Dress (Your Bookshelf) to Impress
A few posts back, I’d written about a list of 100+ books that–according to its compiler–people buy to impress other people, but usually don’t read. I didn’t really buy any of these to impress anybody, so I can’t speak to how well they’d work on that account. The only rules here are that the books have to be good, and that I have to have read them. Thanks to Phil for the idea…
1. The Dialogic Imagination, by Mikhail Bakhtin: Bakhtin doesn’t have the same name recognition as Barthes, Derrida, or Foucault. All of which made these writings great source material when you had a paper due in English Lit. Doesn’t hurt either when you have someone who chronically name-drops literary critics, philosophers, and others of that ilk. Remember, all you need is to have at least one person up your sleeve of whom you can say: “What do you mean you’ve never heard of…?”
2. Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin: Benjamin was a phenomenal essayist. One of these days, if someone gives me the task of compiling a collection of essays, his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (probably his most frequently read/cited piece) would have to be one of the works included. His writings on culture, poetry, and translation are also essential reading.
3/4. Sixty Stories and Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme. Along with John Updike, Raymond Carver, William Styron, Grace Paley, and a handful of others, Barthelme took fiction on a pretty wild ride in his lifetime. These two collections represent an author at the top of his form, and if you’re a fan of his descendants–Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace and the like–this is pretty much essential reading.
5. Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens: At some point or another, nearly everyone has read either 1984 or Animal Farm. Hitchens takes a broader view of Orwell’s life and work, and explains how and why they’re still vital reading.
6. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson: Arguably the only nonbiased account I’ve read of Che’s life. The author navigates pretty well between the usual traps of canonizing or demonizing the late guerilla leader.
7. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Listen, if you want to make sense of politics and history for the last 160 years or so, you pretty much have to read this book. For yourself. Not someone else’s distortions of it, or misinterpretations. It’s pretty dull in places, and you may (or may not, depending on your slant) disagree with a lot of it, but it’s worth your time if you want to make sense of large portions of history.
8. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair: The first roughly 2/3 of this book are the better part of it, before it lapses into a thinly disguised advert for socialism, which is where it goes a bit off the rails. Read this in conjunction with Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and you won’t touch a hamburger for a week. Minimum.
9. The Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano: Traces the history of the exploitation of Latin America, from both without and within.
10. Our Word Is Our Weapon, by Subcomandante Marcos: Reads as though Karl Marx had grown up on a steady diet of Galeano and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Revolution as literature, or maybe the other way around. Polemics don’t usually have this kind of passion, or humor.
Tags: good books, lists, Literature