Tag: booklist

Welcome to my 8th Annual Annotated Book Recommendations.

As always, I try to select the very best reads, drawn from authoritative sources, books generally regarded as canonical, as well as works endorsed by critics of the first rank. I also aim for balance through stimulating titles across a range of interests.

Since this list begins as my own, it includes books I should have read long ago.

The hardest part is limiting worthy candidates in order to arrive at a manageable list of ten to twelve works of fiction and nonfiction. Ultimately, this list is yours—to read from, to browse, or simply to keep in mind.

Happy New Year!

Fiction:

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart (Achebe’s landmark novel that explores British colonial and missionary intrusion, destabilizing a rich and complex Igbo society.)

Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. (A novel challenging the mythology of the American West and the reliability of historical truth.)

Broch, Hermann. The Death of Virgil. (One of the supreme masterpieces of the 20th Century dramatizing the poet Virgil’s final hours, debating burning the Aeneid manuscript, fearing art’s complicity in fostering illusion rather than truth.)

Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. (An African-American writer of eleven science fiction novels, Butler may have written the most relevant dystopian novel of our time. Published in 1993, the setting is thirty years later. Christian nationalism has usurped the government, the US is corporately run, states and cities restrict immigrants, the gap grows between rich and poor. Southern California is on fire. The fallout of not heeding climate change is horrific. Change is life’s constant. We adapt, or we perish.)

Colette. Claudine at School. (Colette’s first novel, partly autobiographical, depicting adolescent rebellion and the interplay between transgression and innocence.)

Dazai, Obamu. No Longer Human. (An exploration of social estrangement in a rapidly changing post-war society.)

Keegan, Claire. Small Things Like These. (Shortlisted for a Booker, an Irish novella of ecclesiastical hypocrisy and moral resistance. Several critics call it “a perfect book.”)

Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. (While some have dubbed Kipling’s renowned novel as imperialist, it deserves reading for its multi-layered narrative, vivid in its vignettes of India, suspenseful as a story of espionage, and morally significant as a tale of spiritual quest.)

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. (McCarthy may be our greatest novelist since Faulkner, writing a mesmerizing prose. This novel tells of Texas teen cowboy John Grady Cole’s quest to continue a vanishing way of life in Mexico, only to encounter danger, betrayal, loss, and a quest for justice. Winner of National Book Award for Fiction 1992, and National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction 1992.)

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. (An American classic, based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved Kentucky woman escaping slavery who, recaptured, kills her child rather than have her live in slavery. Morrison delivers in rendering slavery’s horror.)

Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. (Featuring a widowed father raising a neurodivergent son with a passion for animals in a next generation world devastated by climate change and species loss, Powers’ intense lyrical narrative probes the infinity of the universe juxtaposed by human limitation).

Pullman, Philip. The Book of Dust. (Pullman’s new fantasy work is a sequel trilogy to that of His Dark Materials, expanding on Lyra’s world, her separated daemon companion, and a corrupt Magisterium that governs religious and political thought. A masterpiece you won’t want to finish.)

Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. (Through interior monologue, Rhys’s novel captures the yearnings of a middle-aged woman in a patriarchal world that enforces women’s dependency on men, but esteems youth and beauty foremost.)

Simenon, Georges. Pietyr the Latvian. (A good place to begin reading Belgian mystery writer Simenon, whose inspector Jules Maigret probes the arrival in Paris of a notorious criminal. Filled with twists and psychological depth, you’ll want to read more Simenon, who wrote 75 Maigret novels.)

Tartt, Donna. The Goldfinch. (A terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art kills 13-year old Theo Decker’s mother. In the confused aftermath, he steals a 17th c. painting, “The Goldfinch.” A story of survival, the painting symbolizes resilience, the ability of art to sustain a traumatized life. Pulitzer Prize winner, 2014).

Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. (A landmark science fiction read, mirroring the anxieties of the Victorian era: a stark meditation on entropy—biological, social, and moral—and on the uneasy faith in progress that defined the late nineteenth century).

Non Fiction:

Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. (A critique of Freud’s limitations and profound meditation on mortality’s central role in shaping civilization.)

Cassidy, John. Capitalism and Its Critics. (Rather than a polemic, denouncing capitalism, Cassidy features a myriad of proponents as well as critics, resulting in an informed primer for understanding current debates about markets, globalization, and the future of work.)

Damrosch, Leo. Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. (In his short life of 44 years, the often invalid Stevenson, nonetheless, produced novels, poems and novellas that continue to excite the popular imagination. Damrosch avoids hagiography in this fully rounded portraiture of the great storyteller.)

Frank, Edwin. Stranger Than Fiction. (Frank, the editor of the New York Review of Books Classics Series, discusses forgotten or overlooked books that may be more culturally informative than celebrated canonical works.)

Hoare, Philip. William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. (A compendium of visionary poet and engraver Blake’s influence on other artists and thinkers, from Derek Jarman to Iris Murdoch to James Joyce to the pre-Raphaelites. )

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction. ( A timely, thoughtful analysis of drivers of past species extinction and those of the present in which evolution is now principally influenced by humans.)

Kowalski, Gary. The Souls of Animals. (A Unitarian Universalist minister writes a grounded study in the emotional life of animals. If animals have souls, i.e., capacity for love, loyalty, grief and empathy, it follows humans must reassess their ethical relationship to its animal kindred.)

Nossack, Hans Erich. The End. (Nossack revisits Hamburg shortly after its 1943 allied fire-bombing. A discerning narrative in restrained prose, The End focuses on human trauma rather than physical destruction, measuring its limits in the aftermath of catastrophe.)

Osnos, Evan. The Haves and Have-Yachts. (A tour of America’s cordoned places where the rich congregate, enjoying amenities unknown to the wider public, possessors of most of the nation’s wealth. How did they accumulate it? What do they want? What do they fear?)

Prideaux, Sue. Wild Thing. (The first biography of Gauguin to appear in thirty years, Prideaux attempts to separate the myth from the realty, loving his art, but not his misdeeds.)

Raffles, Hugh. The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time. (A profound, geological distillation across epochs of violence, loss, and extinction that become metaphor of human rupture inflicted by dispossession, environmental change, and the long reach of capitalism.)

Sanbonmatsu, John. The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves. (A leftist cultural critic, Sanbonmatsu argues on ethical grounds for abandoning a meat economy, which he links with other forms of social injustice; but then how do we feed billions of people without meat? Sanbonmatsu makes a cogent argument meriting thoughtful appraisal.)

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. (An essential read in the making of Modernism in the arts, Stein poses as her life long partner, reminiscing Stein’s influence on avant-garde figures such as Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway and Pound.)

Thurman, Judith. Colette: Secrets of the Flesh. (Thurman’s definitive biography of French novelist Colette, exploring not only her life events, but the social and psychological dynamics that continually shaped her identity.)