10 Books Everyone Should Read
 

A friend asked me today to recommend him ten books I think are required reading. (I only included fiction, so essential stuff like "The Myth of Sisyphus" or "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" got omitted.)

My list would be:

Alfred Jarry: Ubu Roi
Gustav Meyrink: The Golem
Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
Lautreamont: Les Chants de Maldoror
Stanislav Lem: Solaris
Strugatsky Brothers: The Doomed City
Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Voltaire: Candide
William S. Burroughs: Naked Lunch

What's yours?

Including all books/plays in this.

W.G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings (this changed the way that I see the world)
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw
Elie Weisel: Night (for the historic elements)
William Shakespeare: Hamlet (granted that you have the time and will for some in-depth analysis)
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea
Virginia Woolf: The Waves

I've read almost none of those.
Bookmarked.

I'd read Sebald for the more introspective stuff. It must be nice to be able to read the original German version too (though there was a LOT of work put into the English translation, and it shows).

My other choice would be Turn of the Screw to start with because it's short, it's legitimately scary, and it's got ambiguity that opens up analysis and theories out the *******.

I'm guessing you've read Silence and...Hamlet?

The only book from your list I've read is Catch-22. And I didn't finish it.
Yeah, I'm that uneducated.


I just noticed, that my list is missing Kafka's Trial. I omitted it, since the friend I compiled it for already read it in school, same as me. It's definitely in the top ten for me though.

Did you go to school in Germany? I would think that Weisel would be read in public schools.

And I didn't put any Kafka on because I felt like suggesting a compilation of his stories would be a copout. The Judgement is my favourite from him.

Nope.
Never even heard of him before.

Holocaust survivor and writer. Really uplifting stories about camps.

I'm not really into holocaust, but the summary does sound intriguing.

Ja, it's honestly not one of my favourite books to read, but I put it on there because I think everyone should read it, get some perspective of how truly awful it was. You can be told about it at length but the first person details makes it more real.