Gallery of my Favorite Modern Literary Books -Nassim N Taleb
I am often asked by journalists for a list of my "favorite books" --I don't know what "favorite" means for a journalist. I treat books as friends; you miss them when you don't see them for a while. Perhaps the best test of one's appreciation for a novel is whether one craves it at times, enough to reread it. Rereading a novel is far more enjoyable than reading it for the first time. Many I have read more than twice, some (like Il deserto dei tartari, un taxi mauve, Paulina 1881,...), more than five times.
Up to the age of 25, you read wholesale & in a mercenary way, to "acquire" a possession, to build a "literary culture", & do not tend to re-read except when necessary. After 25, you lose your hang-up and start re-reading --and it is precisely what you re-read that reveals your literary soul, what you like.
As with friendship: you do not judge friends, you do not mix business & friendship; I even physically separate literature from more functional books (different libraries; I feel I am corrupting literature by having scientific or the philistinic "nonfiction" in the same area).
Novels/novellas, etc. written after c. 1900
Dino Buzzati Il deserto dei tartari ( As a child, I viewed the world into two types of people: those who read the deserto and were therefore marked by it, and the rest. Francois Mitterand, who was not my cup of tea, seduced me when on the literary panel Apostrophes he went on and on passionately talking about the book --"j'ai été marqué par ce livre", he said, his eyes gleaming).
Albert Cohen Belle du seigneur (A Proust, but with a Levantine soul and personal manners, and aggressively heterosexual. )
Valdimir Nabokov Marenshka, his (first?) novel, when he was an exile in Berlin, before he became complicated. I reread & reread the final scene.
Patrick Modiano Villa triste ("Je m'attachais à elle comme un noyé").
Graham Greene The End of the Affair
Michel Déon Un taxi mauve (I've read it six times; people tell me he is a médiocre writer --I don't know what médiocre means)
Graham Greene The Burnt-Out Case
Louis-Ferdinand Céline Voyage au bout de la nuit
Marcel Proust A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (The second book)
Marcel Proust Albertine disparue (Proust is more limpid towards the middle/end)
Pierre-Jean Jouve Paulina 1881 (I never understood why I keep reading it)
Julian Barnes Flaubert's Parrot
Thomas Mann Death in Venice
Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain
Andre Breton Najda
Alessandro Barrico, Seta
W. Somerset Maugham The Razor's Edge
George Orwell Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d'Hadrien ( Animula, vagula, blandula / hospes comesque corporis / quæ nunc abibis in loca / pallidula, rigida, nudula / nec, ut soles, dabic jocos" ).
André Malraux La condition humaine
Robert Graves I Claudius
André Maurois Climats
Maurice Barrès La colline inspirée . Barrès is the finest French prose, emotional, unhindered with intellectualism, grand, ambitious, incantatory, uninhibited. In a way like Malraux, but without the show-off, he does not try to impress you as much. [There is nothing wrong for a writer to show-off; when he has charm...]
Dino Buzzati Un amore, the story (no doubt autobiographical) of a refined and cultured man who falls in love (beyond the point of relinquishing his dignity) with a dancer & occasional prostitute. [I recently discovered that Buzzati actually married her & that she is still alive in Milan]
Alain-Fournier Le grand maulnes
Lawrence Durell Justine
Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises
Anita Brookner Hotel du Lac
Gregor von Rezzori Memoirs of an Antisemite
Lawrence Durell Cléa
John Steinbeck Tortilla Flat
Italo Svevo Una vita
Jorje Luis Borges, Ficciones
Elsa Morante La storia
Nina Berberova The Tattered Cloak & other stories
Amin Maalouf Léon l'africain ("ils etaient amis en silence")
Elias Canetti Auto-da-fé
Alain de Botton How Proust Can Change Your Life
Graham Greene Travels with my Aunt
Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera Immortality
Alberto Moravia La noia
Alberto Moravia La Romana
John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces
Franz Kafka Amerika
Arthur Conan Doyle All the Sherlock Holmes stories. The good thing is that it is easy to forget the plot.
Romain Gary Lady L
E. M. Forster Howard's End
Kazio Ishiguro The Remains of the Day
Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities(Vol 1)
Henry de Montherlant Les jeunes filles
Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdyduke
Essays (in true literary prose) written after c. 1900
I select essayists as they are more consistent in their prose --you read their prose not their books. This list does not include authors you read for their philosophy.
Walter Benjamin (Arendt:"he thought poetically")
Cyril Connoly (the finest literary sensibility)
Gaston Bachelard (another aesthetic thinker)
Claude Levi-Strauss (Tristes tropiques was initially meant to be a novel)
Roland Barthes
Emil Cioran
Paul Celan
Isaiah Berlin
George Santayana
John Gray (the philosopher not the pop psychologist -a true genuinely non-nonsense philosopher)
