Revision as of 09:26, 4 August 2016

Reading list

of Fabrice

in no particular order (I aggregate at the end). Entries stroke through are those I finally read.

1. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, set in 1938 during the Stalinist purges and Moscow show trials.
2. Le Feld-Maréchal von Bonaparte, Jean Dutourd.
3. Au bon beurre, Jean Dutourd.
4. The Diary of a Young Girl of Anne Frank, classic.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Seven Habits of Highly Successful People Stephen Covey (1989) set the standard for books on leadership and effectiveness in business.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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
12. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad. Inspired a movie that inspired a score to Philip Glass, the novel is noted as well.
13. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman. An evil danger for society even Orwell might have overlooked.
14. L'Enculé and L'âge du Christ, Marc-Édouard Nabe.
15. 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.
16. Billy-Ze-Kick, Jean Vautrin, recommended by Henri Guillemin [1].
17. Le camp des Saints, Jean Raspail.
18. Catch-22, major contemporary work that sets out the catch-22 fallacy.
19. Works from Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt such as Le Visiteur or L'Évangile selon Pilate.

I have a much longer reading list but it is not in electronic format yet, so I just add titles here now.