Helon Habila is a Nigerian novelist and poet. His first novel Waiting for an Angel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Best First Book, Africa Region) in 2003.The Man Who Died by Wole SoyinkaSee the complete list, and listen to a brief interview with Helon Habila about why he chose those particular books.
The Famished Road by Ben Okri
Read about the other entries on the list.War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
I've read this twice and am going through it for the third right now with the new Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation. This man's genius is to handle a huge cast of characters and points of view, from an Olympian historical analysis, to the minds of dictators and generals, to the minds of individual soldiers. When I read how Prince Andre felt when he went down mortally wounded, seeing the concrete nothingness of the sky, I actually had to stand up and take a walk it hit me so profoundly.
One title on the list:For the Survival of DemocracyRead about the other books on the list.
by Alonzo L. Hamby
No single president is more important to American foreign policy in our time than Franklin D. Roosevelt, and there is no better account of FDR's stout defense of democracy against the twin dangers of Nazism and Soviet Communism than Alonzo L. Hamby's great work. His thesis concerns the extent to which the Depression blighted the modern world by scuttling post-World War I prosperity, weakening democratic capitalism in Europe and America at its moment of greatest peril, and rendering a second military cataclysm inevitable. FDR had to contend with the Depression while awakening his countrymen to Hitler's menace and stiffening the spines of European democrats. The consensus on the New Deal remains unsettled; but Roosevelt's global leadership in the late 1930s and throughout World War II made America the superpower it remains.
One novel on the list:Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M PirsigRead about the other entries on Mullan's list.
Philosophical disquisition or autobiographical novel? However you define this once-cult classic, no literary motorbiking column could omit it. The narrator introduces you to the main schools of western philosophy via metaphors from motorcycle mechanics, while travelling across the US with his son on the back of his bike.
She named her ten favorite memoirs for The Daily Beast. One title on the list:The Diary of a Teenage GirlRead about the other titles on the list.
by Phoebe Gloeckner
Gloeckner has worked as a medical illustrator, drawing cadavers in cross-section, and her comics and writings tend to emphasize the sordid and miraculous inner workings of people’s minds and hearts—including her own. Drawing from the diaries she kept during her Bay Area adolescence in the Free Love-hangover late '70s, Gloeckner traces her alter ego Minnie Goetze’s journey from innocent childhood to artistic and romantic awakening; the latter comes at the hands of her neglectful mother’s boyfriend, and Gloeckner doesn’t shy away from the sordid and tragic details even while refusing to shunt the story’s nuances into a clichéd trauma-and-recovery narrative arc. Anyone who has ever been or known a teenage girl will relate.
He named his five favorite books on sports for the Guardian. One title on the list:PG Wodehouse, The Clicking of Cuthbert, 1922Read about the other books on Gekoski's list.
A story concerning both golf and literature, so hilarious that on first reading it, seated on Eurostar on the way to Paris, I laughed so uncontrollably that I had to remove myself and stand between the carriages. Then I got a cramp in my stomach muscles, and ending up on the floor clasping myself in agony, still laughing. The staff inquired solicitously if I was alright, and perhaps needed a doctor. I thrust the book at them: "You must read this!" I said. I can't imagine they did, but they should have. Everybody should.
From the Guardian's excerpt of Immortal Last Words, ten of the more memorable literary farewells:LEO TOLSTOY 1828 – 1910Read about the other nine literary goodbyes.
‘We all reveal ... our manifestations ... This manifestation is over ... That's all’
Tolstoy left his estate, aged 82, to begin a new life as a peasant. Reaching the small town of Astapovo he contracted pneumonia, and died a few days later in the stationmaster’s house. According to the stationmaster, his last words were: ‘But the peasants … how do the peasants die?’ His friend Vladimir Chertkov preferred to remember something from the night before. 'He was lying on his back, breathing heavily … all of a sudden - as if arguing with himself - broke out in a loud voice: "We all reveal ... our manifestations ... This manifestation is over ... That's all".'
One title on the list:Union AtlanticRead about the other entries on Hilderbrand's list.
by Adam Haslett
Set in Finden, Massachusetts, this book is about money and the abuse of power, timely subjects, but it is also about a sense of place, land, family, and history. Adam and I went to the University of Iowa together, and I have to say, I am hyper-envious of this magnificent book. There are multiple narrators, including two dogs, one who channels Malcolm X and one who channels Cotton Mather. That Haslett—or anyone—successfully pulls this off is enough to put this book on my list!
Patrick Cramsie is a graphic designer whose work has centered on corporate identity and book design.The Passport by Saul SteinbergRead about the other books on the list.I could have chosen any number of Steinberg's books, but this is the first one I owned and so it's the first I fell in love with. Steinberg was best known as a cartoonist for the New Yorker – his New Yorker's view of the world showing Ninth and Tenth Avenues in the foreground, a strip of the Hudson River and New Jersey in the middle distance, and then a few rocky outcrops marking China, Russia and Japan will ring a bell with some – but actually he was a truly great artist. Has anybody explored the ideas surrounding individual identity with as much graphic skill, humour and intelligence?
Fred Inglis, author of A Short History of Celebrity and other books, is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sheffield. Previously Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick, he has been a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, and Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.[Banks]: Your next choice is Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor.Read about the other books on Inglis' list.
[Inglis]: What is so powerful and marvellous about Taylor’s book is what the title announces – this deep question of where do we get our ideas of ourselves from? And the answer is history. We tend to suppose that our selfhood is something tremendously precious and all our own. And one of the things that I am at pains to emphasise in my book is that we are wholly made out of our history, including our most intense and personal feelings.
At one point I sketch out a short history of feelings to indicate how different frames of feelings emerge from this period across 200 or 300 years. Those frames of feelings co-existed, and this is something Taylor brings out with beautiful force. For example, he shows how the Romantic Movement brought in a new place for passionate feeling as itself the vindication of who one is.
I have tried to analyse this through Verdi’s Traviata. There, supremely, we find dramatised this idea that our strongest feelings belong to the truest version of ourselves. But at the same time that is at odds with another frame of feeling, which is dictated by class. There we find the practice of the alternation of deference on the one side and condescension on the other. So the powerful condescend in the old-fashioned sense of the word, ie, to indicate their proper sense of social position, which then needed gratifying by the people with whom one did social business.
This whole concept was knocked sideways by the Romantic Movement’s idea that I am as good as the next person and equality is more important than due respect for persons. Taylor’s great book traces those sources. The celebrity in all this becomes someone who will have identified for us what feelings we ought to be having.Where do you think that leaves us today?
My history picks up a new kind of inspection of the feelings which begins to come over us during the 20th century, which can be traced in the famous novelists between about 1880 and 1920: I mean writers such as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and particularly Henry James, in whose work people aren’t sure what they feel, and study their feelings minutely in order to find out what they are and then what to do about it.
The intense study of one’s feelings in a spirit of truthfulness to oneself becomes a characterising moment as the 20th century advances. And of course you then get the trade of feeling therapy and psychoanalysis just because we are no longer sure of our true feelings. And as time goes by many people find they don’t feel anything and they have to bully themselves in order to have some feelings. Celebrity in all this business is, you might say, the public dramatisation of our best and worst feelings, and endlessly discussed as such.
Frances Osborne worked as a barrister and investment research analyst before becoming a full-time writer.Mistress of ModernismRead about the other books on the list.
by Mary V. Dearborn
By taking down New Yorker Benjamin Guggenheim in 1912, the Titanic put his children in line for modest fortunes when they turned 21. To daughter Peggy that meant waiting until 1919—when she was free to run off to Europe and embark on a life marked by a love of both art and sex. Mary Dearborn tracks her through it all inthis captivating biography. Guggenheim befriended Marcel Duchamp and Constantin Brancusi; she married a Dada artist named Laurence Vail. She had an affair with Samuel Beckett; her second husband was artist Max Ernst. During a week in bed with Beckett, she was persuaded by the writer to start collecting modern art, not just modern artists. Guggenheim opened her first gallery in London in 1938, buying "a picture a day" and amassing a collection that included the work of Picasso, Braque, Miró, Mondrian, Dalí and Calder. Yearning for a museum instead of an ever-changing gallery, Guggenheim eventually installed her collection in a Venetian palazzo, later donating the building and its contents to the museum in New York named for her uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim. Dearborn's narrative of Guggenheim's life was criticized for the author's attachment to her subject, but this affection makes the work all the more enjoyable.
One novel on the list:Red Dragon, by Thomas HarrisRead about the other entries on Mullan's list.
Francis Dolarhyde, the psychopathic villain of the novel that came before The Silence of the Lambs, is obsessed with William Blake's scary, apocalyptic paintings of the Great Red Dragon, representative of Satan. He has a huge tattoo of the dragon on his back.
Posts
All Comments
