Saturday, June 18, 2011

Upside Down

Eduardo Galeano

They don't live in the city where they live. They're not allowed to set foot in the vast hell that threatens their tiny private heaven. Beyond the walls lie regions of terror filled with ugly, dirty, envious people. They grow up rootless, stripped of cultural identity, aware of society only as a threat. Their homeland lies in the designer names on their clothes, and their language is a modern Morse code. In the cities around the globe, children of privilege are alike in their habits and beliefs, like shopping malls and airports, which lie outside the realms of time and space. Educated in virtual reality, they know nothing of real reality, which exists only to be feared or bought. 

From the point of view of statistics, if a person earns a thousand dollars and another earns nothing, each of them appears to earn five hundred dollars when one calculates per capita income. From the point of view of the struggle against inflation, adjustment policies are a good remedy. From the point of view of those who suffer such policies, they spread cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, and other damnations.

In a world that prefers security to justice, there is loud applause whenever justice is sacrificed on the altar of security. The rite takes place in the streets. Every time a criminal falls in a hail of bullets society feels some relief from the disease that makes it tremble. The death of each lowlife has a pharmaceutical effect on those living the high life. The word 'pharmacy' comes from pharmakos, the Greek name for humans sacrificed to the gods in times of crisis.

But God, being rather scatterbrained, forgot to make the first woman and man, and they had no choice but to make themselves. Way down there in God's garbage dump, at the bottom of that abyss, the first woman and the first man made themselves out of God's leftovers. We human beings were born from garbage, and that's why we all have a bit of day and a bit of night, and we're all time and earth and water and wind. 

Galeano lays out an incriminating vision of the modern world. It's incriminating because  if you're reading this, you speak English and you have access to the Internet and probably live in the developed world. This is incriminating because Galeano alleges that the developed world is responsible for a lot of evil everywhere else.

If the things he says are true, I come close to thinking that enjoying the pleasant life we lead here is a mortal sin, because it is afforded us by the suffering of so many people. So I take refuge in the lovely qualification, if the things he says are true. And you get the sense that the things he says are true by perception, just as so many things North Americans believe about the innocence of their society are true by perception. After all, it's a complex world, isn't it? And how can we really know if cheap mangoes arranged pleasingly on a shelf in a grocery store actually cause someone somewhere else misery. And how can we tell if trade agreements aren't fair? We can't even figure out if taxation within our own borders is fair.

So you read Galeano and if it's true, dammit. Which means you probably won't finish the book. Because half way through you are already feeling like there is just too much to deal with. Wow it sucks, yeah, in fact, you don't even make any excuses, you just say yeah wow it sucks. Besides, the copy of Upside Down I got from the library reeks of pot smoke, so despise the probably snooty granola hater who lives in this first world and hates it and read this book before you and probably felt all superior to the rest of us who are just trying to get by. At least that way you won't have to feel badly about the woman in Bolivia who has to pay extortionate rates for her water because a US company purchased it all.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Double Fold

Nicholson Baker

The British Library's newspaper collection occupies several buildings in Colindale, north of London, near a former Royal Air Force base that is now a museum of aviation. On October 20, 1940, a German airplane--possibly mistaking the library for an aircraft-manufacturing plant--dropped a bomb on it. Ten thousand volumes of Irish and English papers were destroyed; fifteen thousand more were damaged. Unscathed, however was a very large foreign-newspaper collection, including many American titles: thousands of fifteen-pound brick thick folios bound in marbled boards, their pages stamped in red with the British Museum's crown-and-lion symbol of curatorial responsibility. 

If the thought that the British Library later willingly destroyed these 'unscathed' newspapers arouses a surge off emotion in your breast, you will be interested in Double Fold. If not, you might want to read it anyway and see what it does make you feel, or you may not want to waste your time.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Life: A User's Manual

Georges Perec

However irksome are the discomfitures which a man who has given himself body and soul to the profession of ethnography may encounter in his attempt to grasp the deeper nature of Man in concrete terms--or, in other words, to apprehend the minimal sociality defining the human condition by conquering the heteroclite evidence of diverse cultures--and although an ethnographer may not aspire to more than the discovery of relative truths (since it is vain to hope to reach any final truth), the worst difficulty I have had to encounter was not at all of that kind: I wanted to go to the absolute limit of the primitive; had I not got all I wanted in these graceful Natives whom no one had seen before me, who would perhaps not be seen again after me? At the end of an exhilarating search, I had my savages, I asked for nothing more than to be one of them, to share their days, their pains, their rituals. Alas! they didn't want to have me, they were not prepared to teach me their customs and beliefs! They had no use whatever for the gifts I laid beside them, no use at all for the help I thought I could give! It was because of me that they abandoned their villages and it was only to discourage me, to convince me there was no point in my persevering, that they chose increasingly inhospitable sites, imposing ever more terrible living conditions on themselves to show me they would rather face tigers and volcanoes, swamps, suffocating fog, elephants, poisonous spiders, than men. I think I know a good deal bout physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying...

As always there is a thread that seems to weave together the books I'm reading, no matter how far apart they objectively may be. And as usual with this thread, I do not always realize it until I have already been reading books that are a part of its weave for some time.

Perec's book, although somewhat ponderous to read, seemingly filled with trivialities and recorded data that may not have anything to do with plot or anything other than Perec's urge to report, is a story told by recounting different bits and pieces about all the residents of a single building in France. Sometimes he tells you of past residents, sometimes of present ones, but the story is always circling around this building. The chapters themselves are divided by rooms or characters (In the Boiler Room, Entrance Hall, Dinteville). The story is concerned with puzzles and is itself a puzzle. It's a book that's fonder to remember having read, than to read.

Much of what seems to be the clutter of Perec's story can either be ascribed to his desire to create puzzles or to his ethnographic impulse. Although Life is placed under the genre of fiction, it isn't hard to imagine it simply being an ethnography of one rather strange set of neighbors.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Box of Matches

Nicholson Baker

Claire told me last night that Lucy, the frail but funny woman who lives on our street, has had to go into the hospital. She's going to be okay, but the woman who helps Lucy was trying to fin d a home for Lucy's pets. Claire was wondering whether we should take one of the cat. I see that it would be a good thing to do but it seems to me that our current cat gets into terrible fight with neighbor cats already, and he's had a major blow this year as a result of the arrival of the duck. Greta, although not very bright in some ways, is shrewd about cats. What you do is you walk up to the cat slowly, as if you want to say hello, and when the cat tentatively extends its nose in the willing-to-sniff-and-be-sniffed stance, you peck at him sharply. Then, when the shocked cat turns to walk away, his ears back, his feelings and nose hurt, lunge at him again and peck him directly on or near his anus. That makes him gallop off--for no animal likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck.

I want to take care of the world. Sometimes I think of a helmet with a set of plastic earlfaps that I swivel down over my ears. There are holes on the outside of the earflaps that pick up sounds of distress from far away. It is like listening to the whales groan and squeal--there is usually one cry that is prominent, and, by turning my head from side to side, I use the signals reaching each ear to guide me to where the crime or misery is. I can fly, of course.

This is a good-feeling book. You wouldn't imagine that a good story could be made of a man describing his thoughts while sitting in front of a fire in the early morning, but Nicholson Baker manages to do this: his narrator writes a series of goodmornings each based on the starting of a fire by a match. You know you can trust him because it is a truly wise person who can point out that no one likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck. But beyond this, Baker demonstrates to me that it's not really that important what your story is about; as long as you can tell it good and tell it well, it will be interesting.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Wonderful World

Javier Calvo

If you want to create a special place, says Mr Bocanegra, put in all the statues you can.

Wonderful World makes for an interesting light read, but honestly it didn't stand out to me. It's a wacky crime story, and a bit of a farce--okay, it's a gigantic farce (when was the last time you heard of the high crime world of antique dealers?)--but as much as I enjoy these styles, something about Calvo's writing never really does it for me. It has all the right things: he takes Stephen King and Pink Floyd seriously and makes them central players in the reality of the story; there are majestically outrageous characters, absurd characters with a touch of prophetism about them; and it has all the color of sherbert ice cream, but I think the flaw is in how he ties it all together: it didn't tie together for me.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Garbage

Stephen Dixon

Two men come in and sit at the bar. I say 'How you doing, fellas, what'll it be?'
'What are you, about to close?' the stocky one says.
'No, it's just empty for a change. Still want to stay?'
'Sure. Beers. Whatever you got.'

Interesting story about a bar owner who gets pressure from a garbage company run like the mob. The bar owner doesn't want to switch services, in fact he is damned stubborn on this count. Dixon makes a story out of it.

Monday, February 14, 2011

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder

The Archbishop knew that most of the priests of Peru were scoundrels. It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favourite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy. On one occasion, the iniquities in his see having been called to his notice, he almost did something about it. He had just heard that it was becoming a rule in Peru for priests to exact two measures of meal for a fairly good absolution, and five measures for a really effective one. He trembled with indignation; he roared to his secretary and bidding him bring his writing materials, announced he was going to dictate an overwhelming message to his shepherds. But there was no ink left in the inkwell; there was no ink left in the next room; there was no ink to be found in the whole palace. This state of things in his household so upset the good man that he fell ill of the combined rages and learned to guard himself against such indignations.

Even now, she thought, almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

The Book List

Stolen Words--Thomas Mallon
The Enemies of Promise--Cryil Connolly
Contrarian Investment Strategy--David Dreman
Passage to Juneau--Raban
Maps to Anywhere--Bernard Cooper
Generation X--Douglas Coupland
Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television to Slow--Brian Fawcett
Stop-Time--Frank Conroy
A Fan's Notes--Frederick Exley
The Mezzanine, Pigeon Feathers--Nicholson Baker
The Book of Disquiet--Pessoa
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again--David Foster Wallace
Shuffle--Leonard Michaels
Smoking Diaries--Simon Gray
Great Topics of the World--Albert Goldbarth
A Mother in History--Jean Stafford
The Motion of Light in Water--Samuel Delaney
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon--Rebecca West
One Person and Another--Richard Stern
The Shadow, Venetian Suite--Sophie Calle
10:01--Lance Olson
Speedboat--Renata Adler
Ghosts in the Mirror--Robbe Grillet
The Unquiet Grave--Cyril Connolly
The Book of Embraces--Eduardo Galeano
A History of Bombing--Sven Lindqvist
Studies in Classic American Literature--D H Lawrence
The Queen's Throat--Wayne Koestenbaum
U & I--Nicholson Baker
Out of Sheer Rage--Geoff Dyer
Eros the Bittersweet--Anne Carson
S/Z--Roland Barthes
Gogol--V Nabokov
Proust--S Beckett
Against Interpretation--Susan Sontag
Essays of Elia--Charles Lamb
Within the Context of No Context--W S Trow
Swimming to Cambodia--Spalding Gray
Without You I'm Nothing--Sandra Bernhard
No Cure for Cancer--Denis Leary
Only the Truth is Funny--Rick Reynolds
The Lover--Duras
Boomerang--Barry Hannah
Correction--Thomas Bernhard
Immortality--Milan Kundera
Elizabeth Costello--J M Coetzee
Adolphe--Benjamin Constant
Stone Upon Stone--Wieslaw Mysliwski
I Hotel--Karen Tei Yamashita
Studies in the Art of Rat-Catching--Henry C Barkley
Little Pedlington and the Pedlingtons--John Poole
What is All This?--Stephen Dixon
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master--Denis Diderot
Aura, Terra Nostra--Carlos Fuentes
The Babysitter--Robert Coover
The History of English Prose Rhythm--George Saintsbury
The Autumn of the Patriarch--Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Obscene Bird of Night--Jose Donoso
Conversation in the Cathedral, The Green House--Mario Vargas Llosa
Three Trapped Tigers--Cabrera Infante
Paradiso--Lezama Lima
Makbara--Juan Goytisolo
Short Letter Long Farewell--Peter Handke
Wittgenstein's Nephew, Extinction--Thomas Bernhard
The Awful Mess on Via Merulana--Carlo Emilio Gadda
Close to Knives--D Wojnorowicz
Les Nuits de Paris--Restif de la Bretonne
Paris Peasants--Louis Aragon
Street Haunting--Virginia Wolf
Chromos--Felipe Alfay
The Prince of Darkness--J F Powers
From Cubism to Suprematism--Kazimir Malevich
Beggar's Opera, Trivia--John Gay
The Uncommercial Traveler--Charles
Arcades Project--Walter Benjamin
Mohicans du Paris--Alexander Dumas
Nadja--Andre Breton
The Cult of the Serpent--Balaji Mundkur
The Biophilia Hypothesis--Wilson and Kellert
Biophilia--A O Wilson
Discourse on Method--Descartes
Six Walks in Fictional Woods--Umberto Eco
Steps on Life's Way--Soren Kierkegaard
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich--Danilo Kis
Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf--John Muir
Tramps Across the Continent--Charles Lumis
Tracks--Robyn Davidson
Roads to Sato--Alan Booth
The Way of the Pilgrim
Diary of Climbing Mt Sinai--Egeria
Conquistadors of the Useless--Lionel Terray
The Mountain of My Fear--David Roberts
Shank's Pony--Morris Marples
Walking Up and Down in the World--Smoke Blanchard
The Narrow Road to the Deep North--Ba Sho
Mountains and Rivers without End--Gary Snyder
I Heard You Paint Houses--Charles Brandt
Death and Life in Great American Cities--Jane Jacobs
The Pathless Way--Michael Cohen
I Travel By Train--Rollo Walter Brown
The Job Hunter--Allen R Dodd Jr
The Poetry Lesson--Andrei Codrescu
A Need for Roots, Gravity and Grace--Simone Weil
Inequality Reexamined--Amartya Sen
World as I Found It--Bruce Duffy
Reality Hunger--Daniel Shields
The Gentle Art of Tramping--Stephen Graham
A Naked Singularity--Sergio De La Pava
The Art of Memory--Francis Yates
In Search of Lost Time--Marcel Proust
Touching the Rock--John M Tull
In the Palaces of Memory--George Johnson
Pentimento--Lillian Hellman
House of Leaves--Mark Danielewski
As I Remember Him--Hans Zinsser
The Man with a Shattered World, The Mind of the Mnemonist--Luria
Division Street: America--Studs Terkel
The Wretched of the Earth--Fanon
Reflections on Violence--Sorel
The Warriors--J Glenn Gray
Jakob von Gunten--Robert Walser
I Am a Cat--Natsume Soseki
Confessions of Zeno, As a Man Grows Older--Suevo
Too Loud a Solitude--Hrabal
Journey Around My Room--Xavier de Maistre
Max Havelaar--Multatuli
The Very Strange and Exact Truth--Ben Piazza
The Wonder-Worker--Dan Jacobson
The Theory of the Leisure Class--Thorstein Veblen
Regarding the Pain of Others--Susan Sontag
Teachings of Don Juan--Carlos Castenada
Meetings with Remarkable Men--G I Gurdseiv
New Model of the Universe--P D Ospensky
Crazy about Bellingham--Dan Carrigan
Disaffiliated Man--Bogue
The Hobo: Sociology of the Homeless Man--Nels Anderson
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, Leopards in the Temple--Morris Dickstein
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago--Wolf Haas
Other Electricities--Ander Monson
The Aesthetic of Resistance--Peter Weiss
At the Mind's Limit--Jean Amery
Retribution--Gert Ledig
The Law of War--Jorg Friedrich
Nekyia--Hans Erich Nossack
The City Beyond the River--Hermann Kasack
The Air Raid on Halberstadt--Alexander Kluge
The Body of Pain--Elaine Scarry
The Angel Was Silent--Heinrich Boll
Images in Spite of All--Georges Didi-Huberman
The Civil Contract of Photography--Ariella Azoulay
Language Made Plain--Anthony Burgess
The System of Vienna--Gert Jonke
Signa--Ouida
Martin Eden, Burning Daylight, The Star Rover, John Barleycorn--Jack London
You Have Seen Their Faces--Erskine Caldwell
Writing on the Wall Trilogy--Miklos Banffy
A Holy Tradition of Working--Eric Gill
The Personalist Manifesto--Emmanuel Mounier
The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist--Ammon Hennacy
Nazareth or Social Chaos--Fr Vincent McNabb
Over the Edge--Martha Burt
New Homeless and Old--Charles Hoch and Robert Slayton
Tell Them Who I Am--Elliot Leibow
Down and Out in America--Peter Rossi
The Mole People--Jennifer Toth
Down on Their Luck--David Snow and Leon Anderson
The Excluded Americans--William Tucker
Rude Awakenings--Richard White
A Mammal's Notebook--Erik Satie
Tramping with Tramps--Josiah Flynt
No Me Tangere--Rizal
History of the French Revolution--Carlyle
The Children of Aataentsic--Trigger
The Naked and the Dead--Norman Mailer
Catechism of the Revolution--Sergey Nachev
My Little War--Louis Paul Boon
Melancholy and Mystery of a Street--Giorgio de Chirico
Landscape with Dog and Other Stories--Ersi Sotiropoulos
The Armies--Evelio Rosero
The Melancholy of Resistance--Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Cassell's Guide to Punctuation--Loreto Todd
The Years with Ross--James Thurber
Pause & Effect--Malcome Ross
"Poetry & Grammar"--Gertrude Stein
The Medusa & the Snail--Lewis Thomas
"The Philosophy of Punctuation"--Paul Robinson
The Size of Thoughts--Nicholson Baker
You Have a Point There--Eric Partridge
Shadowplay--Norman Lock
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes--Roland Barthes
Boyhood, Youth, Summertime--J M Coetzee
Brecht at Night--Mati unt
The Lacuna--Barbara Kingsolver
Nog--Rudolph Wurlitzer
The Cave Man--Xiaoda Xiao
Erasure--Percival Everett
The Tanners--Robert Walser
The Sri Lankan Loxodrom--Will Alexander
The MacGuffin--Stanley Elkin
The Ask--Sam Lipsyte
Jernigan--David Gates
The Mighty Angel--Jerzy Pilch
A Fan's Notes--Frederick Exley
Nowhere Man--Aleksandar Hemon
My Name is Red--Orhan Pamuk
Little Fingers--Filip Florian
All Souls, A Heart So White--Javier Marias
Devil to Pay in the Backlands--Joao Guimaraes Rosa
The Passion According to G.H.--Clarice Lispector
Angel Levine--Bernard Malamud
Night--Elie Wiesel
If This is a Man--Primo Levi
A Masque of Reason--Robert Frost
God's Favorite--Neil Simon
Job--Joseph Roth
Job: A Comedy of Justice--Robert Heinlein
On Job--Gutierrez
Blameless in Abaddon--James Morrow
The Frog Prince--Mitchell
The City of Dreadful Night--James Thomson
Still Life, The Things We Are--John Middleton Murry
In Job's Balances--Lev Shestov
The Guide for the Perplexed--Maimonides
The Harvest Gypsies--John Steinbeck
Das Kapital--Karl Marx
Down and Out in Paris and London--George Orwell
Manchild in the Promised Land--Claude Brown
Kamby Bolongo Mean River--Robert Lopez
Senselessness--Horacio Castellanos Moya
The Seventh Gate--Peter Greave
Hermes in Paris--Peter Vansittart
The Clearing--Tim Gautreaux
Redemption Falls--Joseph O'Connor
A Weakness for Almost Everything--Aldo Buzzi
A Philosophical Investigation--Philip Kerr
The Criminalist--Eugene Izzi
Bullet Heart--Michael Doane
Memoirs of the Forties, Of Love and Hunger--Julian Maclaren-Ross
The Garden at #19--Edgar Jepson
Adam Penfeather, Buccaneer--Jeffery Farnol
Flower Phantoms--Ronald Fraser
The Odyssey of Euphemia Tracy--Richmal Crompton
The Last Days of Pompeii--Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Descent into Hell--Charles Williams
The House Under the Water--Francis Brett Young
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser--Jakob Wassermann
Vagabond Adventures--Ralph Keeler
A Very Short History of the World--Geoffrey Blainey
Little Lives--John Howland Spyker
The Family Carnovsky--I. J. Singer
The Late Grate Creature--Brock Brower
Gentleman Overboard--Herbert Lewis
Life in the Crystal Palace--Alan Harrington
Delilah--Marcus Goodrich
Augustus Carp--Henry Howorth Bashford
Jew Suss--Lion Feuchtwanger
The Power of the Dog--Don Winslow
The Power of the Dog--Rudyard Kipling
The Power of the Dog--Thomas Savage
Across Paris--Marcel Ayme
Armed with Madness--Mary Butts
Lud-in-the-Mist--Hope Mirrlees
The Asiatics--Frederic Prokosch
The Curlew's Cry--Mildred Walker
The Stone Brook Quartet--Alan Garner
The Dead of the House--Hannah Green
Peace--Gene Wolfe
The Fortunate Fall--Raphael Carter
Sweet Dreams--Michael Frayn
All the Little Live Things--Wallace Stegner
The Night Country--Loren Eiseley
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes--Angus Wilson
The Horrors of Love--Jean Dutourd
Happy Moscow--Andrey Platonov
Two Kinds of Time--Graham Peck
Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne--Francis Huddleston
Revolutionary Road--Richard Yates
Mine Enemy Grows Older--Alexander King
Wrinkles--Charles Simmons
Therese Desqueyroux--Drancois Mauriac
Into the Beautiful North--Urrea
Globalization and Its Discontents--Stiglitz
Money--Emile Zola
French Ecclesial History under the Ancien Regime--John McManners
The Last of the Angels--Fadhil al-Azzawi
Love, Anger, Madness--Marie Vieux-Chauvet
Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric--Mark Amory
Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life--Philip Jose Farmer
Soul of Wood, Landscape in Concrete--Jakov Lind
The Beijing Possibilities--Jonathan Tel
The Fourth Dimension--C Howard Hinton
Chronos, Locos--Felipe Alfau
Kangaroo--Yuz Aleshkovsky
Grabinoulor--Pierre Albert Bitot
The Good Soldier Svejk--Jaroslav Hasek
The Garden Party--Katherine Mansfield
Petersburg--Andrei Bely
Frozen in Time--John Geiger
World's End--T C Boyle
Women and Men--Joseph McElroy
Zeroville--Steve Erikson
The Beetle Leg--John Hawkes
What Does Mrs Freeman Want?--Petros Abatzoglou
Giant Killer--Elmer Davis
Everything Matters!--Ron Currie Jr
The Arctic and the Rockies as Seen by a Botanist--Chung
People of the Deer--Farley Mowat
Sun and Steel--Yukio Mishima
Wonderland--Joyce Carol Oates
Mr. Pye--Mervyn Peake
Nonsense--Alan Watts
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter--Feynman
Through a Glass, Darkly--Jostein Gaarder
Notable American Women--Ben Marcus
Altmann's Tongue--Brian Evenson
The Old Man and Me--Elaine Dundy
Deadly Winter--Martyn Beardsley
Ice Blink--Scoot Cookman
Arctic Grail--Pierce Berton
Fatal Passage--Ken McGoogan
A House for Mr. Biswas--V S Naipaul
Alone--Richard Byrd
The Ants--E O Wilson
The Last Great American Hobo--Maharige and Williamson
Brothers, To Live--Yu Hua
English--Wang Gang
Escape from China--Zhang Boli
Thirty Years in a Red House--Zhu Xiao Di
Confessions--Kang Zhengguo
Vermillion Gates--Aiping Mu
The Foundation Pit--Andrey Platonov
The Great Railway Bazaar--Paul Theroux
K2: Triumph and Tragedy--Jim Curran
The Endless Knot--Kurt Diemberger
No Shortcuts to the Top--Ed Viesturs
The Hungry Ocean--Linda Greenlaw
Isaac's Storm--Erik Larson
Tinkers--Paul Harding
The Spare Room--Helen Garner
The Nest--Don Beachy-Quick
Death Raft--Alex McKee
Machine--Adolphsen
Customer Service--Benoit Duteurtre
I'd Like--Amanda Michalopoulou
Children of Heroes--Lyonel Trouillot
Life: A User's Manual--Georges Perec
The Book of Chameleons--Jose Eduardo Agualusa
Five Spice Street--Can Xue
Girl Factory--Jim Krusoe
Drowned World, The Drought--J.G. Ballard
Wolf Hall--Hilary Mantel
Comicomics--Italo Calvino
All Aunt Hagar's Children--Edward P Jones
Goldberg: Variations--Gabriel Josipovici
Ghosts--Cesar Aira
Everything and More--David Foster Wallace
The Power of Flies--Lydie Salvayre
Saga/Circus--Lyn Hejinian
Sons and Other Flammable Objects--Porchista Khakpour
A Field Guide to Getting Lost--Rebecca Solnit
Devil Talk--Daniel Olivas
The Garden of Last Days--Andre Dubus III
Hold Tight--Harlan Coben
My Revolutions--Hari Kunzru
Serena--Ron Rash
Sharp Teeth--Toby Barlow
Unaccustomed Earth--Jhumpa Lahiri
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle--David Wroblewski
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing--M T Anderson
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County--Tiffany Baker
The Housekeeper and the Professor--Yoko Ogawa
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair--Pablo Neruda
Thousand Cranes--Yasanuri Kawabata
Fear and Trembling--Amelie Nothomb
X-Kai- Vol. 2--by Asami Tohjo
Fugitive Pieces--Ann Michaels
Life As We Knew It--Susan Beth Pfeffer
Nobody's Fool--Richard Russo
Posession, Babel Tower--A S Byatt
Reader's Block--David Markson
To the Wedding--John Berger
Two Girls, Fat and Thin--Mary Gaitskill
The Royal Family--William T Vollmann
Disgrace--J M Coetzee
The God of Small Things--Arundhati Roy
Underworld--Don DeLillo
Atonement--Ian McEwan
The Blind Assassin--Margaret Atwood
American Pastoral--Philip Roth
Austerlitz--W S Sebald
The Gold Bug Variations--Richard Powers
The Intuitionist--Colson Whitehead
Mating--Norman Rush
The Puttermesser Papers--Cynthia Ozick
The Tunnel--William Glass
White Teeth--Zadie Smith
Art and Lies--Jeanette Winterson
Burning Your Boats--Angela Carter
Caucasia--Danzy Senna
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline--George Saunders
The Corrections--Jonathan Franzen
The Elementary Particles--Michel Houellebecq
A Frolic of His Own--William Gaddis
The Hours--Michael Cunningham
Kitchen--Banana Yoshimoto
The People of Paper--Salvador Plascencia
Rex--Jose Manuel Prieto
boring boring boring boring boring boring boring--Zach Plague
Boxwood--Camilo Jose Cela
All one horse--Breyten Bretyenbach
The Easy Chain, The Lost Scrapbook--Even Dara
T Zero--Italo Calvino
Pierrot Mon Ami--Raymond Queneau
The Last Novel--David Markson
Partial List of People to Bleach--Gary Lutz
Kissed By--Alexandra Chasin
The Way Through the Doors--Jesse Bell
The Winner of Sorrow--Brian Lynch
The Great Weaver from Kashmir--Halldor Laxness
The Cutie, The Hunter--Donald Westlake
The Golden Ass--Apuleius
Invisible Cities--Italo Calvino
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You--Chris Durang
Frogs--Aristophanes
The Immoralist--Andre Gide
The Fair Haven--Samuel Butler
Sartor Resartus--Thomas Carlyle
Ye God!--Tom Holt
Prometheus Unbound--Percy Bysshe Shelley
Orpheus Descending--Tennessee Williams
Orpheus Rising--Colin Bateman
The King Must Die--Mary Renault
Orpheus Lost--Janette Turner Hospital
Poetry and Fear--Grace Andreacchi
What A Carve-Up!--Jonathan Coe
The Sea--John Banville
Alphabetical Africa--Walter Abish
Hopscotch--Julio Cortazar
Breakfast of Champions--Kurt Vonnegut
Old Woman--Daniil Kharms
The Plague--Albert Camus
The American Dream--Edward Albee
London Fields--Martin Amis
The Swimming-Pool Library--Alan Hollinghurst
The Siege of Krishnapur--J. G. Farrell
The Leopard--Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The Last of the Wine--Mary Renault
Disturbance--Jamie O'Neill
The Universe Next Door--Robert Anton Wilson
The Ginger Man--James Patrick Donleavy
No Laughing Matter, Poems--Anthony Cronin
Three Glimpses of Life--Patrick Kavanagh
Borstal Bay, The Quare Fellow--Brendan Behan
Athnuachan, Barbed Wire--Martin OCadhain
Return of the Hero--Darrell Figgis
Journey to the End of the Night--Louis Ferdinand Celine
Still Life with Woodpeckers--Tom Robbins
Trout Fishing in America, Abortion--Richard Brautigan
Post Office, Ham on Rye--Charles Bukowski
The Book of Fuck--Ben Myers
Vagabond Song--Bliss Carman
J R--William Gaddis
Ask the Dust--Jon Fante
Sailor Song, Sometimes a Great Notion--Ken Kesey
Theology and Social Theory--Milbank
After Virtue--Alasdair MacIntyre
Principles For a Catholic Morality--Timothy O'Connell
The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity--Richard Hooker
Disseration on Virtue--Joseph Butler
Christianizing the Social Order--Walter Rauschenbusch
The Methods of Ethics--Henry Sidgwick
Ethics and Language--C L Stevenson
The Language of Morals--R M Hare
Proportionalism--Bernard Hoose
Anarchy, State and Utopia--Robert Norzick
De Amicitia--Cicero
Chronicles of Barsetshire--Anthony Trollope
Natural Law and Natural Rights--John Finnis
Way of the Lord Jesus--Germain Grisez
Pictures from Brueghel--William Carlos Williams
Smilia's Sense of Snow--Peter Hoeg
The Book of Sand and Fog--Andre Dubus III
The Book of Salt--Monique Truong
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love--Oscar Hijuelos
Sula--Toni Morrison
Native Speaker--Chang Rae-Lee
Obasan--Joy Kogawa
The Known World--Edward P Jones
One Man Army--Moacyr Scliar
Great Work of Time--John Crowley
Regeneration--Pat Barker
True History of the Kelly Gang--Peter Carey
Famous Last Words--Timothy Findley
We--Yevgeny Zamyatin
"Politics and the Use of Language"--Orwell
The Plot Against America--Philip Roth
A Theory of Everything--Ken Wilbur
The Dancing Wu Li Masters--Gary Zukav
The Tao of Phsyics--Fritjof Capra
Fear of Flying--Erica Jong
The Beetle Leg--John Hawkes
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions--John Donne
Foundations of the Christian Faith--Karl Rahner
The Phenomenon of Man--Teilhard de Chardin
Spring in Fialta--Nabokov
What I Believe--Tolstoy
A Distant Episode--Paul Bowles
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities--Delmore Schwartz
Hopkins the Jesuit--Alfred Thomas
A Tremor of Bliss--Paul Elie
On Moral Fiction--John Gardner
The Call of Stories--Robert Coles
French Lieutenant's Woman--John Fowles
Eleven Addresses to the Lord--John Berryman
Religion and Literature--John Updike
Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic--Alice McDermott
An American Requiem--James Carroll
The Art of Fiction--John Gardner
Story of a Soul--St Therese de Lisieux
Motorcycle Diaries--Che Guevara
On the Road--Jack Kerouac
Notes and Counter Notes--Eugene Ionesco
The Mysteries of Paris--Eugene Sue
Bless Me, Ultima--Rudolfo Anaya
Daniel Deronda--George Eliot
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Dispatches--Michael Herr
Godel's Theorem: Guide to is Use and Abuse-- Torkel Franzen
A Short Account of the History of Mathematics--W W Ball
Dance to the Music of Time--Anthony Powell
The Sound and the Fury--Faulkner
Arcadia--Tom Stoppard
Doctor Faustus--Christopher Marlowe
Mephisto--Klaus Mann
Fair-Faced, The Home and the World--Rabindranath Tagore
From A Logical Point of View--William Van Orman Quine
The White Book--Jean Cocteau
Logical Dilemmas--John Dawson
The Monadology--Gottfried Leibniz
Barbara or Piety--Franz Weifel
The Man Without Qualities--Robert Musil
Collected Works--Kurt Godel
The Emperor's New Mind--Roger Penrose
From Mathematics to Philosophy--Hao Wang
Godel's Theorem in Focus--Stuart Shanker
On Godel--Jaakko Hintikka
A Piece of my Heart, The Sportswriter--Richard Ford
The Moviegoer--Walker Percy
Light Years--James Salter
G.--John Berger
Antarctica--Claire Keegan
How to Breathe Underwater--Julie Orringer
Sam the Cat and Other Stories--Matthew Klam
The Word--Kaj Munk
Jesus: Revolutionary Biography--John D. Crossan
Presence of the Kingdom, Ethics of Freedom--Jacques Ellul
A Time to Break the Silence--Martin Luther King Jr.
The Politics of Jesus--John Howard Yoder
Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger--Ronald Sider
Schools for Conversion--Ed. Rutba House
The Early Christians in their Own Words--Arnold Eberhard
Philosophumena--Hippolytus
The Revolt of the Angels--Anotole France
Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity--Gerd Theissen
The Long Loneliness--Dorothy Day
The World as I Remember It--Rich Mullins
Works of Love, Christian Discourses--Kierkegaard
The House of El--Howard Norman
Four Quartets--T S Eliot
The Perennial Philosophy--Aldous Huxley
The Diary of a Country Priest--Georges Bernanos
The Idiot--Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Fall of the House of Usher--Edgar Allen Poe
Computing Machinery and Intelligence--Alan Turing
Apologia--Newman
Vie de Jesus--Renan
The Bach Reader--David and Mendel
Godel's Proof--James Newman
A Profile of Mathematical Logic--Howard Delong
Poems--John Donne
The Epistle to the Romans--Karl Barth
The Essence of Christianity--Ludwig Feuerbach
Zen and the Art of Archery--Eugen Herrigel
The Golden Notebook--Doris Lessing
A Worn Path--Eudora Welty
A Clean Well Lighted Place--Ernest Hemingway
The Cantos--Ezra Pound
Moses and Monotheism--Sigmund Freud
The Stripping of the Altar--Roman Duffey
City of God--St Augustine
The Complaint of Nature--Alain de Lille
The Devil is an Ass--Ben Jonson
De Miseria--Pope Innocent
Confessio Amantis--John Gower
The Heroides--Ovid
Thebiad--Stacius
Number9Dream--David Mitchell
The Public Burning--Robert Coover
Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife--William H. Glass
Pale Fire--Vladimir Nabokov
The Sot-Weed Factor--John Barth
Gemeinschaft--F Toennies
1754 Essays: Moral, Political, Religious--David Hume
A Secular Age--Charles Taylor
Capitalism and Freedom--Milton Freidman
Middlemarch--George Elliot
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship--Goethe
Emil--J J Rousseau
The World as Will and Representation--Schopenhauer
Notes from the Underground--Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tom Jones--Henry Fielding
No Country for Old Men--Cormac McCarthy
Abelard's Ethics--Peter Abelard
On Contempt for the World--Bernard of Morlaix
On the Song of Songs--Bernard of Clairvaux
The Seasons--James Thompson
The Rise of the Novel--John Watt
Defense of Poetry--Percy Shelley
Death of a Naturalist--Seamus Heaney
What Does it Mean To Orient Oneself Thinking?--Kant
In Memory of Things Past--Marcel Proust
The Stone of Venice--John Ruskin
Linguistics and Poetics--Roman Jakobson
Biography of Burke--Connor Cruise O'Brain
The Tractatus--Ludwig Wittgenstein
Liturgy, Socialism and Life: Conrad Noel--Mark Chapman
Left to Tell--Immaculee Ilebagiza
Reflections on the Revolution in France--Edmund Burke
The Human Condition--Hanah Arendt
Discourse on the Poor--Joseph Townsend
An Essay on the Principle of Population--Robert Malthus
Annals of Agriculture--Jeremy Bentham
The Constitution of Poverty--Mitchell Dean
Autobiography--John Claire
Reveries of a Solitary Walk--J J Rousseau
The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy--Etienne Gilson
Ends and Means--Huxley
My Quest for the Yeti--Reinhold Messner
Where Bigfoot Walks--Pyle
On the Track of Unknown Animals--Bernard Heuvelmans
Seeker--Jack McDevitt
The Speed of Dark--Elizabeth Moon
The Quantum Rose--Catherine Asaro
Parable of the Talents--Octavia E Butler
Slow River--Nicola Griffith
The Terminal Experiment--Robert J Sawyer
Darwin's Radio--Greg Bear
Red Mars--Kim Stanly Robinson
Doomsday Book--Connie Willis
Stations of the Tide--Michael Swanwick
The Healer's War--Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
The Falling Woman--Pat Murphy
Falling Free--Lois McMaster Bujold
Neuromancer--William Gibson
Startide Rising--David Brin
No Enemy But Time--Michael Bishop
The Claw of the Conciliator--Gene Wolfe
Timescape--Gregory Benford
The Fountains of Paradise--Arthur C Clarke
Dreamsnake--Vonda McIntyre
Man Plus--Frederik Pohl
The Forever War--Joe Haldeman
The Gods Themselves--Isaac Asimov
A Time of Changes--Robert Silverberg
Ringworld--Larry Niven
The Left Hand of Darkness--Ursula K Le Guin
Rite of Passage--Alexei Panshin
The Einstein Intersection--Samuel R Delaney
Theism and Humanism--Arthur James Balfour
Descent Into Hell--Charles Williams
The Life of Samuel Johnson--James Boswell
The Idea of the Holy--Rudolf Otto
The Prelude--William Wordsworth
The Temple--George Herbert
Le Jardin de L'Infante--Albert Samain
Autobiography--Teresa of Avila
The Biographical History of Philosophy--George H Lewes
An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding--David Hume
Hyme to Proserpine--Algernon Charles Swinburne
The Scaffold--Auguste Villiers de L'Isle Adam
Confessions--Paul Verlaine
Eugenie Grandet, Cromwell--Honore de Balzac
L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune--Stephane Mallarme
Biography of Watts--W Loftus Hare
Culture and Anarchy--Matthew Arnold
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel--George Meredith
Marius the Epicurean, Imaginary Portraits--Walter Pater
Scenes de la vie de Boheme--Henry Murger
The Ideas of the Fall and Original Sin--N P Williams
Centuries of Meditation--Traherne
Scale of Perfection--Walter Hilton
Fermat's Enigma--Simon Singh
Real Mathematical Analysis--Charles Chapman Pugh
Mathematics: The Man-Made Universe--H M Schey
On the Game of Chess--Cecellous
The Box from Japan--Harry Stephen Keeler
The Anatomy of Melancholy--Robert Burton
One of the Guys--Robert Clark Young
The Falling Man--Don DeLillo
The Irresponsible Self--James Wood
White Teeth--Zadie Smith
The Kolyma Tales--Varlam Shalamov
And Quiet Flows the Don--Michail Sholokhov
Deep Survival--Lawrence Gonzales
Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone--Immanuel Kant
Soldiers Three--Rudyard Kipling
How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude--Bob Baer
The Strayed Reveller--Matthew Arnold
Travels with a Donkey--Robert Louis Stevenson
Vanity Fair--William M Thackeray
Die Revolution--Wagner
On Freedom of the Human Will--Schopenhauer
Philosophy of Right--Hegel
The Aesthetic Education of Man--Schiller
The Sorrows of Young Werther--Goethe
Decline of the West--Oswald Spengler
DaDa--Tristan Tzara
Mankind in the Making--H G Wells
Candide--Voltaire
The Future of Freedom--Fareed Zacardia
It Takes a Family--Rick Santorum
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit--Sloan Wilson
Red Star Over China--Edgar Snow
Imitation of Christ--Thomas a Kempis
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy--Laurence Sterne
Naked Lunch--William Burroughs
On the Nature of the Universe--Lucretius
State of Fear--Michael Crichton
Eco-Imperialism--Paul Driessen
Joshua and the Shepherd--Joseph Girzone
Atlas Shrugged, Fountainhead--Ayn Rand
In the Grip of Grace--Max Lucado
The Jesus I Never Knew--Philip Yancee
Summits and Secrets--Kurt Diemberger
The Epic of Mt Everest--Francis Younghusband
Manipulations--Harold Broadkey
Alone to Everest--Earl Denman
Everest--Walt Unsworth
The West Ridge--Tom Hornbein
The History of the Devil--Daniel Defoe
Sophie's Choice--William Styron
Divination--Cicero
The Protestant Ethic and Capitalism--Max Weber
Jesus in Beijing--David Akin
One Man's Bible--Gao Xingjian
Wild Swans--Jung Chang
Gorgias--Plato
Veronica Decides to Die--Paollo Coelho
World's End--T C Boyle
Degeneration--Max Nordau
The Rubaiyat--Omar Khayyam
Arthur: A Pilgrim--Arthur Blessitt
The Sixteenth Round--Rubin Carter
Autobiography--Lincoln Steffens
Jurgen--James Branch Cabell
Taras Bulba--Gogal
Kristin Lavransdatter--Sigrid Undset
The Magic Mountain--Thomas Mann
Novum Organum--Francis Bacon
Scrambles Amongst the Alps--Edward Whymper
Doctor Zhivago--Boris Pasternak
The Hungry Summer--John M Campbell
A Pedestrious Tour of Four Thousand Miles--Estwick Evans
The Cruise of the Corwin--John Muir
Breaking Point--Glenn Randall
Up the Black Chalkyitsik--Edward Hoagland
A Conquest of Tibet--Sven Hedin
Strange and Dangerous Dreams--Geoff Powter
Addicted to Danger--Jack Wickwire
Untimely Thoughts--Gorky
Mad White Giant--Benedict Allen
Lord Byron's Jackal--David Crane
Trelawny, A Man's Life--Margaret Armstrong
The Adventures of a Younger Son--Edward Trelawny
Native American in the Land of the Shogun--Frederik Schodt
Seven Pillars of Widsom--T E Lawrence
The White Spider--Heinrich Harrer
Battles with Giant Fish--F A Michtell-Hedges
A Prayer for Owen Meany--John Irving
His Dark Materials--Philip Pullman
The Day of the Locust--Nathanael West
The House of Mirth--Edith Wharton
Portnoy's Complaint--Philip Roth
USA--John Dos Passos
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter--Carson McCullers
The Way of All Flesh--Samuel Butler
Under the Volcano--Malcom Lowry
A Testament of Beauty--Bridges
Autobiography--George Muller
The Spirit of Christ--Andrew Murray
Earth's Earliest Ages--G H Pember
The Unbearable Lightness of Being--Milan Kundera
Everything Is Illuminated--Johnathan Safran Foer
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Achievement--Eggers
Man's Fate--Andre Malraux
The Egoist--George Meredith
The Good Earth--Pearl Buck
Piers Plowman--William Langland
The Monk--Matthew Lewis
Symposium--Plato
Three Years of Arctic Service--A W Greeley
New Lands within the Arctic Circle--Julius von Payer
A Thousand Days in the Arctic--Frederick Jackson
Narrative of the North Polar Expedition Ship Polaris--Hall
Memoirs--Hans Hendrick, trans. Dr. Rink
The Victories of Love--Coventry Patmore
Confessions--J J Rousseau
The Ice of the Siberian Sea--Aleksandr Kolchak
The Voyage of Captain Thomas James--R B Bodilly
Ulysses--Tennyson
Scott's Last Journey--Robert Falcon Scott
The Paper Chase--John Osborne Jr.
No Man's Land--Sir Martin Conway
In Northern Mists--Fridtjof Nansen
Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love--Lady Julian of Norwich
The Way to Christ--Jakob Boehme
The Alchemist, Volpone--Ben Jonson
Pensees--Blaise Pascal
Introduction to the Devout Life--Francis de Sales
The Faerie Queene--Edmund Spenser
The Humanity of God--Karl Barth
Foundations of Christian Faith--Karl Rahner
The Mind of the Maker--Dorothy Sayers
Pious and Secular America--Reinhold Niebuhr
Christ and Culture--Helmut Niebuhr
Message to Men of Thought and Science--M Maritain
A Vindication of Natural Society--Edmund Burke
Saul, Le Visions--Alphonse de Lamartine
A Dialog Between Self and Soul--W B Yeates
Pilgrim's Progess--John Bunyan
Laws of Ecclesiastes--Thomas Hooker
Summa Theologiae--Thomas Aquinas
The Third Day--Arnold Lunn
On the Freedom of a Christian--Luther
The Life of Milton--A N Wilson
Flatland--Abbott
Voyage of Arcturus--David Lindsey
A Case of Conscience--James Blish
Institutes of the Christian Religion--John Calvin
Orthodoxy--G. K. Chesterton
Leviathan--Thomas Hobbes
De Incarnatione--Athanasius
Ender's Game, Speaking For the Dead--Orson Scott Card
The Eternal City--Hall Caine
The Well Educated Mind--Susan Wise Bauer