A Book for Everyone and No One
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Quite accessable and yet so full of beauty and wisdom.
I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
A must read.
Highly recommended.
How One Becomes What One Is
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche's comment on his authorship so a thorough knowledge of Nietzsche is recommended. It is not the place to start reading Nietzsche.
I am not a man. I am dynamite.
An ok read.
by Anaïs Nin
At a time where writting erotica at a dollar a page was a way to make a living Nin wrote these erotic short stories in the style of what men wanted or so she tought.
I finally decided to release the erotica for publication because it shows the beginning efforts of a woman in a world that had been the domain of men.
The New York Times Book Review wrote:
The first American stories by a woman to celebrate sexuality with complete and open abandonment.
Recommended.
by Anaïs Nin
More erotic stories by Nin.
Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times wrote:
Nin again elevates, and surpasses the form. The stories are deep and delightful, sexual elements balanced against a kind of setting Colette might have written.
Not quite up the standard of The Delta of Venus but recommended anyhow.
by Joyce Carol Oates
The story of a young woman leaving a beach party with an aging but powerful senator only to end her in life a river after a car accident with the senator as the only survivor.
The life of Kelly Kelleher as it fashes before her eyes in the last moments.
The story will most likely remind you of the death Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick under similar circumstances in a car driving by Senator Edward Kennedy.
A quick and OK read.
by Joyce Carol Oates
A small, feminine woman's fascination with the bloody art of boxing.
On boxing as metaphor, in literature, Dempsey and Ali and more.
An OK read if you are interested in boxing.
by Michael Ondaatje
Anil Tissera is a Sri Lankan forensic anthropologist returning after 15 years in Europe and America. She is part of an civil rights group sent by the UN to investigate the political murders.
A novel of foreigness and the bonds and hopes that tie people together. Also a very political novel.
... the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here.
Recommended
by Chuck Palaniuk
Victor Mancini describes himself as an uncaring asshole and proud of it. He is also a sex addict and a hustler.
If you're going to read this, don't bother.
I should have followed Palaniuk's advice from the first line of the book.
Choke is not particularly interesting.
by Michael Palin
The story of Martin Sproale who is an assistant postmaster in an English coastal town obsessing about Hemingway.
Palin's first novel and luckily not quite what you would expect from a Monty Python.
Recommended
by Orhan Pamuk
The story of the Turkish poet KA in a small town under a rebellion. He goes there to see an old friend and to investigate the story of young teenage girl suicides but finds love, religion and violence.
Ka new very well that life was a meaningles chain of random events.
Well written but a bit too long.
Recommended.
by Matthew Pearl
In 1865 the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow began translating Dante's Divine Comedy. Together with poets James Russell Lowell and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, historian George Washington Greene and publisher James T. Fields he formed The Dante Club which in 1881 became The Dante Society of America. This is the fact.
Pearl has made this the setting 0f a story of a homicidal mad man who takes it upon himself to enact the horrible punishments of Dante's Inferno. It is now up to the members of The Dante Club to stop him.
"Remember: Virgil tells the pilgrim that fear is the main impediment to his journey.
The New York Times wrote:
Ingenious... Sparkling with erudition.
A great story allthough a bit loose in the edges.
Recommended
by Robert Pirsig
A modern classic. A book about values. Phædrus rides his motorcycle with his young son while he thinks about values and the events leading to his mental breakdown.
When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way.
This is the novel that I have read the most times. It is also the novel that I have thrown away in anger the most times.
Highly recommended.
An Inquiry into Morals
by Robert Pirsig
Phædrus is back. 20 years later the philosophizing, introspective Phædrus is sailing down the Hudson River with the sexually agressive, outgoing Lila. Phædrus is again forced to examine the fundamental questions of living.
Dusenberry smiled with a kind of arch smile. He said, `One time they [the native americans] were supposed to have food, you know, from before the white man came. Blueberries and venison and all that and so what did they do? They broke out three cans of DelMonte corn and started opening all the cans with a can opener. I stood it as long as I could. Finally I told them "NO! NO! NO! Not canned corn," and they laughed at me. They said, "Just like a white man. Has to have everything just right."
Highly recommended.
by Silvia Plath
Esther Greenwood is brilliant, talented and beautiful but she is slipping further and further down into depression.
I felt Mr. Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said no, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr. Willard had never been sick a day in his life.
A desturbing book about a breakdown.
Recommended.
by Plato
One of the most important books in the history of philosophy in which Plato details a just state governed by philosophers.
To readers of other of Plato's dialogues like Gorgias, Phaedo, and Symposium it will be disappointing with its acceptance of euthanasia, censorship, slavery and more. Popper went as far as to blame it for the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.
An important read.
by Plato
Socrates spends the hours up to his death with friends discussing the immortalily of the soul.
The it is true, Simmias, that the real philosophers train for dying, and to be dead is for them less terrible that for alle other men.
In Phaedo Plato's notion of ideas are also introduced although as an established fact.
For serious study do get a version with a commentary for instance R. Hackforth Plato's Phaedo from Cambridge University Press.
Recommended.
by Dennis Potter
A psychological thriller for television. The screenplay of Potter's six part television serial.
The writer Marlow is crippled by psoriasis and lies delirius in a hospital bed blending the present, his childhood memories from a rural mining community, and his fictional alter ego's exploits.
The Independent wrote:
A masterpiece ... Potter's wheel of imagination spins as uniquely and viciously as ever and his distinguishing characteristics as writer - narrative ambition and scalding honesty - are at their strongest.
Highly recommended.
by Richard Powers
A excellent book on race and music set from 1939 to the present day.
The Stroms are an exceptionally musically gifted family. A German-Jewish physicist married to a black singer with 3 children trying to make it in a white world singing white (classical) music in a changing America.
It took me months in the Glimmer Room to realize that what most people wanted from music was not transcendence but simple companionship, a tune just as bound by gravity as its listeners were, cheerful under its crushing leadenness. What we really want, finally, from friends is that they have no more clue than we do. Of all tunes, only the happy amnesiac live forever in the hearts of their hearers.
It looses a bit in the end but still recommended.
by Marcel Proust
Then he belonged to that class of intelligent men who have lived a life of idleness, and who seek a consolation and perhaps an excuse in the notion that their idleness offers to their intelligence objects as worthy of interest as any that might be offered by art or learning, the notion that ”Life” contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written.
Probably one of the best works of literature ever written.
A revised and updated edition of the Moncrieff and Kilmartin translation.
Highly recommended.
by Marcel Proust
No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves. And so there are very few who can regard the enormous proportions that a person comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the person that they see.
Highly recommended.
by Philip Roth
The story of a Jewish familily living in Newark around the second world war. Charles Lindberg has defeated franklin Roosevelt in the presidential election and is pursuing an isolationist policy keeping America out of the war against Nazi Germany.
The Times wrote:
A dark, humane masterpiece. Roth is at the peak of his powers.
An ok read.
by Salman Rushdie
Forget everything you think you know about The Satanic Verses.
It is about the nature of religion but in a round about way. Can demons be angelic? Can angels be devils?
Gibreel and Saladin both survives a plane crash after plunging to the ground clinging to each other singing. The experience changes them. Gibreel gets a halo and Saladin's feet turn into hoofs and he gets bumps at his temples.
A cycle of extraordinary tales among these the story of Mahound - Prophet of Jahilia - who has a revelation in which the the satanic verses mingle with the devine.
A story of good and evil but which is which?
Highly recommended.
by Salman Rushdie
A modern version of Orpheus riddled with references to high as well as pop culture.
We leave our home not only to make room for our selves but to avoid the sight of our elders running out of steam. We don’t want to see the consequences of their natures and histories catching up with them and beating them, the closing of the trap of life. Feet of clay will cripple us, too, in out turn. Life’s bruises demythologise us all. The earth gapes. It can't wait. There’s plenty of time.
Rushdie at his usual fabulatory self.
Toni Morrison wrote:
This is Rushdie at his absolutely, almost insolently global best - his adroit mastery of language serves brilliantly imagined characters and a mesmerizing narrative. Completely seductive.
It is well written as usual but I could not get into the story. It was just too ... out there.
by Salman Rushdie
A fantastical and funny childrens book on good and evil that everyone can read and enjoy.
The story of Haroun - the son of a storyteller that has lost the gift of speech - the mad bus driver, the Shadow Warriors and the Land of Darkness.
Rushdie's first book after The Satanic Verses.
Clever and beautifully written.
Highly recommended.
Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991
by Salman Rushdie
75 essays by Rushdie on earlier and comtemporary writers (Orwell, Gordimer, Chatwin (Rushdie travelled with him in Australia), Naipaul, Calvino, Kipling, Vonnegut and many more) , colonialism, culture and religious fundamentalism in America.
Rushdie is a brilliant writer which makes this collection of essays all the more interesting. At the very least you can read this book as a series of introductions to the works of countless writers.
Recommended.
