My high school friend Jennifer Erickson created a fascinating, annotated list of her 10 favorite books and listed me as someone she would like to see follow her example. Here is my list. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison - Most of the books on this list Ive read multiple times. I remember The Bluest Eye as being the emotional equivalent of being kicked in the stomach. So, it is probably a one and done experience. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - I use to be convinced that Milan Kundera would win the Nobel Prize. It looks like I was mistaken about this. Jude the Obscure - Almost any Thomas Hardy book could have made my list. Pere Goriot - This too is mostly a lifetime achievement award. Balzac wrote dozens of great books all part of the same loosely connected fictional universe. At one point I wanted to read every Balzac novel, but it turned out that Balzac wrote dozens of mediocre books too. The Kindly Ones - This is a 1400 page account about a Nazi bureaucrat involved in the holocaust. This is the best book that I dont recommend to other people. Although it won Frances highest literary prize, it gets a lot of mediocre reviews - most people dont want to read about evils paperwork. It has my favorite ending in literature. The Masterpiece by Emile Zola - About a painters struggle to put his vision on canvas. Three Musketeers - Probably my if I was stranded on a dessert island book. Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne inspired me to learn how to read French. Death on the Nile - Agatha Christie has given me more pleasure than any other writer. Now I mostly read her in translation. An effective way to learn the vocabulary of a foreign language is to read a story that you already know. The Stranger - This has my favorite opening lines in literature; they perfectly capture the narrators emotional world. This is usually considered a philosophical work - if written today, I wonder if readers would just view the narrator as being autistic.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 12:43:38 +0000
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