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| # ''White Teeth'', Zadie Smith | | # ''White Teeth'', Zadie Smith |
| # ''The Man Without Qualities'', Robert Musil | | # ''The Man Without Qualities'', Robert Musil |
| + | # The remaining novels from [[Victor Hugo]] I haven't read yet: ''Bug-Jargal'', ''Han d'Islande'', ''Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné'', ''Claude Gueux'', ''Les Travailleurs de la mer'' and ''L'Homme qui rit''. |
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| I have a much longer reading list but it is not in electronic format yet, so I just add titles here now. | | I have a much longer reading list but it is not in electronic format yet, so I just add titles here now. |
Revision as of 13:59, 20 July 2018
Reading list
in no particular order (I aggregate at the end). Entries stroke through are those I finally read.
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Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, set in 1938 during the Stalinist purges and Moscow show trials.
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Le Feld-Maréchal von Bonaparte and Au bon beurre, Jean Dutourd.
- Following reading le Feld-Maréchal in July (2018), and recognizing Dutourd as a major contemporary writer and thinker, I add to this list Le Septième Jour, 2024, Rivarol and Mémoires de Mary Watson as a first salve (there are more titles of interest).
- The Diary of a Young Girl of Anne Frank, classic.
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Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (1958), as the most widely read book in contemporary African literature, focuses on the clash of colonialism, Christianity, and native African culture.
- Syntactic Structures Noam Chomsky (1957), laying out his ideas of transformational grammar, revolutionized the field of linguistics and at the same time dethroned behaviorism in psychology.
- Seven Habits of Highly Successful People Stephen Covey (1989) set the standard for books on leadership and effectiveness in business.
- Darwin’s Black Box Michael Behe (1996), though roundly rejected by the scientific community, epitomizes the challenge of so-called intelligent design to evolutionary theory and has spawned an enormous literature, both pro and con.
- Man’s Search for Meaning Victor Frankl (1962) provides a particularly effective answer to totalitarian attempts to crush the human spirit, showing how humanity can overcome horror and futility through finding meaning and purpose.
- In the Shadow of Man Jane Goodall (1971), in relating her experiences with chimpanzees in the wild, underscored the deep connection between humans and the rest of the animal world.
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn (1962, last edition 1978) changed our view of science from a fully rational enterprise to one fraught with bias and irrational elements
- The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad. Inspired a movie that inspired a score to Philip Glass, the novel is noted as well.
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Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman. An evil danger for society even Orwell might have overlooked.
- Interesting idea but a bore to read as too anchored in its time.
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L'Enculé and L'âge du Christ, Marc-Édouard Nabe.
- Confessions of a Mask, Yukio Mishima, on homosexuality in wartime Japan; I put the more urgent Temple of the Golden Pavilion on my May reading list.
- Billy-Ze-Kick, Jean Vautrin, recommended by Henri Guillemin [1].
- Le camp des Saints, Jean Raspail.
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Catch-22, major contemporary work that sets out the catch-22 fallacy.
- Works from Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt such as
Le Visiteur or L'Évangile selon Pilate.
- The Good Soldier Švejk, a classic of Czech literature.
- Everything from Kurt Vonnegut; after reading Slaughterhouse 5, I realised that Vonnegut is probably a favourite Author (what Cat's cradle by itself did not make me realise right away although it gives a consistent picture). This could include as a first further exploring: Player Piano (first novel),
Mother Night (memoirs of the American Nazi met by Bobby Pilgrim) and Galapagos, as a later work, featuring Darwinism. Breakfast of Champions should also surface at some point.
- The portrait of the artist as a young man, not in my Joyce's reading list selection of August 2017.
- Robinson Crusoe, Defoe, classic.
- The Call of the Wild, Jack London, classic.
- Moby Dick, Herman Melville.
- Madame Bovary, Flaubert.
- La princesse de Clèves, Madame de Lafayette
- The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner [2]
- La cantatrice chauve, Eugène Ionesco.
- Les Faux-monnayeurs, André Gide.
- Le Hussard sur le toit and Un roi sans divertissement from Jean Giono.
- Thérèse Desqueyroux, François Mauriac
- The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu
- The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
- White Teeth, Zadie Smith
- The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
- The remaining novels from Victor Hugo I haven't read yet: Bug-Jargal, Han d'Islande, Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné, Claude Gueux, Les Travailleurs de la mer and L'Homme qui rit.
I have a much longer reading list but it is not in electronic format yet, so I just add titles here now.