🙃
I thought @thedisasterautist's meme prompt today was pretty neat, but it is VERY hard to ask a writer to pick just a few good books.
Still, here goes nothing:
Top 30(ish: actually 34)
Books To Know Me Better
1. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
2. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
3. Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics
4. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
5. Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War
1/x
6. Tony Judt, Postwar (but also Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem)
7. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
8. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
9. Roland Barthes, Mythologies
10. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
11. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
12. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
13. Fyodor Dostoevsky, either The House of the Dead or The Brothers Karamazov
14. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future
15. Anton Chekhov, The Complete Short Novels
2/x
16. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
17. Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea
18. George Eliot, Mill on the Floss, or Middlemarch
19. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
20. Adele Wiseman, Crackpot
21. Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
22. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
23. Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
24. Neal Stephenson, Anathem
24. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt
26. Laurent Binet, The Seventh Function of Language
27. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
3/x
I always like to see Robertson Davies appear in lists like this. My mom turned me on to his writing years ago and I plowed through them all over a period of time. Wonderful complex books.
It's one of only 2 of your list that I've read.
Davies is a gem! I'm actually surprised I was introduced to him in Grade 9 English. I wonder if students would be let lose on something so psychologically complex today. (Although we also read Timothy Findley's The Wars - another *very* challenging book, for all its nuance about World War I atrocity, so I guess I just had good teachers!)
What was the second one?
This is the problem! Too many books.
When venturing into the land of lit, we need to bring a whole citizens' army of readers if we're going to catch 'em all. :)
Some of your list seems to lean into futurists it seems
but you left off John Brunner and William Gibson who write some very prophetic stories.
I do love Gibson's dialogue--he's one of the absolute best at imagining realistic future-speak--but I favoured worldbuilding in this list instead.
The real heartbreak was leaving J.G. Ballard out, actually! Some of his stories are still so unnervingly resonant.
Also, on the psych-theme of Davies, Frederik Pohl's Gateway is a beautiful use of SF to talk not only about socioeconomic precarity but also the psychological ramifications of a scarcity mentality.
🙃 Just 30 books is hard!
@MLClark
Eco's Name of the Rose
I have read some of the other authors but not those specific titles.