🙃
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
28. Nazim Hikmet, Poems
29. Wislawa Szymborska, Poems New and Collected
30. Tobias Wolff, The Night in Question OR Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
Whew.
So many key books missing, but it's good to review one's touchstones--even if left kicking oneself for everything left out!
Literature is a conversation we have with ourselves, about ourselves, over time.
Whenever we write, we're in dialogue with the stories given to us and around us.
Choose your fellow-travellers well.
@cmskiera
The Years of Rice and Salt is another very challenging book - but worth it!
KSR has two questions at the foundation of the book:
1) What if the Black Plague had wiped out most all of Europe - what would development of the world look like from an unchecked Asia instead?
And,
2) What if the Bardo was real, and two consciousnesses had to reincarnate over and over and over until they found a way to build a better ecosystem for all beings in their vicinity?
Ambitious book! Have fun!