100 Books Like The Idiot

This book was absolutely amazing. The author interviewed many Soviet citizens in the 1990s after the Soviet Union’s collapse. I loved this book because it showed how people dealt with the massive change of the fall of the Soviet Union.

I also happened to be doing research in the Soviet Union in 1990 and then in 1995. So, I had an idea or two about before and after, but what about the people themselves? It shocked me to learn how many people believed in Stalin and how they thought they were changing the world even as it went far astray.

I also learned in the wonderful stories how they struggled to survive, some more, some less. The stories were heartbreaking but also illuminating and even encouraging.

This classic book, unlike others in the list, is not so much about memory, as a collection of the author’s memories of his childhood and early years.

Nabokov was born into a wealthy family in pre-Revolutionary Russia in 1899. His childhood in St. Petersburg and at the family’s country estate are described in loving detail, as are aspects of later years in England, Germany, and France. Nabokov was one of the great writers of the 20th Century, and the memories are recounted in his glowing and evocative prose.

His writing is nostalgic, but also wryly humorous, aware that many aspects of his early life are gone forever. Many of the chapters first appeared as articles in The New Yorker; all are eminently readable. 

Though I love to read Homer’s Odyssey in the original Greek, I also appreciate translations that allow particular themes to emerge in new ways.

All translations of the ancient epic are necessarily inventive recreations of the ancient Greek Homeric story, and I like the way this translation employs a quick-paced poetic meter and updates the tale to suit modern sensibilities on uncomfortable aspects of the Odyssey (e.g., misogyny, slavery).

The introduction also provides an authoritative explanation of the Homeric Odyssey.

This book has become so familiar to us through cartoons and movies that we often forget how very weird it is as a piece of writing. The book begins when Alice, bored of her sister’s company, notices a white rabbit muttering to itself “Oh dear! Oh dear!”, and starts to become curious—not, mind you, because talking rabbits are impossible, but only because they are so very intriguing.

The rest of the book shares this bemused tone: Alice will be subjected to all sorts of indignities, including a near-beheading, but as a “good” Victorian girl, she will generally accept the bizarre reality that is presented to her. Carroll’s mastery of language is key to this effect. Nearly every character sounds sensible, turning well-formed logical sentences, but they never make much actual sense, and their speeches are riddled with so many puns, double meanings, and other linguistic tricks that one can never… show more.

I was on an extended trip to Eastern Europe, back when Eastern Europe was not such a dandy place to visit, and I found myself with nothing to read. In a used bookstore in Prague, I found a tattered paperback, translated into English, of this next pick. It was falling apart, the pages stained by coffee and God knows what else. I bought it anyway.

And over the next few weeks, I was, for the third time, blown away by words on a page, by an author’s imagination. It’s been said that Don Quixote, written around 1600, was the first novel ever written. It may also be the greatest novel ever written. Adventure. Humor. Pathos. Crazy amounts of imagination. The Whole Damn Human Condition.

Make sure to find a first-class translation!

One of my all-time favourite books and one of the greatest narratives about the power of the imagination.

Picture books are the best teachers of ideas because they delight the eye and because the lessons they offer never feel didactic. The opening chapter of this book offers one of the most unforgettable lessons about how to see that dimension of the visible world that is not given to sight. 

Do I need a reason to love this book? There are too many characters, too many subplots, too many deaths, and the ruins of beloved characters. And yet, the entire picture it presents is beautiful. That is how life is– unpredictable and chaotic.

I learned a lot about war, the mentality of people who go to fight, and the mentality of the people left behind. Above all, it was such a good feeling to finish the big book–probably one of the biggest books I had read and loved! 

When I first read this book, I was somewhat mystified by what the fuss was all about. All I could see was a story of a group of dissolute and disillusioned expats living a pointless life of pettiness and drinking. However, as I separately learned more about Hemingway and his writing style, I was drawn back to the book, and on subsequent readings, I was able to discern more in the characters and the plot than was apparent in my first reading.

The protagonist Jake Barnes, impotent because his penis appears to have been shot off as a result of a wound in World War I, is further emotionally damaged, possibly with PTSD from his war experiences and with a cynicism and sadness that engage the reader’s attention. 

These letters of Franz Kafka to his Czech translator Milena are not formally a novel but in its essence the love novel, none of his novels were.  He wrote them 1920-1923, being ill with tuberculosis as he was visiting different sanatoriums in Germany and Czechoslovakia and she was living in Vienna in an unhappy marriage. As they only saw each other shortly three times it forms a love by letters story of burning love transforming itself into misunderstandings and conflict. Their value lies in the genial Kafka’s trying and succeeding in communicating something incommunicable about how it is to be in love accounting totally honestly for his vast complexity of emotions from the utmost passion and longing to the state of fear of being rejected. A great inspiration to me for my novel in writing about Kafka.

I loved this book because it combines the gothic tradition with politics. Written during the Soviet era, it deals with the Devil and his entourage who visit Soviet-era Moscow and reveal Soviet society.

While not truly a gothic novel, it is an imaginative work and kept me mesmerized as an undergraduate student so much that I have gone back to read it again as an adult.