Isham Cook
Rumi is one of the few classic past authors I would love to have had the opportunity to have dinner with in person.
With its rabbit-hole portal into a dark surrealist labyrinth of the mind in the form of the Magic Theater, Hesse's novel attains an enigmatic mysteriousness that makes it perennially elusive and re-readable.
About the only thing memorable in this dour protofascist utopia is the sensible measure to allow prenuptial couples to view each other in the nude before committing themselves.
I give this world classic only 4 stars to set the proper expectations, not because it's unworthy of the highest praise, but because it's really only a poorly edited collection of fragments attributed to the author, assembled without much rhyme or reason. Yet the wisdom shines out.
Montaigne was largely responsible for inventing and developing the essay, a misunderstood literary genre often confused with the (journalistic or academic) article. The essay's prerogative is the freedom to range freely over topics in order to draw original and unseen connections.
It's been a while since I first read this forerunner of Brave New World and I hope to return to it; images of apartment buildings with transparent walls and floors shielding no one from privacy.
One of the great invented-language novels, with the perfect balance struck between readability and unreadability.
A grad-school text, my first semi-coherent introduction to poststructuralism, and I remember getting a lot out of it but no longer retain much about this particular account.
Read this decades ago but can still remember the vividness and telling detail, such as the revolutionary invention of the crossbow.
The standard introductory Barthes text, where he teaches the reader how to read life semiotically - the subtext underlying everything: what everything represents.
Read this decades ago when it first came out; will have to read it again to see how well its aged.
Much as I respect Harris's dogged pursuit of scientific logic and truth, he is noted and notorious for boxing himself into ethical corners.
A momentous text, basic thesis: the Orient is largely just a delusion, a distorting mirror in which the Occident sees and reassures itself in relation to its fearful “Other.”
Tough-going for initiates, but a good place to begin to understand avant-garde French philosophy; Zizek's introductions to Lacan help clear away some of the mist.
The most eloquently written text by the so-called “New Atheists,” as it abounds in irony, sarcasm, humor, and style.
Like all of Kafka's works (I happen to prefer his novels), this novella dramatizes social malaise and psychological oppression in vivid dreamlike fashion.
Eagleton is primarily famous for explaining difficult concepts such as ideology in a straightforward way.
As with the Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music for the classical world, this was the go-to reference for rock until the Internet opened things up.
Still remains a classic, though Stargardt's The German War provides a needed update, from a more German perspective.
Didn't understand much of this when I read it in grad school decades ago, but it was clear Foucault was dealing with meta-concepts, pretty heavy stuff that made traditional philosophy seem just a bunch of cliches.
One of Foucault's more approachable texts, how society is a macrocosm based on the microcosm of the prison or panopticon, the 360-degree observation of prisoners in their cells.
The scope of the novel is too big for the 200+ pages to contain (see the Amazon TV series for an excellent fleshing out), but the imaginative feat of a Nazi and Japanese-occupied USA is compelling reading.
Auerbach was stranded somewhere in wartime when he wrote this erudite classic and apparently had no access to any books or sources; just what he had retained in his head.