertrude Stein
Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Counterfeiters – André Gide
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Artamonov Business – Maxim Gorky
The Professor’s House – Willa Cather
Billy Budd, Foretopman – Herman Melville
The Green Hat – Michael Arlen
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
The Devil in the Flesh – Raymond Radiguet
Zeno’s Conscience – Italo Svevo
Cane – Jean Toomer
Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley
Amok – Stefan Zweig
The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
The Enormous Room – E.E. Cummings
Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
The Glimpses of the Moon – Edith Wharton
Life and Death of Harriett Frean – May Sinclair
The Last Days of Humanity – Karl Kraus
Aaron’s Rod – D.H. Lawrence
Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Fox – D.H. Lawrence
Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
Tarr – Wyndham Lewis
The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
The Shadow Line – Joseph Conrad
Summer – Edith Wharton
Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsen
Bunner Sisters – Edith Wharton
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Under Fire – Henri Barbusse
Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf
Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham
The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence
The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
Kokoro – Natsume Soseki
Locus Solus – Raymond Roussel
Rosshalde – Herman Hesse
Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
Death in Venice – Thomas Mann
The Charwoman’s Daughter – James Stephens
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
Fantômas – Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre
Howards End – E.M. Forster
Impressions of Africa – Raymond Roussel
Three Lives – Gertrude Stein
Martin Eden – Jack London
Strait is the Gate – André Gide
Tono-Bungay – H.G. Wells
The Inferno – Henri Barbusse
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
The Iron Heel – Jack London
The Old Wives’ Tale – Arnold Bennett
The House on the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson
Mother – Maxim Gorky
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Young Törless – Robert Musil
The Forsyte Saga – John Galsworthy
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
Professor Unrat – Heinrich Mann
Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
Hadrian the Seventh – Frederick Rolfe
The Golden Bowl – Henry James
The Ambassadors – Henry James
The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
The Immoralist – André Gide
The Wings of the Dove – Henry James
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
Sister Carrie – Theodore Dreiser
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. – Somerville and Ross
The Stechlin – Theodore Fontane
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
What Maisie Knew – Henry James
Fruits of the Earth – André Gide
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
The Real Charlotte – Somerville and Ross
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Born in Exile – George Gissing
Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
News from Nowhere – William Morris
New Grub Street – George Gissing
Gösta Berling’s Saga – Selma Lagerlöf
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Kreutzer Sonata – Leo Tolstoy
La Bête Humaine – Émile Zola
By the Open Sea – August Strindberg
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
The Master of Ballantrae – Robert Louis Stevenson
Pierre and Jean – Guy de Maupassant
Fortunata and Jacinta – Benito Pérez Galdés
The People of Hemsö – August Strindberg
The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
She – H. Rider Haggard
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
Germinal – Émile Zola
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant
Marius the Epicurean – Walter Pater
Against the Grain – Joris-Karl Huysmans
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
A Woman’s Life – Guy de Maupassant
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
The House by the Medlar Tree – Giovanni Verga
The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert
Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace
Nana – Émile Zola
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Red Room – August Strindberg
Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Drunkard – Émile Zola
Virgin Soil – Ivan Turgenev
Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
The Hand of Ethelberta – Thomas Hardy
The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Enchanted Wanderer – Nicolai Leskov
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
In a Glass Darkly – Sheridan Le Fanu
The Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Erewhon – Samuel Butler
Spring Torrents – Ivan Turgenev
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
King Lear of the Steppes – Ivan Turgenev
He Knew He Was Right – Anthony Trollope
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
Phineas Finn – Anthony Trollope
Maldoror – Comte de Lautréaumont
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola
The Last Chronicle of Barset – Anthony Trollope
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
Uncle Silas – Sheridan Le Fanu
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Water-Babies – Charles Kingsley
Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev
Silas Marner – George Eliot
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
On the Eve – Ivan Turgenev
Castle Richmond – Anthony Trollope
The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Max Havelaar – Multatuli
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Oblomovka – Ivan Goncharov
Adam Bede – George Eliot
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
North and South – Elizabeth Gaskell
Hard Times – Charles Dickens
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
Villette – Charlotte Brontë
Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Shirley – Charlotte Brontë
Mary Barton – Elizabeth Gaskell
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
The Nose – Nikolay Gogol
Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
Eugénie Grandet – Honoré de Balzac
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
The Red and the Black – Stendhal
The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg
The Albigenses – Charles Robert Maturin
Melmoth the Wanderer – Charles Robert Maturin
The Monastery – Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Ormond – Maria Edgeworth
Rob Roy – Sir Walter Scott
Emma – Jane Austen
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Absentee – Maria Edgeworth
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Elective Affinities – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth
Hyperion – Friedrich Hölderlin
The Nun – Denis Diderot
Camilla – Fanny Burney
The Monk – M.G. Lewis
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
The Interesting Narrative – Olaudah Equiano
The Adventures of Caleb Williams – William Godwin
Justine – Marquis de Sade
Vathek – William Beckford
The 120 Days of Sodom – Marquis de Sade
Cecilia – Fanny Burney
Confessions – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Reveries of a Solitary Walker – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Evelina – Fanny Burney
The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Humphrey Clinker – Tobias George Smollett
The Man of Feeling – Henry Mackenzie
A Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith
The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
Émile; or, On Education – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rameau’s Nephew – Denis Diderot
Julie; or, the New Eloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rasselas – Samuel Johnson
Candide – Voltaire
The Female Quixote – Charlotte Lennox
Amelia – Henry Fielding
Peregrine Pickle – Tobias George Smollett
Fanny Hill – John Cleland
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
Roderick Random – Tobias George Smollett
Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
Pamela – Samuel Richardson
Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus – J. Arbuthnot, J. Gay, T. Parnell, A. Pope, J. Swift
Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Roxana – Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
Love in Excess – Eliza Haywood
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
A Tale of a Tub – Jonathan Swift
Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
The Princess of Clèves – Marie-Madelaine Pioche de Lavergne, Comtesse de La Fayette
The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Unfortunate Traveller – Thomas Nashe
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit – John Lyly
Gargantua and Pantagruel – Françoise Rabelais
The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
The Golden Ass – Lucius Apuleius
Aithiopika – Heliodorus
Chaireas and Kallirhoe – Chariton
Metamorphoses – Ovid
Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

Read more >>

101 Books to Read Before You Die

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Spud - John van de Ruit
The Power of One - Bryce Courtenay
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee
My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
I Know This Much is True - Wally Lamb
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M. Auel
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Possession - A. S. Byatt
Perfume - Patrick Suskind
The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
Chocolat - Joanne Harris
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith
Q & A - Vikas Swarup
Dune - Frank Herbert
Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels
River God - Wilbur Smith
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Mort - Terry Pratchett
Crime and Punishment - Feodor Dostoyevsky
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - John Boyne
The Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Magician - Raymond E Feist
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Day of the Jackal - Frederick Forsyth
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
The Magus - John Fowles
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher
The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
The Beach House - James Patterson
Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
Kringe in 'n Bos - Dalene Matthee
The World according to Garp - John Irving
Northen Lights - Phillip Pullman
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Shades - Marguerite Poland
Kane and Abel - Jeffrey Archer
Fiela se kind - Dalene Matthee
Story of an African Farm - Olive Schreiner
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Winnie-the-Pooh - A.A. Milne

Read more >>

Book List: Modern Library Writers Workshop by Stephen Koch

I've owned this book for months, I lend it and then someone else tells me that there is this index of books the writer, Stephen Koch, recommends. WTF? I didn't know that.

It's divided into categories, and a few are hard to find indeed, so I'd recommend looking here: Abe Books Online and then of course the usual list of suspects.


The Ancients:

The Poetics, Aristotle
I found a copy online, and he specifically recommends Chapters 5 through 14.

On the Sublime, Longinus


Craft and Confidence:

Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott

Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande

The Traditional Modernist Texts:

Aspects of the Novel, EM Forester

The Craft of Fiction, Percy Lubbock

Writers of Writing:

The Paris Review Interviews

Letters to a Fiction Writer, Frederick Busch

On Becoming a Novelist, The Art of Fiction, and On Moral Fiction, John Gardner

Memoirs and Manuals of the Craft:

Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury

How to Write a Novel, John Braine

Narrative Design, Madison Smartt Bell

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, Patricia Highsmith

On Writing: A Memoir on the Craft, Stephen King

One Writer's Beginnings, Eudora Welty

Publishers and Editors:

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers, Betsy Lerner

Notebooks:

A Writer's Notebook, W. Somerset Maugham

Of all the books on the list, the one I most highly recommend (mostly because I've read it) is A Writer's Notebook by Somerset Maugham.

Maugham claimed he never made a note he did not plan to use professionally. Other writers say they make notes but never consult their notebooks. This is completely dependent on what type of writer you are.

I for one keep several notebooks, I categorize them. I keep little markers for things I'm certain I'm going to use. I blog, I keep Google Docs - I basically make a massive amount of notes and I know other writers who do the same.

But a notebook for the book you are working on is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL. You never know when the inspiration will strike you. I specifically carry a smaller sized Moleskin so that I can write when I'm on the metro without throwing my elbows into the weary traveller beside me.

So read, but not too much.

Write. It's the only way to be a writer. Write. Today. I'm starting write now...

Read more >>

Guardian Book List

Why the Guardian gave so much weight to what Norweigans read in their book clubs, I have no idea. But it's The Guardian, so we should take it seriously.

I like to read lists people compile of books one should read. Mostly because I've read a lot and it makes me feel good about myself, like when a girl not as pretty or smart or funny or generally as awesome as you hits on your boyfriend right in front of you. As you can tell this happened recently, but I found this book list a few hours ago, so I suppose I should get over the thing with the bitch who hit on my boyfriend. As the great musical philsopher Lily Allen once said on her freshman LP effort, "you're not big, you're not clever"...anyways moving on.

Here is the entire list, with books I can't wait to get me mitts and me's eyeballs on.

Bold = Books I Want to Read
Italics = Books I have read and actually recommend

Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930), Things Fall Apart
Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875), Fairy Tales and Stories
Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice
Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850), Old Goriot
Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989), Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375), Decameron
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986), Collected Fictions
Emily Bronte, England, (1818-1848), Wuthering Heights
Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960), The Stranger
Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970), Poems.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961), Journey to the End of the Night
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616), Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400), Canterbury Tales
Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904), Selected Stories
Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924), Nostromo
Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870), Great Expectations
Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784), Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957), Berlin Alexanderplatz
Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881), Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot, England, (1819-1880), Middlemarch
Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994), Invisible Man
Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC), Medea
William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962), Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880), Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936), Gypsy Ballads
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Colombia, (b. 1928), One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Gilgamesh, Mesopotamia (c 1800 BC).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832), Faust
Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852), Dead Souls
Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927), The Tin Drum
Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967), The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952), Hunger.
Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961), The Old Man and the Sea
Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC), The Iliad and The Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906), A Doll's House
The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC).
James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941), Ulysses
Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924), The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle Bohemia
Kalidasa, India, (c. 400), The Recognition of Sakuntala
Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972), The Sound of the Mountain
Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957), Zorba the Greek
DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930), Sons and Lovers
Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998), Independent People
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837), Complete Poems
Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919), The Golden Notebook
Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002), Pippi Longstocking
Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936), Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC).
Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911), Children of Gebelawi
Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955), Buddenbrook; The Magic Mountain
Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891), Moby Dick
Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592), Essays.
Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985), History
Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931), Beloved
Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (N/A), The Tale of Genji Genji
Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942), The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977), Lolita
Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300).
George Orwell, England, (1903-1950), 1984
Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC), Metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935), The Book of Disquiet
Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849), The Complete Tales
Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922), Remembrance of Things Past
Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986), Pedro Paramo
Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273), Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947), Midnight's Children
Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292), The Orchard
Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929), Season of Migration to the North
Jose Saramago, Portugal, (b. 1922), Blindness
William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616), Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC), Oedipus the King
Stendhal, France, (1783-1842), The Red and the Black
Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928), Confessions of Zeno
Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745), Gulliver's Travels
Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910), War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500).
Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC), Ramayana
Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC), The Aeneid
Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941), Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987), Memoirs
of Hadrian

I'm very much into book lists at the moment, so stayed tuned for more...

Read more >>

Taking a few pages from Henry Miller

I recently got my mitts on a book by Henry Miller with an appendix that originally appeared in an article entitled "Pour Une Bibliothèque Idéale".

I decided to compile my own list, in no particular order.

The Books that Have Influenced Me the Most

1. Miguel Angel Asturias, Mulatta and the Fly
2. Jean de la Fontaine, Fables et Contes
3. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
4. Edith Hamilton, Mythology
5. Jerzy Kosinski, Painted Bird
6. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude
7. Yusunari Kawabata, A Thousand Cranes
8. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
9. Miguel de Unamuno, Mist
10. Isabel Allende, House of Spirits
11. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
12. FUP, Jim Dodge
13. Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials Trilogy
14. JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit
15. C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia
16. Oscar Wilde, A Picture of Dorian Gray
17. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
18. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
19. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
20. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
21. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
22. George Orwell, Animal Farm
23. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
24. W. Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories
25. W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
26. Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
27. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
28. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
29. Alexandre Dumas Pere, Le Comte de Monte Cristo
30. Alexandre Dumas Fils, La Dame aux Camelias
31. Aesop's Fables
32. Jose Saragamo, Blindness
33. Margueritte Duras, La Douleur
34. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
35. Cervantes, Don Quixote
36. Lady Murasaki, Tale of the Genji
37. Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme
38. Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum
39. George du Maurier, Trilby
40. Zola, La Ventre de Paris
41. Kate Chopin, The Awakening
42. Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
43. Anais Nin, Delta of Venus
44. Anais Nin, The Complete Diaries
45. Khaled Hosseni, The Kite Runner
46. Boccaccio, The Decameron
47. Homer, The Odessey
48. Plato, The Symposium
49. Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
50. The Perfumed Garden
51. Federico Garcia Llorca, Feder
52. Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Voyage au bout de la nuit
53. Ovid, Metamorphoses
54. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
55. Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking
56. Albert Camus, La Peste
57. A Thousand and One Nights
58. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
59. Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach
60. Michael Bond, Paddington Bear
61. E.B. White, Charlotte's Web
62. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu
63. Thomas Malory, La Mort d'Arthur

There are many more, but I guess I'll stop there for now...

Read more >>