New Friend, New List of Favorite Books

Joseph Brodsky around 1970. 

A new friend here in Panama, a cyclist, Yogi, and round-the-world-sailor named Roger, asked me for a list of books I would recommend. He is an avid reader and looking for new books he has not read.  

Roger has read all the greats of 19th Century Russian literature. Today I found out why.  Roger was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1970.  He took a
semester of creative writing with Joseph Brodsky, the Russian emigre poet who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987.  Roger won the Russian lit. professor lottery! 

I have a few books with me in Panama. Two are Blindness, the terrifying dystopian novel by Jose Saramago, and Tribe by the journalist and war correspondent Sebastian Junger. Both are excellent, so I gave them to Roger. 

Now the list. 

1. Kazuo Ishiguro. Remains of the Day and Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro are my favorites. I have read everything Ishiguro has written, most recently Klara and the Sun and seen his movie Living.  His writing is brilliant. These two books are my favorite.

2. Hannah Arendt. Philosopher and historian and one of the most influential political writers of the 20th Century. Born in 1906, a German Jew, she earned a PhD at Heidelberg in 1929 and fled Germany in 1933 just after the Nazi takeover.  She lived in France until WorldWar II began, then escaped to America in 1941. In 1951 She published The Origins of Totalitarianism, her best-known work defining the new tyranny of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.  I have read all of her books. I most admire On Revolution a book that shows why nearly all revolutions devolve into tyranny, but America did not.  I love The Human Condition for explaining living in our world.  I am such a devoted fan, I am in a weekly reading group and go to Hannah Arendt Conferences.

3. George Orwell. I have read and re-read Orwell's novels.  A decade ago I read the 1200-page volume of his collected essays, finding endless entertainment.  His essay on brewing tea shows the utter snob that still lingered inside the Democratic Socialist writer. There is no better book explaining the rise of Stalin than Animal Farm.  A decade ago, I became convinced that 1984 was not prophetic after all, until I read about life in Communist China.     

4. Mark Helprin. I have been a devoted fan of Mark Helprin since read his novel Winters Tale in 1983.  I have since read every one of his novels, most recently The Ocean and the Stars.  His Paris in the Present Tense gave me a new and lovely view of my favorite city.  I plan to read Winters Tale for the third time this year.

5. - 12.  I love big books in which one author writes the entire history of humanity as in Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.  

Or of recorded human history as in Why the West Rules--For Now by Ian Morris or another view Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. 

Or a history of American from the view of those without power, These Truths by Jill Lepore. 

Another delightful view of the past 500 years Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson.  

I recently read Titans of History by Simon Sebag Montifiore. I plan to read his The World: A Family History of Humanity.  But I also want to read his Jerusalem.

An aside on these books is that I believe recent histories are the best. The old histories did not have access to all the new data. That perspective here.

And another aside! If you read books in translation, read the newest translation available.  The latest translation will be clearest and will correct the mistakes of predecessors.  If you read Scriptures in translation, read a translation by one person.  A committee compromises. One person may be wrong, but they won't be tepid. 

Back to the list.  

13. (for the unluckiest author on this list)  The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. Son of a German father and French mother from territory between the countries. Enlists in the German Army at 17 in 1941. Spends the entire war in Russia. Returns home. Home is now in France. He serves in the French Foreign Legion to avoid prison. A soldier under any flag can be a good soldier.  

14. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli I re-read it for the tenth time last year, every Presidential election year since 1980.  I will read it again in 2028. Machiavelli's advice remains brilliant, relevant and chilling 500 years after he wrote it.  

15. Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin.  A 2006 novel that imagines Russia in 2028 as a restored Tsarist empire, complete with Oprichniks, the assassins of Ivan the Terrible. It is a crazy, funny novel, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine showed it has a dark, prophetic side. 

16. A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller Jr. shows us the world after a Soviet-American nuclear exchange kills 95% of the population.  A Catholic monastery in the ruins of Utah preserves books after the survivors of the nuclear war burn books and scientists. The irony in this book is amazing.

17. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.  In a nine-month trip beginning in1830, Tocqueville found the heart of American democracy and wrote a book that became the central description of America for the world--including every political scientist in America.  He said in the 1830s that the 20th Century would be defined by the conflict between Russian and America.

18. C.S. Lewis. I have read all of the 39 books he wrote in his lifetime, plus posthumous collections. His novel Till We Have Faces is so good it is one of the books I read aloud to my daughters. The central characters look at the same thing at the same time and see two entirely different things.  So much of the book looks at perception and reality in ways I have not read anywhere else. His book The Four Loves gave me a frame for seeing the different ways people express love...and reject love. 

19. Vasily Grossman. Since Roger has read about and is very interested in the Battle of Stalingrad, my first recommendation is Life and Fate the novel of the Battle of Stalingrad and it's second volume titled Stalingrad. Grossman was a Soviet war correspondent who arrived the first day of the battle and reported then entire terrible fight.

20. Leo Tolstoy. Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy. No book affected my view of life, death and eternity more than this one. I just re-read War and Peace, but Ivan Ilych is for me the best thing Tolstoy wrote.  

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: Beauty and Deep Irony Unlocked by Hannah Arendt

Irony can be lovely in literature. The current living master of irony in my reading is Kazuo Ishiguro especially in his book The Remains of the Day. Another sad and beautiful master of irony is Walter Miller Jr. in his book A Canticle for Liebowitz. Miller and Ishiguro intend irony.

Leo Tolstoy did not, but there is more irony at the center of War and Peace than in the biggest Soviet-era Russian steel mill.  The deep love stories that swirl through this beautiful book are set in tragedy a time of war. The story begins in the gossip and whirl of upper class city life and ends with country family life.  

At intervals throughout the book, Tolstoy interrupts the narrative to tell us with increasing stridency that great people, and all people, have no real influence on life and history.  The collective spirit of the people, and chance, and fate, and the will of God guide events.  The great people believe they are in charge, but they are merely corks bobbing on a river flowing where God and nature intend.  

While he is telling us great people have no influence, Tolstoy fills hundreds of pages of this 1,500-page book with the actions of Napoleon, Marshall Kutuzov, Emperor Alexander, as well as mayors, generals and other leaders.  To learn how great people have no influence, we learn a lot about what they do.  

My current reading of War and Peace was on a Kindle in the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky.  In the late 80s I read the Constance Garnett standard translation.  In 2000, I read the Almyer and Louise Maude translation.    

Since 2000, I have gone to war and after returning from that war read all of the works of Hannah Arendt.  The year in Iraq showed me how deeply Tolstoy was affected by his service in the War in Crimea and how he turned that experience into art.  Reading Arendt showed me why I disagreed so completely with the philosophy that fills hundreds of pages of Tolstoy's longest novel.  

Central to Hannah Arendt's view of the human condition is natality.  She says that each person when born has the potential to influence the world.  Each new life is a new beginning.  Further, in her book titled The Human Condition Arendt divides human activity into Labor, Work and Action.  Labor is work done that leaves no trace--factory work, cleaning, cooking.  Work is creating things that endure--furniture, works of art, jewelry.  Action is influencing others.  

When we act, we influence others who have wills and ideas of their own, so we never know what will come of our words.  Leaders persuade people to act but the message strikes each individual in a different way. So what seems a mass from the outside is really individuals, each moved in their own way by the message. In fact some may hear the message and become opponents while others follow. 

Natality, in Arendt's description, brings unique possibilities into the world in the life of every individual.  After reading Arendt, reading Tolstoy's philosophy gave me the same feeling I have when reading Sam Harris and other determinists.  I understand why they believe what they do, but cannot agree.  Natality gives me billions of reasons to know that something new could come into the world begin by one person and change the world, for good or ill.   

In the first epilogue of War and Peace Tolstoy says his book is not a novel.  It's his book, so he can say whatever he wants.  But the story itself is wonderful on its own terms.  The philosophy underneath it does not affect the intricate beauty of the story Tolstoy tells.  If I read it again, I will skip the philosophy and enjoy the story.