The Reading List Olivia Van Guinn, February 27, 2024February 28, 2024 Let’s get real. Top 5 books which I think should be mandatory reading for all humans (top 5 books I would bring to read on a desert island is a completely different list). “Pale Fire” by Vladimir Nabokov. “Crystalline perfection in fractured form”, as it was once described. This is a perfect novel. I believe in perfect novels. Many of the books on this list I consider perfect novels, in the way that a circle is a perfect shape, in the way that a goal is set and fulfilled with nothing left to desire. “Pale Fire” is a 999-line epic poem by John Shade, and then an exegesis of that poem by Charles Kinbote. John Shade is a hero, and the poem is an absolutely beautiful account of a poet’s life and discoveries. Charles Kinbote is an asshole, the very specific kind of asshole who cannot stand it when a book they like is not about them. The exegesis here is Kinbote’s off-kilter attempts to insert himself, his delusions about his home country, and his homoromantic feelings for John Shade into the poem. This is a very cynical take; “Pale Fire” is a do-it-yourself novel that can be read in hundreds of ways, leading to delightfully off-the-wall fan theories. But above all that, it is a fun story, written by the greatest prose stylist of this century at the peak of his abilities. “If On a Winter’s Night A Traveller” by Italo Calvino. Calvino’s name had been floating around in my sphere for a while, but I hadn’t read anything by him until I found this book. I think I have some skill for finding absolutely insane books on a whim. I typically always know the gist of a book before I read it, but the only two times in recent memory I’ve bought a book on a whim were G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who was Thursday”, and “If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller”. I 100% recommend going into this book blind and being as absolutely floored as I was. It is a clown show, full of noise and buffoonery where you least expect it. There is not a single dull page. And equally true, Italo Calvino is one of the most thoroughly intelligent people ever to write fiction; this book is dense to the point of oozing with insights and philosophies on reading, art, authorship, and the relations we have with art, each other, and our world. “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov. The only book to make me physically feel like I was flying. Bulgakov wrote in the post-Tolstoy, post-Dostoevsky era of Russia, after the Soviets had taken over and (in many people’s opinions) thoroughly steamrolled the literature coming out of the country. For all the great pre-Soviets like Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, and Chekhov, one of the only Soviet-era writers to rise to those heights was Bulgakov, and “The Master and Margarita” is his magnum opus. It’s about Lucifer and his delightful band of miscreants who go about causing havoc in Moscow, interwoven with the story of Pontius Pilate during the crucifixion of Jesus. The ribald first act steadily progresses into an intensely emotional story about stories, leading to one of the greatest climaxes in all of world literature. “Anna Karenina” by Lev Tolstoy. I have such vivid memories of overheard conversations in bookstores, on buses, in hallways, from avid readers who either saw a Russian novel and were scared by the length, or attempted to read a Russian novel and couldn’t make it through. At the start of “Anna Karenina”, it’s easy to feel that way. But I swear, by the end of “Anna Karenina”, I desperately wished it was longer. Broadly speaking, this book is about happiness. It follows four principal characters as each strives for their vision of happiness and fails over and over, leaving the final question a contemplation for the reader and for Konstantin Levin, Tolstoy’s stand-in in the novel. I truly grieved Anna Karenina, Kitty Shcherbatskaya, Alexei Vronsky, Konstantin Levin, Stepan Oblonsky, and Alexei Karenin by the end of this book because it’s so easy to imagine them as modern-day people you know, and are friends with, and whose drama you receive at midnight as drunk texts on your phone. That’s what necessitates the length of the novel. It is truly a plenitude of lives lived. “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess. I’ve always thought that if I was visited by aliens who had no idea what a story was, and I had to provide one perfect example of a story, I would give them “A Clockwork Orange”. Reading this really solved a lot of mysteries of storytelling for me. Because although a story is normally taught as an initial incident, rising action, climax, etcetera, a story at its purest form is really just an event and a consequence. I believe that conversationally, your friend telling you about something that happened is just news, but if they tell you a consequence of the thing that happened, now it’s a story. “A Clockwork Orange” is a pure, condensed story; a young criminal undergoes the Ludovico Technique, what happens next? Thereby, it is also a thought experiment on accountability, responsibility, identity. It is also a dazzling work of prose; Burgess essentially invents his own dialect wildly different from modern English, and then teaches you that dialect so easily and organically that without paying it any mind, you’ll be able to speak Nadsat by the end. I for one was distraught that there were no other Nadsat books I could keep practicing from. More reading lists coming soon! Including the “5 Books I’d Bring to a Desert Island” list, etcetera, etcetera. Reading Lists Updates