Bookshelf
I. Remember. Reading.
Books that I am reading, rereading, or thinking about now — all highly recommended expository material to understand the historical context and the age-old conflicts of the present moment:
- Zadie Smith, Dead and Alive.
- Salmon Rushdie, Languages of Truth.
- George Orwell, 1984 (the 75th anniversary edition from the Berkley imprint of Penguin Random House with the introduction by Thomas Pynchon).
- Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel.
- Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts.
- The Age of Extraction, by Tim Wu.
Critical reading: Here’s a link to the transcript of a special address by Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, delivered during the 2026 World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. Excerpts:
“So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination. …
“Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but. A partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.
“And we have something else. We have a recognition of what’s happening and a determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is. We are taking the sign out of the window. …
“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. … This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation. The powerful have their power. But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.”
The references to the sign in the window are from Václav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless, where Havel writes:
The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person. In everyone there is some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity, and to utilitarianism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudolife. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.
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- Thomas Pynchon, Vineland.
- Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.
- Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions.
- Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
- Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice.
- Broch, The Sleepwalkers.
- Musil, The Man Without Qualities.
- Franz Kafka, The Castle.
Some writers and critics who I think have accurately analyzed what’s happening now: Broch, Musil, Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Marcuse, and Kundera.
The following books, perhaps more practical and accessible, also come to mind: Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction; recent work by Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender (please check my sources); Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification; Catherine Wilson’s How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well; and the essays and books of William Deresiewicz. If all else fails: Wherever You Go, There You are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Vectors of Ambivalence and Ambiguity
Philosophy and world literature; literatue and knowledge; praxis; mindfulness; critical analysis; literary criticism; phenomenology; existentialism; critical theory; cosmopolitanism; technology; artificial matrices; relativity and reactivity; fragments of rationality; fragments of replication; fragmented realities; fault lines; the forgetting of being.
Protean; interpretative lenses; literature as social knowledge; the dialogic voice and the dialogic imagination; double life; polyphonic praxis; writing resistance; sense and sensibility; substance over image; bibliotherapy; inclusion over ritual exclusion; open universities; open seminiars; re-evaluating ideas uncritically adopted from the system in which we are embedded; freedom from the iron cage, the silicon cage, and the totality through a polyphonic critical literary praxis.
Bookshelf: Literature and Knowledge
Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart: A Novel.
Martin Amis. London Fields; Money; The Pregnant Widow; The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America. Want to read: The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000; a quotation from it:
“To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliche. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting cliches. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.”
Margeret Atwood. Cat’s Eye; The Handmaid’s Tale.
Anonymous. Arabian Nights: Tales from the Thousand and One Nights.
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility.
Paul Auster. The New York Trilogy.
Balzac.
Julian Barnes. The Sense of an Ending; Flaubert’s Parrot.
Roland Barthes. Writing Degree Zero; S/Z; Mythologies; Camera Lucida; The Fashion System; Elements of Semiology; Empire of Signs; A Lover’s Discourse; The Grain of the Voice; The Pleasure of the Text.
Saul Bellow. The Adventures of Augie March; Herzog; Humbolt’s Gift.
Marshall Berman. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. …
Paul Bowles. Stories; Travels; The Sheltering Sky; The Spider’s House.
Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451.
Emily Bronte. Wuthering Heights.
Italo Calvino. Cosmicomics; Invisible Cities.
Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus; The Stranger; The Rebel.
Raymond Carver. Cathedral; Will You Please Be Quiet, Please; Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories; What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories; Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories; Short Cuts.
Miguel de Cervantes. Don Quixote.
Raymond Chandler. The Long Goodbye.
Bruce Chatwin. The Songlines; In Patagonia.
Noam Chomsky. Syntactic Structures; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; The Minimalist Program; Manufacturing Consent; Language and Problems of Knowledge.
Mohammed Choukri. For Bread Alone.
Teju Cole. Open City.
Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness.
Don DeLillo. White Noise.
Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities.
Annie Dilliard. An American Childhood; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; The Writing Life.
Dostevsky. Notes from Underground; The Double; The Idiot.
Dubus II, Andre: Selected Stories. (For a list of books in the Vintage Contemporaries series, see https://vintagecontemporariesbib.com/bibliography/.)
Bret Easton Ellis. Less Than Zero.
Patrick Leigh Fermor. A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water. (For A Time of Gifts, see https://www.nyrb.com/collections/nyrb-series.)
F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby; This Side of Paradise.
Flaubert. Madame Bovary.
E. M. Forster. A Room with a View. …
Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Goethe. Faust; The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Gogol. Dead Souls. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories.
Graham Greene. Orient Express; Brighton Rock; The Quiet American.
Ernest Hemingway. Nearly all: The Sun Also Rises; …
Joseph Heller. Catch-22.
Oscar Hijuelos. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.
Aldous Huxley. Brave New World.
Kazuo Ishiguro. The Remains of the Day.
Pico Iyer. …
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Heat and Dust.
James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; Dubliners.
Kafka. The Trial; Metamorphosis and Other Stories; The Castle.
Jack Kerouac. On the Road.
Ken Kesey. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Barbara Kingsolver. …
Jerzy Kosinski. Steps; Being There; …
Milan Kundera. The Unbearable Lightness of Being; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Laughable Loves; Slowness; The Curtain: An Essay in Sever Parts; The Art of the Novel.
“What does Cervantes’s great novel mean? Much has been written on the question. Some see in it a rationalist critique of Don Quixote’s hazy idealism. Others see it as a celebration of that same idealism. Both interpretations are mistaken because they both seek at the novel’s core not an inquiry but a moral position.” — From Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel.
Hanif Kureishi. The Buddha of Suburbia.
John le Carré. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; A Small Town in Germany; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; The Russia House; The Night Manager; The Tailor of Panama; The Constant Gardener; Our Kind of Traitor.
Doris Lessing. …
Mikhail Lermontov. A Hero of Our Time.
Robert Macfarlane. Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination.
Naguib Mahfouz. The Search; The Beginning and the End.
Thomas McGuane. The Bushwhacked Piano.
Jay McInerney. Bright Lights, Big City.
Larry McMurtry. Lonesome Dove.
Toni Morrison. …
Bharati Mukherjee. Jasmine.
Iris Murdoch. Existentialists and Mystics; The Philosopher’s Pupil; The Sacred and Profane Love Machine; Under The Net (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series).
Nabokov. Laughter in the Dark; Lolita.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future; On the Genealogy of Morality; The Gay Science; The Birth of Tragedy; Twilight of the Idols; Human, All Too Human.
Joyce Carol Oates. …
George Orwell. 1984 (the 75th anniversary edition from the Berkley imprint of Penguin Random House with the introduction by Thomas Pynchon).
Orhan Pamuk. The White Castle. Memories of Distant Mountains. Want to read: A Strangeness in My Mind; The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist.
Dorothy Parker. The Portable Dorothy Parker; Selected Stories.
Walker Percy. The Thanatos Syndrome.
Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language; How the Mind Works; Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language; The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
Niel Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death; Technopoly.
Thomas Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49; Inherent Vice. Vineland.
Michael Ondaatje. The English Patient.
Richard Russo. Mohawk; The Risk Pool.
Salman Rushdie. Midnight’s Children; Haroon and the Sea of Stories; Luka and Fire of Life; Languages of Truth.
Philip Roth. The Professor of Desire.
Thomas Sanchez. Rabbit Boss; Zoot-Suit Murders.
Sartre. …
Mona Simpson. Anywhere But Here.
Susan Sontag. Against Interpretation.
Zadie Smith. White Teeth. Dead and Alive.
John Steinbeck. …
Bram Stoker. Dracula.
Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Life on the Mississippi.
Gore Vidal. Myra Breckinridge and Myron; United States: Essays 1952–92.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. All. …
Raymond Williams. The Country and the City. …
E.B. White. Essays of E.B. White; The Elements of Style.
Tom Wolfe. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Bookshelf: Writing and Editing
Here are some books that describe principled methods for editing word usage, syntax, sentence construction, and structural organization to produce clear, concise, coherent writing:
Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (or one of its variants), by Joseph M. Williams.
Stylish Academic Writing, by Helen Sword.
Developmental Editing: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers, by Scott Norton.
On Writing Well, by William Zinsser.
The Sense of Style, by Steven Pinker, who also supplies a quotation to end this article with a reminder to balance a focus on style with more important things in life:
“And for all the vitriol brought out by matters of correct usage, they are the smallest part of good writing. They pale in importance behind coherence, classic style, and overcoming the curse of knowledge, to say nothing of standards of intellectual conscientiousness. If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and possessive antecedents but the ones that govern critical thinking and factual diligence.”
Memories of public mountains: Whistler Mountain, February 2024. Photograph by Steve Hoenisch.