Recommended Reading
This is a list of books I’ve enjoyed. Follow the links to longer (sometimes much longer) articles I’ve written. The first three, are the greats and the obsessions.
Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn
Black Spring
Quintessential Miller. Written in Paris, these books are explosive. “I want to put a scar on the world,” he writes and with the Tropics he certainly does. Black Spring is more subdued, but equally pleasing. If new to Henry Miller I suggest balancing these with some of his later and more serene stuff.
Colossus of Maroussi
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Travel books in their most expansive sense.
The Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus, Plexus and Nexus
This is the one novel Henry Miller planned to write. Instead of one it became three. His years in New York City, if they can be summed as such.
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
The Books in My Life
In addition to these three books there are a profusion of various collections of his short works. I tend to enjoy such works for the sheer joy of picking up one tome or a slim pamphlet and flipping to any heading or chapter. It is in such works where Henry Miller rings out with shattering clarity.
Doris Lessing
The Grass is Singing
The Children of Violence Series:
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
I really don’t know what I can write about this series. I read them out of order but found that made no matter. I read them like some smoke cigarettes, quickly and addictively.
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing’s best known work. A transforming book for both author and reader, endowed with the ability to predict events before its time.
Shikasta
Space-fiction. Some readers are convinced that within these pages are all the answers to our time.
Memoirs of a Survivor
A post-apocalyptic book in the loosest sense. One of my favorites.
African Stories
Between these pages are all the short stories Doris Lessing has ever written about Africa. Around thirty in all. The only book of Lessing’s that I brought with me to Italy and a good thing, for it allows me the pleasure of continuous reading.
On Cats
I can never have enough cats!
Autobiographies:
Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949
Walking in the Shade: Volume Two, 1949 to 1962
There is curiosity that builds with the extensive reading of one author. What is fact and what is fiction? What spurs the drive to write? What are the influence of events, of people, of books?
Putting the Questions Differently: Interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964-1994
I enjoyed this for her many takes on the art of her craft, where certain books sprung from, the questions she put to herself during their formations. Highly repetitious, but that can also be enlightening.
John Cowper Powys
This mythopoeic genius has, with very good reason, ousted Doris Lessing as my most cutting obsession. Follow me through the madness! For mad this man must have been to write such deep-conscious drifting books
Porius
The best book I’ve read this year, maybe two years, maybe three; probably since I first discovered the genius of Henry Miller have I been this awe-struck. Not a book to be digested lightly. Here are my first impressions. Here is a rather long quote.
Wolf Solent
What a book to send me reeling! Begging for more!
Natalie Angier
Woman: An Intimate Geography
A biological and literary endeavor that explores anything, from myth to biology, about woman that one could possibly want to know. Beginning with the egg and ending in old age, it is ultimately about us all.
Honoré de Balzac
La Comédie Humaine:
A Harlot High and Low
Eugéine Grandet
Why not? Balzac’s style is fiction in the true sense of the word. With 95 finished works, there’s an awful lot to choose from.
Simone de Beauvoir
She Came to Stay
The Second Sex
The Prime of Life
The last book of this list is the one that really caught me. Where she fails in her fiction, she exceeds in autobiography. All the juicy bits about her and Jean-Paul Sartre, the Paris occupation, her beginnings as a writer. Leaving me to wonder, what’s the big deal with fiction when life is so much more variable.
The Bible
An eternally good read!
Charles Bukowski
Women
The prodigious dirty-old man. I read this book awhile back, but remember enjoying it, perhaps only for its perversity.
Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Enough said. There is always more need for fantasy.
Italo Calvino
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
The only novel of his that I have read, though I know it will not be my last. Weaving from one story to the next, it is a writer’s dream.
Albert Camus
The Plague
The Rebel
The Myth of Sisyphus
I can only imagine the mind of this man, in perpetual gyration.
Carlos Castaneda
The Teachings of Don Juan
A Seperate Reality
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Death on the Installment Plan
Journey to the End of the Night
Miguel Cervantes
Don Quixote
Colette
The Vagabond
The Pure and the Impure
A woman of superb unconventionality, especially for her time.
Roald Dahl
Anything and everything! A writer’s whose imagination pushed the limits of reality beyond it’s everyday confines. Could you imagine if more adults had thoughts similar to his? Mama mia!
Fydor Dostoevsky
A colossus. Sometimes I wonder if all of modern literature would even exist if this man did not put words to paper. An influence stronger than the currents of the oceans. I suggest the translations of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky whenever possible.
Crime and Punishment
Demons
The Brothers Karamazov
The Idiot
The Adolescent
The House of the Dead
Notes from Underground
Admittedly I have yet to read the last one, I guess I am waiting for the moment in my life where it will cause the most damage. Of the top three I can never decide which one moves me the most, even after having read them twice.
Short Stories:
The Eternal Husband
The Double
White Nights (also a movie directed by Luchino Visconiti)
A Gentle Creature
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
The Gambler
And the list goes on. . .
Lawrence Durrell
The Alexandria Quartet:
Justine
Balthazar
Montolive
Clea
It is the setting and its description that keeps bringing me back. I also would like the recommend The Black Book, but I haven’t read it yet.
William Faulkner
Light in August
Faulkner’s only novel that I have read, though not for lack of wanting. He is the master of the American South in all it’s gritty forms.
Jean Giono
Joy of Man’s Desiring
Blue Boy
Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls
Another Russian great.
Gunther Grass
The Flounder
The only book of Grass’ that I have read. I did try The Tin Drum some years back, but couldn’t do it. The Flounder is a journey of sex and gastronomic delights through the ages. A lyrical and playfully good book.
Knut Hamsun
Introduced to me by Henry Miller. A man of great literary talent, after all he won the Nobel prize for Growth of the Soil, for whatever merit that proves. Though he seems to have been washed under in the up-flux (or morass) of too many other books. The story of the eternal wanderer because aren’t we all.
Mysteries
Hunger
Herman Hesse
Siddhartha
If you have not read this book yet, you must seriously ask yourself why not.
Steppenwolf
Demian
Erica Jong
Fear of Flying
It seems like the greatest women writers of our time are the ones who begin by blowing the confines of female sex out of the water. What Fear of Flying represents was something apparently startling for the time though now has become commonplace. The protagonist is not an unconscious adulterer and Jong expertly created her without self-pity and the female guilt.
Franz Kafka
Metamorphisis
Another must read. The classic tale of rising one morning to find that the body has become a giant bug.
The Trial
A rather freaky book that made my head spin, but an enjoyable gyration none the less.
Krishnamurti
Think on These Things
The First and Last Freedom
Krishnamurti holds within his voice the possibility to awaken any consciousness. Not the usual new-age bullshit or spiritual guru who are more interested in your money than your being. Krishnamurti’s books are not written by him, but based on his talks, interviews, and discussions. He does not preach a way of life, but insists one must find their own.
Milan Kundera
And now I have stumbled upon a giant. This man was my obsession some years back. A writer with clarity and precision. He knows what he is doing and that he excels at what he does. He has created his own rules.
The Joke
The first book Kundera wrote, this book takes place in Czechoslovakia and is the tale of being kicked out of the communist party and university all on account of a joke.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Immortality
It is between the last two books that my favorite lies. Kundera is the master of writing his text devoid of anything but the most important. “A novel shouldn’t be like a bike race but a feast of many courses.” It is these last two books that have risen him out of the morass of contemporary literature. His force as a writer can not be disputed though some may not like his style. But it is exactly this style that sets him apart. He doesn’t add any ‘upholstery,’ as he calls it. The characters do not have descriptive features, there is only the story and its telling.
D.H. Lawrence
The Rainbow
Women in Love
Sons and Lovers
These three books, all set in England explore relationships in many forms. I enjoy Lawrence’s descriptions, his awareness of nature and politics.
Twilight in Italy
A thin book of connected essays. One of my favorites for obvious reasons. Experiences on the shores of Lago di Garda and from walking through the Italian Alps. Here is where Lawrence’s writing really comes alive.
Lady Chatterly’s Lover
What would the history of obscenity and literature be without this book? To be complemented by more essays, A propos of Lady Chatterly’s Lover.
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera
I must read this one again, if I can find it.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
I read this one before the big burst of this books’ popularity. My most enjoyment derived from the long and wordy passages.
Desmond Morris
The Naked Ape
The Human Zoo
I found these books rather funny. That breasts were developed as a frontal ass is a little far fetched, but some of the information has validity. Another story of how we came to be.
Toni Morrison
Another high-school obsession, that fed me what my hungry mind needed to know and what school was not teaching me.
Beloved
Song of Soloman
The Bluest Eyes
Sula
Tar Baby
Anaïs Nin
A woman writer who shook my world.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume I, II and III
These are the works I was first introduced to. A woman after my own heart in her obsessive journal writing, began at the age of eleven. Though as I read the holes, apparent against the natural flow of time became a little too frustrating. Finding then that I needed to supplement these works with the later published unexpurgated editions, which could only reveal what Anaïs’ husband was not allowed to know.
Henry and June
Incest
Fire
These are the unexpurgated volumes I have read. Henry and June being my favorite, depicting Anaïs’ love affair with Henry Miller and his wife. Sometimes the woman is too much to keep up with.
A Literate Passion
This book is a collection of letters written between Anaïs and Henry Miller, the largest section being from the when they were involved with their affair. Though these letters are about their art, their writing and their mutual development of their craft. An enlightening collection.
House of Incest
A very surreal and slim book supposedly based on June Mansfield. It is a mass of images and poetic words though I’ve never been able to make much of it.
A Spy in the House of Love
Honestly, I read it because I liked the title and that was quite some years ago.
Delta of Venus, Erotica
It has been said that the fiction of Anaïs Nin did not succeed because she held too much back. Everything was poured into the journal and it was done in white heat. But in this collection of short stories, erotica Anaïs wrote for a collector in New York City, she excels. I dare say this is the best fictive work that she ever wrote.
The Novel of the Future
With all that said I had enough respect for her to read this book. Found it interesting and at least saw where her writing was coming from.
Dierdre Blair
Anaïs Nin: A Biography
This book is out of order for apparent reasons. I usually don’t read biographies, especially about authors I respect as I feel to gain a wealth of information about them from their work. But with Anaïs the truth is up in the air. This biography filled in a lot of blind spots that were constantly a part of the life of this enigmatic woman.
Marcel Proust
Remembrance of Things Past:
Swann’s Way
Within a Budding Grove
I read these both in succession, which was a little too much Proust, especially for a first reading. But I found him to be the giant he has been acclaimed as. The long descriptions, images of hairline that go on for pages. To envision the mind of this man! I am determined to read the full series before the end of my life.
Tom Robbins
He is quite a long way from Proust to be sure!
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
A great book. Adventure, big thumbs, it has it all.
Skinny Legs and All
Another Roadside Attraction
Still Life with Woodpecker
Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
Jitterbug Perfume
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
Tom Robbins’ books are quirky, but the thoughts he propounds are very, very grounded. An excellent and imaginative writer.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Nausea
This book should be read, just to find out what all the fuss was about. Very thought out, very meticulous, it reeks of the philosopher.
John Steinbeck
I went through a phase in high-school where I was a rabid Steinbeck fan, reading anything that I could find, well, mostly the shorter works, such as:
Of Mice and Men
(of course)
The Pearl
Cannery Row
The Moon is Down
Tortilla Flat
The Winter of Our Discontent
Needless to say I don’t remember much, but that they were fuel for an obsession is reason enough to put them here.
East of Eden
Grapes of Wrath
Of which I wrote of simultaneously.
Henry David Thoreau
Walden
There is nothing that this man does not say! Alive well before his time, his words have remained relevent and will remain relevent for all time.
Lao Tzu
Tao Teh Ching
For some bits of poetic reflection.