The Life of Reading Library 📚

Hello, and welcome to The Library. Here you will find the titles I mention in each of my YouTube videos, organized by topic, with Bookshop.org, Better World Books, and/or Amazon links where to purchase them. Some are affiliate links, which means I earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting the channel.

Topics (so far): Modernism, Brazilian Literature, Odyssey Translations in English, Postmodernism, Eroticism, Favorite Books

I. Modernism:

Modernist Poetry

• T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland & Other Poems

  Arguably the most emblematic modernist poem.

• Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker

  Some of my favorites: “Parturition,” “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” “Lunar Baedeker”

• Ezra Pound, Selected Poems or The Cantos

  Look out for: “In a Station of the Metro,” “A Pact,” “To Whistler, American”

• Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumousor Collected Poems

  Poems: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Anecdote of the Jar,”

• William Carlos Williams, Spring and Allor The Red Wheelbarrow & Other Poems

  Some favorites: “To Elsie,” “This is Just to Say,” “The Young Housewife,” “Spring and All,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “A Sort of Song,” and “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”

Modernist Prose

• Jean Toomer, Cane

• Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosistrans. Susan Bernofsky or Stanley Corngold

• Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones trans. Anthony Bonner

• Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time

• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. DallowayorTo the Lighthouse

• Rainer Maria Rilke,The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggetrans. Stephen Mitchell

• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, the Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!

• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

• Andre Breton, Nadjatrans. Mark Polizzotti

• Clarice Lispector, Passion According to G.H., trans. Idra Novey

Ultimate Modernist Challenges

• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

• William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

• James Joyce, Ulyssesand Finnegans Wake

• Gabriel García Márquez, Autumn of the Patriarch

II. Brazilian Literature

Novels

• Graciliano Ramos, Barren Lives

• Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Dom Casmurro,Quincas Borba,

• Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories, Agua Viva,

• Mário de Andrade, Macunaíma

• João Guimarães Rosa, UPCOMING TRANSLATION: Grande Sertão Veredas

• Clarice Lispector, Passion According to G.H.

• Jorge Amado, Captains of the Sands, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray

Poetry

• João Cabral de Melo Neto, Education by Stone

• Adélia Prado, The Alphabet in the Park

• Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Multitudinous Heart

III. Odyssey Translations

• Robert Fagels

• Emily Wilson

• Richmond Lattimore

• Robert Fitzgerald

• Alexander Pope (harder to find)

• George Chapman

IV. Postmodernism

Theory

• Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

  Defines the postmodern through incredulity toward metanarratives.

• Michel Foucault,Discipline and Punish

  Develops power/knowledge and the historical production of truth.

• Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

  Theorizes simulation, signs, and hyperreality.

• Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

  Provides most important Marxist account of postmodern culture.

• Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology

  Supplies the critique of stable meaning and metaphysical binaries.

Novels

• David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

  Sprawling exploration of addiction, entertainment, technology, loneliness, and the nature of human connection in modernity.

• Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

  Retelling of Jane Eyre that gives voice to Bertha Mason and destabilizes narrations of sanity, identity, and empire/colonialism.

• Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, V, Vineland

  Paranoid, encyclopedic texts that trace systems of technology, power, violence, and capitalism and how they shape the modern world.

• Don DeLillo, White Noise

  Darkly comedic account of consumer culture, media saturation, and thanatophobia.

• Italo Calvino, If on winter’s night a traveler

  Metafictional novel about reading.

• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

  Science fiction, antiwar time-traveling novel.

• Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

  Medieval murder mystery turned interpretive spiral.

• Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

  Man and nation become one complicated entity.

Poetry

• John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

V. Eroticism

Philosophy / Theory

• Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

• Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality

• Michel Foucault, A History of Sexuality (Vol I) (Vol 2) (Vol 3) (Vol 4)

• Plato, The Symposium

• Alan Watts, The Book, The Way of Zen

Poetry

• Rumi, The Essential Rumi

• Ovid, Ars Amatoria(free online)

• Ovid, The Metamorphoses

• Milton, Paradise Lost

Prose

• Boccaccio, Decameron

VI. Lenz

• Georg Büchner, Lenz

• Paul Celan, The Meridian

• Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

VII. Jorge Amado & The Myth of the Brazilian Soul

Jorge Amado:

• Captains of the Sands

• Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon

• The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray

• Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands

• The Violent Land

Theory/History:

• Roland Barthes, Mythologies

• Marly Tooge, Traduzindo o BraZil: o país mestiço de Jorge Amado

• Lilia M Schwarcz e Heliosa M Starling, Brazil: A Biography

  Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves

VIII. The Art of Close Reading

• Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

• Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

• Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

IX. Ancient Philosophy

• Plato, The Complete Works

• Plato, Five Dialogues

• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (if possible one without any contribution by Ryan Holiday)

Favorite Books

Fiction

• Georg Büchner, Lenz

• Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

• John Williams, Stoner

• Don DeLillo, White Noise

• Graciliano Ramos, Barren Lives

• John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• Vladmir Nabokov, Lolita

• Marcus Zusak, The Book Thief

• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

• Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

• Toni Morrison, Beloved

• Mario Puzo, The Godfather

Philosophy

• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations(if possible one without any contribution by Ryan Holiday)

• William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

• Alan Watts, The Book, The Way of Zen

• Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

• Plato, The Apology, The Symposium, The Pheadrus

• Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Nonfiction

• David Foster Wallace, This is Water

• Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

• Mary Oliver, Winter Hours

• Eliot Stein, Custodians of Wonder

• Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life

• Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie

• Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

• Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History

• David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster

Poetry

• Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground

• Rumi, The Soul of Rumi

• Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

• Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous

• Langston Hughes, Collected Poems