I have finished the collected short stories of Saul Bellow, which I read as a way of deciding whether I wanted to tackle his longer novels. And I decided that his prose style, which has been much lauded, doesn’t appeal to me, so it’s into the bin with Saul. That’s sad, as he wrote a lot of highly-rated and fat novels that would have kept me busy for a while.
Therefore I’m appealing to readers for suggestions of good books to read. They can be either fiction or nonfiction, though I think I’m in a nonfiction mood. As I’m old and on the downhill slide to oblivion, the books should be world class, as I have little no time for less than brilliant works.
Let us know what you’re reading, but particularly put your recommendations in the comments. For example, you could tell us what you think is the best book you ever read. For me it’s Anna Karenina for long fiction and Joyce’s The Dead for short fiction. Non-fiction is harder, but Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson come to mind (I’ll probably think of another choice soon). “Best books,” then, are what I’m looking for, and I realize that such choices are subjective.
Please comment below.
The Poisonwood Bible
Seconded – an excellent book about the follies of religion!
Oops, I meant to add that this post is very helpful as my wife’s been asking me for ideas for my birthday later in the month. Thanks everyone for some great suggestions!
Wow, I came here to recommend that one and am surprised to see it’s the first comment! I read it over 20 years ago and it has stuck with me.
Kingsolver’s latest, Demon Copperhead, is wonderful! Loved Saul Bellow’s novels, when I read them maybe 30 years ago.
Currently loving Rory Stewart’s The Prince of the Marshes, about Iraq in early 2000s. Also loved his The Places in Between about his year-long walk through Afghanistan,
All the books by Salman Rushdie are FANTASTIC!
I listened to the audiobook of “Victory City” during a recent cross country trip. The story was very compelling, but the names of the characters, as read by the narrator, combined with road noise, made it less than satisfactory.
I expect that reading the book would have been a much more pleasant experience.
I could recommend “The Cancelling of the American Mind” that just came out which I finished reading just these last two weeks.
Also just added to the pile.
The best book I’ve read by far in the last few years is David Potter’s The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861. Can’t recommend it strongly enough. If you want a dissenting view on modern American History, try M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (the first chapter is hard to get through; I don’t think it works).
For lighter fun reading consider Andy Weir’s “Project Hail Mary”. All sorts of twists and turns in the plot.
For more inspirational reading Daniel James Brown’s “Boy in the Boat” is wonderful. I made sure my son read it before heading off to college. (The book was so good I am worried about the movie adaptation)
There’s one obvious work of literature to stand beside ‘Anna Karenina’ in terms of psychological depth and literary description, Proust’s ‘A la recherche du Temps Perdu’. [ No real need to put in the qualifier ‘Western literature’, with the possible exception, if one wishes to add a female author, ‘the Tale of Genji’. As Dr Coyne mentioned Bellow, I might as well add to be naughty, SB’s rhetorical question of ‘Where is the Zulu Tolstoy?]
So JAC should tackle Proust, and for English-only readers such as my limited self, this ought to be in the beautiful but pricey Yale edition : ‘The CK Scott Moncrieff translation edited and annotated by William Carter.’ The Scott Moncrieff is the oldest of the Proust English translations, and has been revised in the 1980s [ this is the edition I first bought and read while I was at med school ] and later. Whatever the merits of the Penguin multi-author translation [ The Lydia Davis translated volume is very fluent ], the Penguin books were nasty — cheap paper even in hardback with tiny typeface. The Yale edition ed Carter is lovely — paperbacks that lie open and flat with ease without cracking the spine, nice matt white paper, and most importantly, generous footnotes that are inserted alongside the outer margins of the text, such that the eye moves easily to the explications, without the interruptions of flicking to the end of the book !
Why should Dr Coyne tackle Proust? For one, he was Jewish, with [ for me] interesting reportage of the Dreyfus affair. Proust’s judgments of music and painting are so modern compared to Henry James — appreciations of Wagner, Vermeer, etc that are close to the intellectual consensus of the late 20th c.
As for Russian lit, the Constance Garnett translations are still very serviceable, inhabiting an English idiom that is genteel Edwardian. As a kid, I read the Penguin Anna K translation done by another woman. But the Russian translations of the husband and wife team of Pevear and Volokhonsky have received great acclaim — not just for Anna Karenina, but also works by Dostoevski, Chekhov, the Master & Margarita etc. These seem to replicate some idiosyncrasies of the original authors’ punctuation style, insofar as this can be replicated in translation.
Thank you, I love descriptions of how books look, and you have made me want to reread Proust in the Carter edition.
Loved the Pevear and Volokhosky Anna K. Am very slowly making my way through Proust en français (in the middle of volume 3).
“I might as well add to be naughty, SB’s rhetorical question of ‘Where is the Zulu Tolstoy?]”
Are you being just naughty or gratuitously racist?
Always bracing to have the ‘R’ word used by somebody with a Western name, Jonathan! Indeed, what might I know of racism, being half-Chinese and half-Indian, growing up in a western country.
While I would personally not have phrased this in the manner of Saul Bellow, you will note that I did mention Lady Murasaki’s novel ‘Tale of Genji’ alongside Proust and Tolstoy. The cultural question is how much does a society with a long history of written, as opposed to orally transmitted culture , have its literature altered, or expanded by this tradition of literacy? The ‘R’ word you use is not relevant to this question. So it is no surprise that China and Japan produced, inter alia, long secular works of literature — Genji, Red Chamber, while tribal peoples without a long history of the written word permeating the elites with the time and resources to write — did not. Also, while the world is now focused on Hamas, I may as well mention the multi-century literary written production of the classical Islamic world, which inherited the written traditions of the Hellenistic and pre-Islamic Middle East’s literary cultures.
Book Tip – Annotated Arabian Nights ed Yasmine Searle! Marvellous folio sized book with colour illustrations !
Well there may be interesting questions to explore around the development of literature in different cultural contexts but it remains unclear to me why, in a thread devoted to book recommendations, you found it necessary to allude to the supposed literary inferiority of Zulu culture.
“Sometimes A Great Notion” by Ken Kesey
Yes, Kesey’s second novel is technically superior to his first, Cuckoo’s Nest — no small feat, that — even if the saga of the Stamper clan fails to pack the same wallop.
South by Ernest Shackleton
The ship sank but nobody died thanks to Shackleton’s leadership. But there is no self justification in the book. It’s sober and elegant, and I was gripped from page 1.
“The Theory That Would Not Die” by Sharon Bertsch mcGrayne. It catalogs ideology in the field of mathematics and statistics by following the history of Bayes Theorem. Great read and for me a nice reminder of how the crazy ideology and dogmas of our time – while alarming – are not new at all.
I was very disappointed in that book: it failed to deliver what I had expected. It was too full of the obvious while being light on the reasons for how Bayes’s theorem works.
The mathematical proof of Bayes theorem is pretty straight forward, at least for the simple version of the theorem, taking only a few lines. Thus the how and the why could only really occupy a few pages.
What’s interesting about Bayes theorem is that, given its simplicity, why its implications are so profound and unexpected by the majority of people and also, given the profound and unexpected implications, how it and its proof are so simple.
World class? No problem – “The Body” by Bill Bryson.
I’m a Bryson fan too. “A Walk in the Woods” and “In a Sunburned Country” are 2 of my favorites.
I also like Dave Barry, for humor. “Best State Ever” includes “The Villages”, one of my favorite short stories.
A Walk in the Woods was great fun. My favorite quote from it:
Now here’s a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American does in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days—that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls—adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That’s ridiculous.
Yikes! Those walking stats are horrendous.
” Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe by Philip Plait, PHD. ”
A very fun read which imagines what other parts of our universe look like and feel like and the special dangers ( lots of those!) and wonders of the cosmos. Travel to the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, Saturn, Pluto and beyond. A marvelous book!
I read Anna Karenina years ago while taking the subway to one of my first jobs. It was a more modern Penguin translation. My boss spotted me coming with that in my hand one day and reprimanded me saying if you are going to read Anna Karenina at least read by great aunt’s translation. I then made the connection as his last name was Garnett.
The Song of the Cell. Sidharta Mukerjee. A jewel.
Red Notice – Bill Browder. Fascinating read about his exposing corruption in Russia at the highest level.
Shadow Divers – Robert Kurson. True story of a U-boat discovery off the east coast of the US in the ‘90s and the dangerous world of recreational deep sea diving.
Nick Lane is an English biochemist who has written several science books based on his speciality and aimed at the general public. On my bookshelf are “Life Ascending” and “The Vital Question”, both of which came out some time ago. I have recently read his latest, “Transformer”, which is about the role of the Krebs and reverse-Krebs cycles in building and sustaining life. It is perhaps a bit lowbrow for a Professor Emeritus in Evolutionary Biology; but Lane is an engaging writer and the book is a good read.
I’d second that. Any of Lane’s popular science books are well worth reading.
Me three on Nick Lane.
Yes to Lane! After reading Ascending and Question, I wished that I could have read them before College Chemistry, I would have spent more time trying to grasp the Redox tables. Every potential Bio or Chem major should read these!
I have not yet gotten to Transformer, and have long intended to.
Two of my favorites are Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow” and Geraldine Brooks’ “People of the Book.” Both are historical novels, the first about a man who is placed under house arrest in Moscow in 1922 and how he adapts to life in that situation. The second is the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah–an ancient book actually in the Sarajevo library. Based on small clues in the book, the author imagines some of the places it might have been taken over the centuries.
I second the recommendation of “A Gentleman in Moscow”. I read this recently after reading the same author’s “The Lincoln Highway.” That book was on a recommended list at my library. I highly recommend both books.
Came here to recommend “A Gentleman in Moscow.” A bit of history, and can be both sad and uplifting, but mostly uplifting.
In the weird sub-subgenre of books tracing the history of a specific object, of which People of the Book is an exemplar, another very interesting one is The Hare with Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal. He’s in the fifth generation of the Ephrussi family (at one time, the second-richest Jewish banking family in Europe, after the Rothschilds; all lost to the Nazis). The book follows the history of a collection of 264 netsuke, as they made their way from Japan to France to Austria and back to Japan.
A much lower-brow example is a 12-part Czech television mini-serial (I have no idea if it’s ever been dubbed into German or English) titled Nahrdelnice. It follows a necklace from its origins in Central Europe through the vicissitudes of the 19th and 20th centuries, then across the Atlantic with an immigrant, ending up in a pawn shop in New York City.
For historical fiction, I adored “People of the Book” and also “Horse”. Yes you should have some passing interest in horses, but the book is much more about slavery and racism.
“Breaking Through. My Life in Science.” by Katalin Kariko (2023; Crown, Penguin Random House).
try The Wager, a very revealing story about a boat in the British navy in the 1700s – well written too.
I recently got a friend started on Trollope’s Barchester novels. He’s now in for the long haul. There are ups and downs, but Trollope is worth trying. I think the two Phineas Finn novels (from the Palliser novels) are especially good, with a deeply interesting woman character playing a central role. Trollope’s mother was a strong and fascinating woman, and Trollope has a great variety of women characters. He also is much more willing to write about sex than are other Victorian writers.
The Palliser series is good, though there’s some anti-Semitism in a couple of them – The Eustace Diamonds and The Prime Minister IIRC?
I’ve collected and read all of Trollope, and enjoy him greatly. But if you want to try someone less well known and still in the Victorian novel scene, try out Mrs Gaskell. North and South is a good place to start. Or go back a bit further and try out Tobias Smollett, I recommend The Expedition of Humphry Clinker which was such fun, and an easy read. Also one of the first epistolary novels.
And quite different, a biography of Eric Brown has just been published (Winkle – a nickname in the RN for someone vertically-challenged). He flew more aircraft types than anyone else, ever. Interrogated Goring after the war and had several ‘firsts’ in his career. Absolutely fascinating!
‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen or ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy for short or long read.
‘Goodbye to All That’, Robert Grave’s experiences in First World War, when you realise he was only 22 years old when the war finished.
Speaking of war novels — this time about the War after the War to End All Wars — Gore Vidal was just 19 when he wrote Williwaw; The Naked and the Dead was in print by the time Norman Mailer was 25.
I just finished Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, in the Wheen translation. Very moving; I hope no one will object if I quote the last two paragraphs, which speak of the protagonist, who had survived three years in the trenches during WWI: “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”
Anything by Somerset Maugham, William Thackery or Anthony Trollope.
I had a feeling someone in this erudite bunch would beat me to it – I think PCC would appreciate Maugham (if he hasn’t already encountered him) “Cakes and Ale” for a taste of his short stories, “Of Human Bondage” for a meatier meal. Like Tolstoy, Maugham had a genius for insight into character and motivation.
Just finishing upVanity Fair. While interesting enough (well, at least once you get past the first quarter of the book, which even the author, in one of his many asides, admits is pretty thin gruel), the completely over-the-top presentation of apparently every single person in England as completely devoted to status and social climbing was undoubtedly a lot more incisive back in the 1840s than it is now, when all it does is to make them all seem to be a bunch of buffoons. As always, YMMV.
When I was in high school I read Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” which I liked, but which I don’t remember a thing about! Wikipedia—the repository of all human knowledge—has a write-up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herzog_%28novel%29.
As for some non- Saul Bellow reading, I am about 3/4 of the way through Ray Monk’s 2014 book on Robert Oppenheimer called “Robert Oppenheimer: a Life Inside the Center.” It’s long, very detailed, and excellent. There’s a lot of physics in there and a lot of great information about all the players in the Manhattan Project, but it is quite different from Richard Rhodes’s great 1987 book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” The part in Monk’s book on the notorious (and successful) effort to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance is very well argued and convincing.
Particular titles in the pile – all non fiction – that I find striking contains :
Sowell : Social Justice Fallacies (2023 – just started yesterday)
Xi Van Fleet : Mao’s America – A Survivor’s Warning (2023)
Stephen R. C. Hicks : Postmodernism Explained 2004,2011,2018 Ockham’s Razor Publishing
Gnosis and Hermeticism, van den Broek and Hanegraaff eds., 1998 SUNY Press (good as reference).
And in fiction :
King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, a retelling by Roger Lancelyn Green. This is about as close to what I was looking for as the actual literature of King Arthur, with that sort of grandiose prose – which I only found disappointing versions of.
I’m still unclear how the famous tales were handed down, exactly.
Thanks for this post.
Jane Austen is my literary version of comfort food. If you haven’t read Pride and Prejudice or Emma, I invite you to do so. They’re beautifully crafted, insightful, amusing, and respected.
Plus, they’ll take you far away from a lot of the crap going on today.
The philosopher Gilbert Ryle read all five of Jane Austen’s novels every year. They stand up to that. I would add, if you haven’t ever read it, Kidnapped. It is much more than an adventure story for boys. It is a great story of friendship, and the undercurrents from the actual history are fascinating.
There are six complete Jane Austen novels: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion.
My favourites are P&P and Emma. Northanger Abbey is the least highly regarded but I think it’s the funniest (as well as the shortest). But they’re all great.
S &S, P & P, Mansfield Park, and Emma were all written in the first half of the second decade of the 19th century — a five-year run that, to my knowledge, is otherwise unmatched in English literature. (Coincidentally, this is the same half-decade in which Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope were born.)
I know this only because of a paper I wrote for a literature class in college. Looking back, the paper wasn’t much to brag about, but these factoids have stuck with me, lo these many years.
My younger male self couldn’t tolerate ten pages of balls, and gossip, and courtship intrigue. Yet, in the last two months I have read Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and am now on Persuasion.
Oh my! How Jane Austen has changed over the years!
I *so* understand! In high school, Wuthering Heights bored me out of my skull. A depressingly large number of decades later, I found it, especially the first half, quite absorbing!
This gives me some hope, Doug. Every five years or so I pick up P&P and make an honest effort to experience the magic that so many others have found in this book. I have failed every time. I inevitably turn a page to find that *somehow* the characters are still talking and it’s dialogue as far as the eye can see. I slog on for a bit longer then the book returns to the shelf. Maybe if they included blank pages every so often I could enjoy the silence for a moment and rebuild my strength before the chatter begins again on the following page. Like little intermissions for my socially underdeveloped male brain. My last attempt was in 2022 so maybe 2027 will be the year I finally get it.
Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson.
A classic, beautifully written by a true wordsmith. If you want to experience the trials of life as an otter in the south of England, this is the book for you.
King Leopold’s ghost, by Adam Hochschild.
A non-fiction book that reads like a novel and is deep and poignant. Certainly world class.
Another goodie. About to start Hochschild’s latest : American Midnight.
I like “Tom Lake” (Ann Patchett) and “I am homeless if this is not my home “( Lorrie Moore, 2 of my favorite women writers.
I’ve read no decent non-fiction lately, but “The Maniac” (Labatut) about the “smartest man in the world,” John von Neumann, is ok but I hate the writer’s style. The best line from the book is von Neumann’s response in an interview to the question of when we will build a computer smarter than a human. He said “We won’t. It will build itself.”
“Pimp” by Iceberg Slim for an -out of your life experience- cultural experience. Chicago is featured. I have had recommended to me Stephen King’s Holly” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEsRSQcy_Q0
John Keegan’s “Face of Battle”. It was one of the first military history books that examined warfare ( and especially battle ) from the point of view of the grunts/PBI. He chose Agincourt, Waterloo and the First Day of the Somme and looked at what it was like for the fighting man: especially looking at WHY they fought when all rational considerations said that it could end up either in death or serious wounds. A brilliant writer, Keegan takes us to the point of the sword…..
That was a good one. Both my parents were military historians, so those books are certainly on our shelves.
I recently got around to reading “The cat from Hue”, by John Lawrence. I really enjoyed it. Additionally, the cat in question is a communist revolutionary feline.
I also recently read “The Battle of Long Tan” by Peter FitzSimmons, which was a good read and explores the ANZAC role in Vietnam.
In fiction, “Starter Villain” by John Scalzi was a lot of fun.
I recently read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. I was waiting for the next “readers’ open comments” here on this website to ask which of the general histories of WWI is the best (I see the same 4-5, including Keegan, popping up on lists, but I probably won’t read all of them); perhaps I can get away with asking that question here and now.
Keegan is good but I think that Martin Gilbert is my favourite. Keegan slips because the critical 7 months of March-Nov 1918 are covered in a dozen or two pages. Gilbert recognises that this was the key period in the whole war after the Marne.
Strachan is also very good ( if only he had completed his trilogy … sigh) . David Stevenson I also heartedly recommend.
Thanks!
One of the best nonfiction books that I can recommend highly is Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. The anatomical, neurophysiological, and evolutionary evidence for man as a self-domesticated species is presented. Also, I have just started Nicholas Humphrey’s book Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness which looks at phenomenal sentience as an evolutionary adaptation. So far another great read from Humphrey.
try Apeirogon, mid way between narrative and reality. One of the best books of the last years
There’s always The Feynman Lectures on Physics. I figure you’ve probably read all of the books in which you have any interest by Sean Carroll, Max Tegmark, David Deutsch, Brian Greene, and so on.
I figure you’ve probably already read Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter, and Chaos by James Gleick, if you were interested, but those are both good.
And, of course, I can always recommend Rationality: from AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkoswky.
Yes, I was going to recommend GENIUS about RF – but you covered it. And The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Perhaps Jerry has read them…..
Michael Walzer (*1935) is an eminent figure in contemporary political/social philosophy, and I recommend his latest book “The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On ‘Liberal’ As an Adjective”: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300267235/the-struggle-for-a-decent-politics/
I also recommend the following book by history professor John Patrick Diggins (1935-2009), in which he describes the history and development of the four American Lefts in the 20th century (The Lyrical Left, the Old Left, the New Left, the Academic Left): “The Rise and Fall of the American Left” (W. W. Norton & Co., 1992)
The publishing industry has, for many years, been infested with wokery, but it can still produce some fine books. Two of the best works of non-fiction of 2023 are Honor Cargill-Martin’s Messalina and Adam Goodheart’s The Last Island. Both are superb, the former also distinguished by the author’s age (24) and the latter by the author’s being the foremost expert on North Sentinel Island, home to the planet’s only group of featherless bipeds almost completely untouched by the world beyond its narrow confines.
Ceiling Cat,
(Here’s a tweet I thought you’d like: https://x.com/catshouldnt/status/1731702943395598784?s=20)
I have a growing list of books on my shelf that need reading:
1. Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider by Stephen B Heard
2. Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell
3. The Origins of Woke by Richard Hanania
4. Metazoa by Peter Godfrey-Smith
5. Lost in Trans Nation by Grossman
6. The Rise of the New Puritans by Noah Rothman
7. When Race Trumps Merit by Heather Mac Donald
8. The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle
9. Locked in Time: Animal Behavior Unearthed in 50 Extraordinary Fossils
Textbooks and Guides
1. Animals Without Backbones
2. Water Bears: The Biology of Tardigrades
3. Trilobites: Eyewitness to Evolution
4. The Wine Bible by Karen MacNeil
Not much of a fiction reader over here, though I did read Anna Karenina 20+ years ago and remember how enthralling it was.
Robert Trivers, “The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life.” Despite the subtitle’s reference to humans, the book is mostly about deception and self-deception in the broader world of biology. My Kindle edition has highlights on almost every page, because there was so much mind-blowing stuff that I had never encountered before, despite having been a biology major in college and going on to medical school.
This is a fiction recommendation, but I think I recall that you really liked All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. You might also like his Cloud Cuckoo Land. It’s sort of complicated so for me it was best not to try and grapple with any other books at the same time but rather focus on this one. Beautifully done.
Thanks. I was going to recommend that too, for the same reason. One of the best books I’ve read recently.
If you read or have read the book, don’t watch the Netflix miniseries 🙂 Significant deviations – but it’s still good!
I am always seeking out serious books that take a position that is challenging to me (i. e. that don’t simply affirm my already held positions). To that end, I recommend the following:
The Hundred Years War on Palestine, by Rashid Khaledi
The Meritocracy Trap, by Daniel Markovits
How Rights Went Wrong, by Jamal Greene
The titles pretty much give away the contents – the Palestinian perspective on the last century, a critique of meritocracy as currently envisioned, and an argument that appeals to constitutional rights are not always straightforward. There is a lot to disagree with in each of them, but they are rigorous works that need to be considered seriously.
– “A Christmas Memory” by Truman Capote and “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens.
– My favorite Dickens: “Dombey and son”.
– The diaries of Victor Klemperer under the Third Reich.
“Dombey,” excellent choice. I just finished rereading “Martin Chuzzlewit,” and, despite Dickens’s kind of sappy portrayal of Ruth, I forgot how funny much of it is. Nobody skewers pompous windbags like Dickens.
My favorite Dickens (thus far) has been Bleak House.
Bleak House is my favorite Dickens too.
My favorite non-fiction book is also written by Caro; The Power Broker. My favorite fiction novel is Aztec by Gary Jennings.
Caromis great. I’ve only made my way through his first LBJ volume, bug intend to get to the others.
“City of Thieves”
David Benioff
For nonfiction, a favorite of mine is “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72” by Hunter S. Thompson. The 1972 Democratic primaries and presidential campaign sounds like a pretty dry subject, but as recounted by Thompson I found it as gripping as a novel.
Political reporting hasn’t been the same since.
You will like The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom
No downside for you yet! I’m PhD from U of C 1955 still reading
Moby Dick bears rereading. It’s Herman Melville’s prose poem of Americana, Shakespearian in scope.
Along with all the poems of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. His infectious enthusiasm for a spirit of America makes me wistful.
For an “unknown” writer, the fictions by George Dennison: A Tale of Pierrot and Other Stories, Luisa Domic, and Shawno might appeal to you. A creative writer the way Paul Klee is a creative painter.
Please give Bellow’s Herzog a try. It relates to the U of Chicago scene and the debates among the humanities and sciences in a very humorous way.
Totally agree. Herzog was addictive. I should read it again.
Someone posted some titles – but it disappeared, but I wrote the following all out :
On that note – I’d add John Burroughs. A contemporary of Whitman, I believe. A title which is fitting for this audience might be (all caps is from text recognition):
THE WRITINGS OF
JOHN BURROUGHS : XI.
THE LIGHT OF DAY –
RELIGIOUS DISCUSSIONS AND CRITICISMS FROM THE NATURALIST’S POINT OF VIEW
Free Google book : https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Writings_of_John_Burroughs_The_light.html?id=i1FaAAAAMAAJ
But also lots of other stuff – he hung out with John Muir.
So many great suggestions already, but I’ll add a few more.
Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee, which is about the geological history of North America. It’s one of my all-time favorites, among non-fiction books. He travels across the U.S. on Interstate 80, and consults with various geologists along the way. Though geology is sometimes considered a rather dry and boring subject, McPhee weaves a captivating tale, full of fascinating information and colorful characters. He’s a brilliant writer and storyteller.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, by Robert Sapolsky. A wonderful, in-depth look into the neuroscience of human moral behavior. If you know anything about Sapolsky, you know you’re in for an engaging ride.
H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald. A beautiful, mesmerizing, impossible-to-put-down account of the author’s attempts to tame and train a goshawk, a journey she embarks on as a way to process her grief over the death of her father. She brilliantly blends her own story with an account of the author T.H. White’s (The Once and Future King) similar and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to train the same species. Some of the best writing I’ve read in recent years.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake. I’m a longtime mycophile, so this book was of particular interest to me, but Sheldrake is an engaging writer who does a superb job of making accessible the mysterious and amazing world of fungi.
There are so many more, but I should probably stop there. Happy reading!
Ditto on all three of your recommendations!
Entangled Life was excellent. Interestingly, the author’s father is the somewhat notorious Rupert Sheldrake; the son’s book has none of the father’s craziness in it.
John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World is an omnibus of his four books on the geology of North America. Marvelous prose and fascinating accounts of the geologists involved in revolutionizing our understanding of how the continent came together.
At the risk of running on: at 10 my favorite book was Wind in the Willows, in high school Tolkien’s Ring Trilogy, in college Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in San Francisco, Hesse and the I-Ching, and Murasaki’s Tale of the Genji and Shonagon’s Pillow Book. Sobering up and returning to my roots, Webb’s The Great Plains, Albion’s Seed, and Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture. The Leopard is great for those of us who are aging, as are Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club mysteries set in a retirement community.
As you say, “for those of us who are aging”, Osman’s Thursday Murder Club books are delightful.
The first one of the series is the best so far (though I haven’t started the 4th, so I could be wrong). Enjoyable as they are, I’m not sure that they meet our host’s “world class” requirement though.
“Educated” by Tara Westover
“American Prometheus”
I, too, enjoyed Tara Westover’s “Educated” several years ago. Just a nice autobiography of a young lady who draws a pretty short straw for her prospects in life at birth, brought up in rural Utah by a strict survivalist family. But she wants to succeed in the “rest of the world” and takes initiative to find a range of safety nets and good strangers to help her. If I recall correctly, she ends up at Oxford and Harvard through the help of special programs working the way they should (read opportunity). It was an optimistic read for me at a time when I really needed one. Nonfiction and a very easy read.
Educated, yes! I’m nearly 100% sure, though, that I’ve seen our host mention that he’s already read it.
I was going to add “American Prometheus” as well. I read it before the movie. Pulitzer Prize winner.
‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb’ by Richard Rhodes (you may have already read the book).
Two non-fiction books to savor:
Ovenden, R. (2020). Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge. Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press.
Strevens, M. (2020). The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science (Illustrated edition). Liveright.
Richard Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian (director of the Bodleian Library at U of Oxford) a book historian. A riveting history of the loss of knowledge.
Strevens, a historian of science, a thoughtful tour of how science came to be as we know it today.
And thank Professor Ceiling Cat for the question. There are always so many good book tips in the responses.
The Ascent of Rum Doodle – by W. E. Bowman
I strongly recommend any book by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-19869 and specifically. LABYRINTHS:select stories and other writings. Modern Library.New York.A group of short stories and essays. Borges is always!!! brilliant and never disappoints.
Recently finished “Who We Are and How We Got Here” by David Reich. I’ve read with interest various news reports over the past several years asserting that humans migrating out of Africa constituted an extremely small cohort and thus possessed way less genetic diversity than their kindred who stayed in Africa. I wondered how this came to be known. This fantastic book tells the story, and it is the story of an entirely new branch of science.
With the sequencing of the human genome, it became possible to determine the most recent common ancestor, not just of the parents of an individual, but of the many different genetic segments in that person’s genome. Then with the recently developed methods of extracting DNA from ancient, partially fossilized remains it is now possible to trace the relationship between hominid species. The result is an ongoing rewrite of human prehistory.
Reich and others have been able to trace vast migrations of populations. The intuitive idea that people now living in, say, France are the descendants of those who lived in that region in ancient times has been shown to be completely mistaken.
I cannot praise this book highly enough.
I think you might like Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer The Blurb: This book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins.
This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins.
Was a recommendation by Razib Khan
I’ve only recently discovered Alice Munro (Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013). I believe she only writes short stories, but they are sublime works of depth and conciseness. I read her collection “My Best Stories”. If you want to give it a try, a story such as “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” would be an excellent place t start.
Your tastes might differ from mine: I have attempted Anna Karenina several times and could never get into it. Just in case of any overlap in likes, two of my favourite long fiction books are Lorna Doone by RD Blackmore and the Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh.
For non fiction I have just finished re-reading The Rising Sun by John Toland, a history of WWII seen mainly from the Japanese point of view, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. IIRC his wife was Japanese.
I’m not sure short fiction is the place to start to get a feel for Saul Bellow’s prose. Why don’t you give The Adventures of Augie March a try — a coming-of-age picaresque set right there in Chicago. It opens with one of the most famous lines in American literature: “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.”
No American novelist combined high culture and low as well as Bellow did.
The Order of Time – By Carlo Rovelli
I must recommend ‘The Gift of Touch” by Helen Colton, 1918-2014.
Even if Helen were not my father’s cousin, I would recommend it!
Her book helped me and many others to understand who each of us is
especially those not in the mainstream.
A wonderful obituary of Helen is at https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/helen-colton-obituary/
Sid
In fiction, I’m currently reading a series of four quirky Japanese novels, the first of which is “Before the Coffee Gets Cold”, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. The central premise is that there is a little cafe in Tokyo, in which there is a special chair which allows the visitor to travel back in time, but they cannot change the future and they can only remain there for as long as it takes a cup of coffee to go cold. Kawaguchi uses this device to tell a series of poignant and thought-provoking tales in each book.
On a lighter note, “The Wheel is Spinning But the Hamster is Dead” by Adam Sharp is a delightful collection of (in the words of the book’s sub-title) idioms, proverbs and general nonsense from around the world.
How about Philip Roth’s book, American Pastoral. It is wonderful.
Yes!
Roth’s “The Human Stain” is great. He skewers wokenss before that label was commonplace.
Another superb book by Roth, especially in the light of the currently rising tide of anti-semitism, is The Plot Against America. It’s an alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh (who apparently was somewhat anti-semitic) defeats FDR in the 1940 election, enabling American anti-semites to come out of the woodwork. Extremely well-written; very interesting, even if one abstains from drawing modern parallels.
Nonfiction:
Hugo Mercier’s NOT BORN YESTERDAY: THE SCIENCE OF WHO WE TRUST AND WHAT WE BELIEVE
https://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/not-born-yesterday
Fiction:
Cormac McCarthy’s THE PASSENGER and STELLA MARIS
The Power by Naomi Anderson
“No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith” by Fawn Brodie. Fascinating account of how Joseph Smith invented a religion.
I own a bookstore/cafe/community space in Seattle. In these days of increasing polarization and partisanship, I highly recommend “How to Know A Person” by conservative columnist, David Brooks.
Hello Theo, and best regards. I drop in periodically, sometimes on Saturday afternoon
when the Irish trad musicians are having a seisiún. I may even still have some
credit in my account with you.
My recommendation is ‘Master and Commander’, the first book in the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. These books are an absolute joy to read and I envy anyone who is starting out in the series. There is another regular who has suggested this series in the past. I hope they add to this thread
In what order should they be read?
Happily, at least the paperback editions are numbered on the spines. And, since there are a number of characters, of significance, who appear in multiple books, it definitely helps to read them in chronological order. I have read them all three times now, some years apart.
Hemingway: “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. “A Farewell to Arms”. George Eliot. Thomas Hardy. Besides the biggies, Tolstoys shorter works esp. “The Death of Ivan Illich” among others.
For fun reading you might try Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders has been recommended to me as a good read. It was awarded the 2017 Booker Prize.
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx and Dickens’ Pickwick Papers are also books I have enjoyed.
If you listen to books, the best I’ve ever “read” is Lincoln in the Bardo…every character has a different voice.
Postcards by Proulx is also an excellent read.
I’m going to go off the beaten track and recommend the fictional work ‘The Curse of Chalion’ by Lois McMaster Bujold. It is set in a fictional medieval world and the society is structured around Five Gods (Father, Mother, Son, Daughter and the Bastard). Even nontheists like me can enjoy the interplay of lives and religion, and the concepts are thought provoking. There are other books set in the same ‘world’ but this is the best.
For some people (like me) books are self medication. They inform, distract, and make you feel better in yourself. Sometimes a Romcom or Crime Procedural just hits the spot.
I absolutely agree with The Curse of Chalion. Super fun read (and better than its sequel); also, with the possible exception of The Lord of the Rings, the best-written fantasy novel I’ve ever read.
Penric and the demon Desdemona – and their travels – appear in many other shorter books in the same ‘world’ and are well worth reading.
Yes, I’m intending to read those. My original comment was meant to refer to The Paladin’s Soul, which was good, but not as good as Chalion, and the third book in the trilogy, The Hallowed Hunt, which was tedious beyond description. I’ve heard nothing but good things about the Penric books, and the World of the Five Gods that she created was quite interesting.
Try John Banville’s The Singularities or the 2023 Booker Prize winner Paul Lynch Prophet Song (dystopian future in Ireland).
My favourites are Ulysses (the Joyce one) and I concur with you on The Dead (by the way Anjelica Huston was wonderful in the film).
You’ve probably already read both of these, but sharing with the whole class, they’re both great:
Religion Explained, Pacal Boyer
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity Paperback, David Graeber
The Heaven And Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Incredible novel of Jewish and African American lives in 1930s Pottstown PA
Recently completed Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and enjoyed it very much. She has keen insight into contemporary Appalachia and the challenges so many of our youth face.
Just started reading Heaven and Earth Grocery: A Novel and am loving it. It was chosen as Book of the Year 2023 by Amazon editors; the author has a wry sense of humor and clear connections to diverse cultures.
Anna Karenina is one of those few works that repays rereading at different stages of life, especially if one has only read it when young.
I agree that it is the best novel out there, at least as far as I’ve read, and it would also be my hands-down favorite if it did not compete with Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita.” If you haven’t yet read it, then I would demur a bit from the P&V translation franchise and, instead, suggest the translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor. What is Bulgakov up to as the mysterious Professor Woland (the Devil incarnate?!?) takes us on a magical, satirical, fantasy tour through Stalinist Moscow? Why do four seemingly-unrelated chapters—in tone, genre, and content—get interspersed with the overall thirty-two (does the epilogue make thirty-three?)? Why do we find ourselves transported from Moscow to Judea, face-to-face with a reimagining of the encounter between Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ? It’s a book over which to laugh, cringe, wonder, question, critique, and remain amazed.
If you like to explore the literary through nonfiction, then I cannot recommend highly enough two classic biographies: Walter Jackson Bate’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “John Keats,” still in print since 1963 at Harvard Press. And, for a very different type of biography, also a Pulitzer recipient, with a focus more on the works and times than on the man, then Joseph Frank’s five-volume work on Dostoevsky cannot be surpassed. It is a tour de force through the intellectual and cultural currents of 19th century Russia, and Frank does not shy from addressing Dostoevsky’s antisemitism. For anyone wanting to explore the forebears of Woke America, to dismay over the old once again becoming “new,” to encounter the brilliant Russian writers who waged battles in print against their own forms of our current cultural insanity, the work cannot be beat by our contemporary lamentations and critiques. Little patience? Skip back to fiction and tackle Dostoevsky’s “Demons.” Can’t happen here? Uh huh.
Great suggestions ! I was about to suggest Bulgakov’s Master ans Margarita.
Non fiction: Orlando Figes, The Story of Russia. A good introduction to understanding Putin’s regime in light of Russia’s history.
Trollope’s short story “Christmas at Thompson Hall” may be the funniest short story ever.
It’s got considerable competition from Connie Willis’ Hugo- and Nebula-winning Even the Queen. There are other gut-bustingly funny science fiction short stories, none as well-known as the Willis. See if you can find an anthology containing Harry Harrison’s Space Rats of the CCC, for example.
“Christmas at Thompson Hall” is available for free at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/58558
“Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts” by Clive James. A collection of brief essay/profiles on some of the most notable artists, thinkers, and monsters of the 20th century. As witty as it is illuminating.
“Julian” by Gore Vidal. A wonderful novel about the Roman Emperor who tried (and failed) to prevent Christianity from taking over the Roman Empire.
“The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt” by Toby Wilkinson. Probably the most enjoyable one-volume book on the subject. A good gateway drug to egyptology!
“The History of England” by Thomas Babington Thomas Macaulay. It’s really a history of the Glorious Revolution, written by one of the greatest masters of English prose. The Penguin edition is edited by another great historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper.
“Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music” by Greil Marcus. Commonly regarded as one of the best books ever written about rock’n’roll.
“The Decameron” by Giovanni Boccaccio. 100 amusing and often bawdy tales of life in medieval Italy.
“Jacques the Fatalist” by Denis Diderot. An 18th century novel far ahead of its time. Crazily funny, and its treatment of determinism should interest PCC.
“A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment” by Philip Blom. Primarily a study of two of the great early modern atheists: Diderot and Baron D’Holbach.
“Maxims” by La Rochefoucauld. A pitiless unmasking of human nature by the great aphorist/psychologist. “Amour propre” rules all!
“The Devil’s Dictionary” by Ambrose Bierce. America’s version of La Rochefoucauld, and possibly even more bitter and cynical.
“The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus” by Cyril Connolly. A nearly undescribable collection of aphorisms, musings, and quotations. Written during the darkest hours of WWII.
The latest novel by Julian Barnes (Elizabeth Finch) is based upon his friendship with the great Anita Brookner and upon his interest in Julian.
Bierce’s Dictionary is available free from a certain tech company down Cupertino way.
I’ve been working my way very slowly through Cultural Amnesia for about a year now. James makes everything so interesting.
Cosmically great fiction: Nabokov’s Lolita; Woolf’s Orlando; Marquez:Love in the Time of Cholera; K.A. Porter;s Noon Wine and Pale Horse, Pale Rider; Malcolm Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange; Stephen Vincent Benet’s The Devil and Daniel Webster; Borges and Roth;
Nonfiction: W.W.Story’s Roba di Roma; Redmond O’Hanlon’s In Trouble Again and
Through the Wilds of Borneo; Teddy Roosevelt’s memoirs of his Brazilian river trip with Rondon; Marquez’ Living to Tell the Tale;
Royall Tyler’s translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji.
Well, I would begin with Blood Meridian if you haven’t read it.
Bill
One of a number of excellent novels by McCarthy but you need a strong stomach for the violence!
Fiction: “The Untouchable” and “The Sea” by the Irish prose wizard John Banville (I haven’t read”The Singularities” yet, but it is presumably just as wizardly); “The History of Danish Dreams” by Peter Høeg; and I agree with others in recommending Bellow’s “Herzog”.
Non-fiction: Loren Graham’s “The Ghost of The Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union”, which explains a key part of 20th century history.
I just finished Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. At 900+ pages, it will keep you occupied. Great characters, including some historical characters like Turing, Göring, MacArthur, and even Reagan. It’s also quite funny. It has a wild and unique plot that follows two time lines (WWII and 1990’s) but it’s impossible to describe with brevity. He’s been compared to Pynchon, but I can’t stand Pynchon and I like Stephenson. I know you don’t like science fiction, and some of Stephenson’s books have been characterized as sci fi, but this one isn’t…more speculative fiction. I got bogged down in some of the physics and maths, but that’s just me (cryptography is hard!). Someone here on WEIT recommended it…sorry I don’t remember who, but thanks!
Now I’m reading Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch… which I know you’ve already read. I’m half-way through and it’s magnificent. Though I do find some of his many biblical allusions a bit strange.
Cal Flynn, Islands of Abandonment. Prose is extraordinary.
Daniel Immerwahr
How to Hide an Empire
Really illuminating on US history.
Just read a brilliant short novel by Cynan Jones, The Dig.
Beautiful…
Oh yes – Fire Weather by John Vaillant – really shocking & powerful on fire & climate change.
This book by Sarah Bakewell looks interesting:
Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope
I really enjoyed her book on Montaigne;
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Her Montaigne book was great!
I think you’d like The Constitution Of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch.
A Shot To Save The World
Nonfiction and exciting.
I’m currently reading Midnight at Malabar House which takes place in 1950s India.
A British diplomat has been murdered and a female detective is set to resolve the case.
Historical fiction.
I just finished A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry. It was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, and deservedly so, to my mind. I had previously read his Days Without End and expect that I will read anything he has written I can get my hands on.
+1 for A Long Long Way
How Not to Age by Michael Greger may provide an opportunity to read all these.
Thanks to all for the recommendations and to those who will post after this. The panoply of suggestions is wide, and I’ve found more books than expected that I will want to read. I hope others have, too!
Will you tell us what you’ve decided on?
BTW, I read one of your recs; The Elegance of the Hedgehog and loved it
Dylan Thomas comes out off copyright in 2024, for those interested…
The Curiosities of Food, Or, The Dainties and Delicacies of Different Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom
By Peter Lund Simmonds · 1859
Non-fiction with fascinating biological and cultural info. Entertaining ornate prose refreshingly antiquated.
https://archive.org/details/curiositiesoffoo00simm/page/n3/mode/2up
For those interested…
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy. A tour de force by a genuine expert, as good a “public intellectual” as has ever lived, and one of the finest wordsmiths in English ever. (Plenty to quibble about, too.)
“This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers” and “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War” by Jeff Sharlet. I picked these because they are a very different style from what I usually read. I think the first is a bit better.
For fun science with cartoons “What if” and “What if 2” by Randall Munroe. The subtitle explains it: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
The 2 books I read long ago that got me interested in evolution and indirectly led me to this site are:
– “Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning” by David Edward Goldberg
– “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins
And finally, “Founding Brothers, The Revolutionary Generation” (2000) Pulitzer Prize for History in 2001.
GN
The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef
Did you read my book, Slow Birding, yet?
Hi Joan:
It’s on my TBR list!
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black. Fabulous writing. The KT extinction comes alive! Reading it twice.
Thanks for the tip — didn’t know of this book. Strangely enough, just the day before I placed an order on Bezos Cartel for Michael Benton’s ‘Dinosaurs – new visions of a lost world’. Given the date of Black’s book, and the blurb I can find about the narration’s emphasis on the Hell Creek formation, I presume it has some mention of that site nicknamed ‘Tanis’ by its finder — the tsunami debris putatively from Day 1 of the Chicxulub impact? Hardly anything new has been published about that site, at least for 2023. Very strange.
I’ll stick to non-fiction, though will begin by agreeing about The Dead, which I have read every Christmas for over 30 years.
1. The Tiger, by John Vaillant. A brilliant account of conflict between man (boo!) and cat (rah!) in Russia’s Taiga. A powerful, haunting evocation of a place, a culture, and a magnificent creature. Should have won every non-fiction prize in Canada when it was published, but only got one.
2. Swansong 1945, by Walter Kempowski. The last of a monumental series about life in the Third Reich, this is about its final days. Using some thousand letters, diary entries, and journals from civilians and soldiers, and focusing on four specific days, Kempowski creates an indelible portrait of gotterdammerung.
I’ve just remembered Hadley Freeman’s House of Glass: The story and secrets of a twentieth-century Jewish family. Salman Rushdie wrote, “A magnificently vivid re-creation of her Jewish family’s experience of twentieth-century Europe, Hadley Freeman’s book is also an acute examination of the roots, tropes, and persistence of anti-Semitism, which makes it an urgently necessary book for us to read right now”. (Of course, such an examination has recently become even more acute.)