Litterae

Welcome to my ongoing adventures in canonical literature ... and other books.

 

reading notes

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Sanctuary, by William Faulkner (Vintage; May 22, 2012) – This books starts off so strong (namely, everything that goes on at the Old Frenchman homestead; as much as the first third or even close to half of the text), then just turns into “Noir Cliches: The Novel.” Because it’s Faulkner, the cliches are mingled with that trademark grotesque, which is so powerful elsewhere – but here, most of the time, it just comes off as bizarre and tiresome. After a while, there’s just too much mediocrity here to take the work seriously as a whole. There’s also some weird stuff in here about blacks and women, which seems less and less likely to be justified the cheaper and more cliched the story gets. And don’t get me started about the strange attempts at pulp humor. Having said all of this, I do still plan to read “Requiem for a Nun,” which is something of a sequel, at some point. But “Sanctuary” gets a failing grade in my book ... bad Faulkner is really bad. Further discussion and debate here.

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Arguably, essays by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve; May 5, 2012)

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Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick, by Peter Collier (Encounter; April 18, 2012) – A fine story, finely told.

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Hooking Up, by Tom Wolfe, and assorted other essays: Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast, Radical Chic, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, A City Built of Clay, The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening, and The Birth of New Journalism (April 1–25, 2012)

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Henry IV (Bantam; January 3 and February 11, 2012) – I could not help but notice the way in which the two worlds of the play – the politics of court and country, the debauchery of hostel and highway – never quite seem to come together as a whole. Prince Hal presumably carries this disparity in his heart, yet the audience also yearns for some dramatic mending that the rejection of Falstaff, although entirely plausible, never delivers. Of course, some of this allows for the cliffhanger ending, which forecasts the new king’s adventure in France. Some of this also surely reflects the disjointed times of England’s civil wars. Yet despite those explanations, there still remains a strange disconnect for me between these two worlds: the long and eloquent speeches of the king, the prince, and other nobles grow more and more estranged from Falstaff’s own ramblings. Where once the two worlds served as equal antagonists to one another, by the end of the second play, they seem to have grown entirely apart. Perhaps this mimics Hal’s own drift and reformation, yet it still makes for an unfulfilling conclusion, not unlike the way Malvolio’s torture and subsequent bitterness unbalances the general unity of resolution at end of “Twelfth Night.” In the latter, our sympathy lingers with the victim of cruel prank despite the pretty pairing of lovers that ends the play; in the former, we realize that even though the center of the play’s world might be the king and his justice, there is undoubtedly a great lack in that world, even if Falstaff is literally too soiled to fill it himself. One is left wondering why we’ve been given such fascinating partial characters as Henry IV, Prince Hal, and Falstaff yet no true protagonist to bestow our loyalty upon. Perhaps this makes for a lesser play; perhaps it also makes for a telling enactment of the playwright’s frustration with the human factors that create historical unevenness, which itself echoes England’s own anxiety about Hal’s ascension.

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Stamboul Train and Brighton Rock (Penguin; January 9 and 15, 2012) – I find it interesting to compare these two. The first is a relatively comic and enthralling mystery with something of a cynical conclusion; the second is an agonizing story of poverty, crime, and despair that is redeemed at the very end by the triumph of justice and goodness, headed up by the free spirit Ida Arnold, who is so angelic and delightful that she seems almost un-Greenean. I look forward to seeing how these two novels compare with his others.

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (Puffin; December 10 and 25, 2011) – The first book was fun, the second one made a lot less sense, to the point that, unlike the first, it was too strange to enjoy as a story.

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Cathedral, stories by Raymond Carver (Vintage; December 14, 2011) – This is my second helping of Carver stories, after "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," which seemed a bit edgier or sparse or something. The characters in this book seemed a little older and given more easily to ruminations. This is a pretty subtle difference, though, and has nothing to do with which one is better. These were some great stories. Nobody does it better.

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The A.B.C. Murders, by Agatha Christie (Berkley; December 11, 2011) – After growing up in a house full of mystery books, I've finally read one. It was a lot of fun. I can see why people get addicted to these. Also, I picked up some French from Monsieur Poirot ... at least I thought I had until I talked with someone who actually knew French.

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The Wind in the Willows (Puffin; December 10, 2011) – A truly neglected classic; well worth returning to; and a reminder that just because a book is written "for children" doesn't mean it has to scrimp on charm, irony, or character development. I was actually amazed how many times I laughed out loud while reading this. Three cheers for Mr Badger and the inimitable Toad!

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Measure for Measure (Everyman’s; December 4, 2011) – I found myself enjoying this play even more on this reading; I'm not sure why, excactly, but I found the toils of the characters and their philosophizing about love, sex, mores, laws, etc. totally engrossing. The only downside was that the final act wraps things up far too conveniently, even for Shakespeare, and, except for the Duke, none of the characters show any depth, or even speak, barely. I look forward to reading some criticism on this issue.

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The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories (“Sir Edmund Orme,” “Owen Wingrave,” and “The Friends of the Friends”; Oxford; November 29, 2011)

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Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, collected essays by Tony Judt (Penguin; November 15, 2011) – The thought I kept having while reading this book is what a different and intellectually complex era the twentieth century turned out to be. Perhaps because the contending forces were rooted in ideology (communism, fascism, democracy, etc.) or perhaps just because it was a weird fact of history that the last century saw widespread education flourish just before the birth of passive media (radio, film, television, the Internet) – i.e., the last may have been the best-read century in human history. Either way, Judt is both product and chronicler of this legacy, and essential reading for anyone looking to understand its complexity, not to mention its often air-brushed successes and failures.

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The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach (Little, Brown; October 23, 2011) – Despite its abominable first half, this book does eventually scrap together a good ending – moving, fascinating, even literary. But one can't help but be annoyed at the author and the editors who worked on this book for publishing such a half-baked novel. Once the characters are set, you’re able to squint a little and forget that for about three hundred pages they seemed totally flat and clichéd. Most of this probably could have been fixed with some revision. It would have been painstaking, probably taken another year or two, but that’s what you have to do when crafting a lasting work of art. But now it’s stuck like this forever, which is really sad, and which in the end amounts, quite simply, to a professional failure. Also, I’m troubled by the overwhelming decision by reviewers to overlook this in what I can only assume is a desperate search for a “great novel.” I think I understand where they’re coming from, but they’ve ultimately sold everyone short. Biblioklept’s review, “Why I Abandoned Chad Harbach’s Over-Hyped Novel The Art of Fielding After Only 100 Pages” – the only full-on negative review I’ve seen – treats this problem well. In the end, it’s just depressing that so many people – from the author to editors and reviews – have totally fallen short of basic literary standards.

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Oliver Twist (Penguin; October 2, 2011) – My main response to this novel is that the journalism in it (how people live, what different parts of London are like) is top-notch, but the moralizing, aside from the necessary good-and-evil of the drama, gets a little tedious after a while. It has great characters, though, and good comedy, as well as some great villany and even a decent mystery or two. Certainly worth reading, though perhaps not re-reading.

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For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports, by Christopher Hitchens (Verso; September 25, 2011)

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All’s Well That Ends Well (Everyman’s; September 16, 2011)

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American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, by William Langewiesche (North Point; September 14, 2011) – An illuminating and edifying tale of the men who worked "the pile," complete with concise backstories of how it and they came together as they did in September 2001. At 200 pages it's almost too brief, but that's forgivable because it was originally a trilogy of Atlantic Monthly articles, and it makes up for its size by packing in tons of engrossing details and fascinating anecdotes.

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Twelfth Night (Everyman’s; September 5, 2011)

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Anatomy of a Disappearance (Dial; September 1, 2011)

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The Virgin Suicides (Warner; August 31, 2011) – Initial impression: as I read this novel, I just kept saying to myself, over and over: this novel is perfect. I just want to start back at the beginning and start reading it all over again. It gives me hope to see that authors are still writing novels this good in our lifetime.

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The Hours (Picador; August 28, 2011) – It seems callous to say about a book about books, but "The Hours" is an example of an A- novel that got turned into a solid A screenplay. "The English Patient" was like this as well. In both cases, amazingly, a screenwriter has succeeded at taking a strong story and making it even tighter, which almost shouldn't be possible. Nevertheless, here's the proof.

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To Kill a Mockingbird (HarperPerennial; August 25, 2011) – I never read this book as a kid, or a teenager. Instead, I read it as a twentysomething. So there were times while reading it when I feared I might be too old to appreciate it – to really get it in my heart as well as my head. There were moments when this child’s narrative threatened to become too simplistic to sympathize with. But Harper Lee, to my great satisfaction, never let that happen. Always, amid the fringes of Scout Finch’s innocence and safety, lurked the true monsters – not the Boo Radleys of childish imaginings, but the very real terrors: poverty, hatred, violence, racism; rapes, beatings, even lynchings (or attempted lynchings, at least). More than anything else, this novel tells the story of a young girl and her brother learning that actions have consequences, and that the good things in life exist because wiser men and women decided to work for them. As our society grows less tribal, this novel might actually lose some of its power among Americans, or risk becoming quaint, but I wager it will still mean a great deal to others around the world who struggle to uphold the rule of law under regimes that treat their citizens like children. Then again, it’s human nature, no matter what the country, to take the easier, more childish explanation of things, to fear the helpless scapegoat rather than the violent madman. But for every fearful man-child, there’s an adult who sees it the other way round – and stands obliged to correct the mistake, sometimes at the highest cost. As Atticus himself says, “When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake.”

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Blue Angel, by Francine Prose (Perennial; July 8, 2011) – I'm still sort of processing this read. I enjoyed it very much, but at the end I kind of felt like I was still moving at full speed even though the novel had ended. I have a lot of unanswered questions. I could definitely read it again, though, and perhaps see more of what's going on. The, er, prose is rather masterful, as is the storytelling. Also it's hilarious.

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After This, by Alice McDermott (Dial Press; June 30, 2011) – This novel had a lot of talent in the writing and storytelling but ultimately came off as overdone and unsatisfying. Read more.

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Walden (Modern Library; June 24, 2011) – There's been a "Walden" essay sitting in my drafts file since about July. Someday I'll finish it up. Until then, perchance you were waiting for my word on this, this is a truly amazing work, best read as far from the A/V distractions of your life as you can manage. And probably best read in your favorite season (which for me was early summer); when you read what Thoreau has to say about your favorite time of year, you appreaciate his genius even more.

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Love, Poverty, and War, essays by Christopher Hitchens (Nation; June 16, 2011) – What Hitchens does is not all that unusual: he brings a trove of experience (reading, travel, ideas) to each subject – usually literature, politics (history, warfare), or society – but is always able to add a little something new. The astonishing thing about Hitchens is that he can do this for so many subjects, and so often (he is still, despite his illness, writing almost every week for Slate). On top of that, he is an exceedingly eloquent writer.

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Pride and Prejudice (Oxford; May 31, 2011) – In a word, delightful.

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The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte (Picador; May 1, 2011) – I give this book a passing grade in the tradition of novels that are mediocre as literature but manage to make up for poor character development and shallow drama with superior humor and social satire. But all told, it wasn't nearly as brilliant as the reviews made it out to be. Lipsyte offers some biting passages, and there's a novelty to having the current mid-life-somethings represented in fiction, but really I was expecting a lot more. I also can't help but mention that this was another example of contemporary fiction failing to really critique -- or even just represent -- the Iraq War in a meaningful way. Even as a means of conveying liberal rage against the Bush administration (i.e., something I would be inclined to sympathize with even if it wasn't done too well), "The Ask" just felt tired and easy and ultimately boring (from what I've read, I suspect Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" has a similar problem, but I can't say for sure because I haven't read it).

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As You Like It (Everyman’s; March 2, 2011)

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Hamlet (Folger; February 27, 2011)

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Timon of Athens (Folger; February 21, 2011)
Coriolanus (Folger; January 4, 2011)
Antony and Cleopatra (Signet; December 31, 2010)

It’s taken more than a year, but I’ve finally finished a proper reading of Shakespeare’s tragedies. It seems a fitting time to offer a few words on the record. As I was already well acquainted with the major tragedies (for the sake of this conversation, “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” and, since they’re so familiar to us, “Romeo and Juliet” and “Julius Caesar”), I’d like to focus on the first and last tragedies, which I mostly enjoyed. Be warned that some plot details shall be revealed. Read more.

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The Pickwick Papers (Vintage; February 20, 2011)

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Reading Notes: 2004-2010: Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It; Girl With Curious Hair; The Natural; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; The Dead; Macbeth; Othello; Troilus and Cressida; The Merchant of Venice; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Phaedrus; Romeo and Juliet; The House of the Seven Gables; Titus Andronicus; Julius Caesar; Romeo and Juliet; The Two Noble Kinsmen; Emma; The Tempest; The Winter's Tale; Cymbeline; Pericles; A Sport and a Pastime; Macbeth; King Lear; What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; Divisadero; Housekeeping; My Ántonia; O Pioneers!; Othello; Hamlet; Franny and Zooey; A Room with a View; Hamlet; Measure for Measure; The Sun Also Rises; To the Lighthouse; All's Well That Ends Well; Twelfth Night; Much Ado About Nothing; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Between the Acts; Hard Times; Two Gentlemen of Verona; The Taming of the Shrew; Silas Marner; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Love's Labour's Lost; King Lear; The Comedy of Errors; The Merchant of Venice; A Midsummer Night's Dream; As You Like It; One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; The Scarlet Letter; Profanations; The Symposium; The Tempest; Gilead; Utopia; Under the Net; Mrs. Dalloway; The Last Days of Socrates; On the Road; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; A Passage to India; No One Belongs Here More Than You; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction; For Whom the Bell Tolls; The Blithedale Romance; Franny and Zooey; How to Be Alone; Founding Brothers; Light in August; The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; The Power and the Glory; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Dubliners; Dispatches; A Farewell to Arms; The Song of the Lark

 

reading lists

Shakespeare:  

  • 2 Henry VI
  • 3 Henry VI
  • 1 Henry VI
  • Richard III
  • Richard II
  • King John
  • Henry V
  • Henry VIII

Fiction:

  • Alcott: Little Women 
  • Amis: Lucky Jim
  • Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio
  • Austen: Sense and Sensibility
  • Auster: New York Stories
  • Baker: The Fermata; House of Holes
  • Barrie: Peter Pan
  • Baum: The Wizard of Oz
  • Bellow: The Adventures of Augie March
  • Bierce: Civil War Stories
  • Brontë: Jane Eyre
  • Brontë: Wuthering Heights 
  • Cather: The Professor’s House
  • Chabon: Wonder Boys
  • Chandler: The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The Long Goodbye
  • Cheever: The Stories of John Cheever
  • Conrad: Typhoon and Other Tales; Heart of Darkness and Other Tales; Lord Jim; Nostromo; The Secret Agent
  • Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans; The Deerslayer
  • Crane: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; The Red Badge of Courage
  • Dickens: Nicholas Nickleby; The Old Curiosity Shop; Barnaby Rudge; Christmas Stories; Martin Chuzzlewit; Dombey and Son; David Copperfield; Bleak House; Little Dorrit; Great Expectations; Our Mutual Friend
  • Defoe: Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
  • Doctorow: (Ragtime); World’s Fair; Billy Bathgate
  • Dos Passos: U.S.A. (Library of America)
  • Dreiser: Sister Carrie; Jennie Gerhardt; An American Tragedy
  • Eliot: The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch; Adam Bede; Romola; Felix Holt; Daniel Deronda
  • Ellis: American Psycho
  • Ellison: Invisible Man
  • Eugenides: Middlesex; The Marriage Plot
  • Farrell: Studs Lonigan trilogy (Library of America)
  • Faulkner: (The Sound and the Fury); (As I Lay Dying); (Light in August); (Absalom, Absalom!); The Unvanquished; Go Down, Moses; Intruder in the Dust; Collected Stories
  • Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise; (The Great Gatsby); Tender Is the Night
  • Foer: Everything Is Illuminated
  • Forster: Howard’s End
  • Franzen: The Twenty-Seventh City; Strong Motion; The Corrections
  • Fraser: Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman in the Great Game (Everyman’s)
  • Gaddis: The Recognitions
  • Gass: The Omensetter’s Luck
  • Greene: The Power and the Glory; The Heart of the Matter; The End of the Affair; The Quiet American; ... England Made Me; A Gun for Sale; Journey Wihout Maps (travels in Liberia); The Confidential Agent; The Lawless Roads (travels in Mexico); The Ministry of Fear; The Third Man; Twenty-One Stories; Our Man in Havana; A Burnt-Out Case; A Sense of Reality (stories); The Comedians; May We Borrow Your Husband? (stories); Travels with My Aunt; A Sort of Life (autobiography); The Honorary Consul; The Human Factor; Ways of Escape (autobiography); Monsignor Quixote; Getting to Know the General (nonfiction memoir of Panama); The Tenth Man; The Captain and the Enemy; The Last Word (stories); No Man's Land
  • Hammett: The Maltese Falcoln
  • Hardy: Far From the Madding Crowd; The Return of the Native; The Mayor of Castorbridge; Tess of the d’Urbervilles; Jude the Obscure
  • Haruf: Plainsong
  • Hawthorne: The Marble Faun
  • Heller: (Catch-22)
  • Hemingway: A Moveable Feast; Islands in the Stream
  • Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley; Ripley Under Ground; Ripley's Game; The Boy Who Followed Ripley; Ripley Under Water
  • Hurston: Novels and Stories (Library of America)
  • James: Washington Square; Portrait of a Lady; What Maisie Knew; The Ambassadors; Major Stories & Essays (Library of America)
  • Joyce: (Dubliners); (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
  • Kerouac: The Dharma Bums
  • King: The Shining
  • Kipling: The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories; The Jungle Books; Kim
  • Krauss: The History of Love
  • Lawrence: Sons and Lovers; The Rainbow; Women in Love; Lady Chatterley's Lover; Collected Stories, 1914–30 (Everyman’s)
  • Lewis: Main Street; Babbitt; Arrowsmith; Elmer Gantry
  • Mailer: The Naked and the Dead; An American Dream
  • Malamud: (The Assistant); The Magic Barrel
  • Matar: In the Country of Men
  • McCarthy: Blood Meridian; No Country for Old Men; The Road
  • McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
  • McEwan: Atonement
  • Melville: Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, and Other Writings
  • Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables
  • Morrison: (The Bluest Eye); Song of Solomon; Beloved
  • Munro: The Dance of the Happy Shades
  • Murdoch: A Severed Head; The Bell; A Fairly Honourable Defeat; The Black Prince; The Sea, the Sea
  • Nabokov: Lolita
  • O’Brien: Going After Cacciato; (The Things They Carried); In the Lake of the Woods
  • O’Connor: A Good Man Is Hard to Find; Everything That Rises Must Converge
  • Pynchon: V.; The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity’s Rainbow; Mason & Dixon
  • Robinson: Home
  • Rushdie: Midnight’s Children; Satanic Verses
  • Saki: The Complete Saki (Penguin)
  • Salinger: Hapworth 16
  • Salter: Light Years
  • Scott: Waverly; Rob Roy; Ivanhoe
  • Sewell: Black Beauty
  • Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath; East of Eden
  • Sterne: Tristram Shandy
  • Stevenson: Treasure Island
  • Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
  • Tolkein: The Lord of the Rings trilogy
  • Twain: Roughin’ It; Life on the Mississippi
  • Updike: The Centaur; Early Stories; Rabbit, Run; Couples
  • Vidal: Lincoln
  • Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963-1973
  • Wallace: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; Oblivion; Infinite Jest
  • Waugh: Decline and Fall; A Handful of Dust; Brideshead Revisited; The Loved One; Scoop
  • Webb: Fields of Fire
  • West: Miss Lonelyhearts; The Day of the Locust
  • Wodehouse: Jeeves novels
  • Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel
  • Wolfe: The Bonfire of the Vanities
  • Woolf: Orlando; The Waves; The Years
  • Wyss: The Swiss Family Robinson
  • Yates: Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (Everyman’s)
  • Babel: The Complete Works
  • Borges: Collected Fictions
  • Camus: The Stranger; The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays (Everyman’s)
  • Cervantes: Don Quixote
  • Chekov: stories, short novels, plays
  • Dostoyevsky: Notes from the Underground; Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
  • Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo
  • Gogol: Dead Souls; Collected Tales
  • Ibsen: Major plays
  • Kafka: Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle
  • Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
  • Palamuk: Snow
  • Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
  • Proust: Remembrance of Things Past
  • Stendhal: The Red and the Black
  • Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
  • Turgenev: Fathers and Sons
  • Zola: novels

Canonical works:

  • The Aeneid
  • Beowulf
  • The Canterbury Tales
  • The Faerie Queene
  • Goethe’s Faust
  • Gawain, Pearl, Sir Orfeo
  • The King James Bible
  • On the Nature of Things
  • Paradise Lost
  • The Sonnets
  • Cicero
  • Dante
  • Euripides
  • Homer
  • Horace
  • Ovid
  • Sophocles
  • Thucydides

Nonfiction:

  • Adorno: Minima Moralia
  • Agamben: Infancy and History; (Homo Sacer); State of Exception; Remnants of Auschwitz; The Signature of All Things
  • Aristotle: Poetics
  • Artz: The Mind of the Middle Ages
  • Augustine: Confessions
  • Bachelard: The Poetics of Space
  • Benjamin: Reflections; Illuminations; Berlin Childhood
  • Bhabha: The Location of Culture
  • Bloom: The Western Canon; Shakespeare
  • Bradley: Shakespearean Tragedy
  • Brooks: The Well Wrought Urn
  • Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France
  • Burke: The 9/11 Wars
  • Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
  • Robert Conquest: The Great Terror: A Reassessment
  • Curtis (ed.): The Great Political Theories (two volumes)
  • Derrida: Of Grammatology; Dissemination
  • Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem; The White Album; Salvador; Miami
  • Empson: Argufying
  • Fish: Is There a Text in this Class?
  • Foucault: History of Sexuality
  • Fry: A Natural Perspective; Anatomy of Criticism
  • Garber: Shakespeare After All
  • Gass: Finding a Form
  • Greenblatt: Practicing New Historicism; Will in the World
  • Graham Greene: Reflections; Mornings in the Dark
  • William Hazlitt: The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays
  • Christopher Hitchens: Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger; Prepared for the Worst: Essays and Minority Reports; The Missionary Position; The Parthenon Marbles; No One Left to Lie To; The Trial of Henry Kissinger; Letters to a Young Contrarian; Why Orwell Matters; A Long Short War; Thomas Jefferson: Author of America; Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography; God Is Not Great; Hitch-22; Mortality
  • Howe: (The Birth-mark)
  • Kant: Basic Writings
  • Robert Kaplan: Monsoon
  • Stanley Karnow: Vietnam: A History
  • Stephen King: On Writing
  • Belden Lane: Landscape of the Sacred
  • Walter Laqueur: The Last Days of Europe
  • D. H. Lawrence: Studies in Classic Amerian Literature; Introductions and Reviews; Late Essays and Articles
  • C. S. Lewis: Mere Christianity
  • Edward Luce: In Spite of the Gods
  • Norman Mailer: The Armies of the Night; The Executioner’s Song
  • Mansfield: A History of the Middle East
  • Paul Mariani: The Broken Tower; God and the Imagination
  • Martin: Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
  • William Morris: Useful Work Versus Useless Toil
  • Roderick Nash: Wilderness and the American Mind
  • Elizabeth Neuffer: The Key to My Neighbor's House
  • Nietzsche: Basic Writings
  • Norton: Hezbollah
  • Walter Ong: Orality and Literacy
  • George Orwell: Why I Write (Penguin); Essays (Everyman’s)
  • Tomas Paine: Thomas Paine Reader
  • Plato: Protagoras and Meno; Early Dialogues
  • Prunier: Africa’s World War
  • Reid: Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America's Soul 
  • David Remnick: Lenin’s Tomb; The Bridge 
  • Christopher Ricks: Dylan’s Vision of Sin
  • Rousseau: Reflections of a Solitary Walker
  • Robert Service: Comrades!: A History of World Communism
  • Tuchman: The Guns of August
  • Mark Twain: Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches
  • Mark Van Doren: Shakespeare
  • Gore Vidal: Selected Essays
  • Michael Walzer: Just and Unjust Wars
  • Terence Ward: Searching for Hassan
  • Rebecca West: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
  • Douglas Wilson: Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln
  • Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s; Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s
  • Tom Wolfe: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby; The Pump House Gang; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; The Painted Word; Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine; In Our Time; From Bauhaus to Our House; The Purple Decades; The Right Stuff; Hooking Up
  • Richard Wolin: The Wind from the East
  • Stanley A. Wolpert: India
  • Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower
  • Patrick Wright: Passport to Peking

 

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