Reading list
in no particular order (I aggregate at the end). Entries stroke through are those I finally read.
- Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, set in 1938 during the Stalinist purges and Moscow show trials.
- Le Feld-Maréchal von Bonaparte, Jean Dutourd.
- Au bon beurre, Jean Dutourd.
- The Diary of a Young Girl of Anne Frank, classic.
- 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.
- Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman. An evil danger for society even Orwell might have overlooked.
-
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.
- 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.
I have a much longer reading list but it is not in electronic format yet, so I just add titles here now.