Isham Cook
Novelistic masterpiece about two families which unfolds in delicate layers down to the ugly core.
I find Harris' books generally compelling, but this got tangled up for me in redundancies and logical excesses, slim though the volume is.
Surely one of the most bizarre books ever written, one that the author himself probably didn't understand (also the inspiration for the biopic starring Jim Carrey which never got made). Love the Esquire blurb: “It would be hard to find a drug narrative more compellingly perched on a baroquely romantic limb than this passionate Tom-and-Huck-ride-Great-Mother-river-saga of brother bonding.”
This was one of the first metaphorical bombs in the form of a book that blew up in my face (in my junior year of college); the other was the Marquis de Sade's Justine.
Memoir of the author's China stay in the mid-80s when foreigners were few and far between and not very welcome.
One of the greatest novels ever written; actually 3 shortish novels but which must be read together. As I write (in https://ishamcook.com/2012/06/16/multiply-cascade-explode/), Beckett “withdrew increasing amounts of ambulatory capacity from his characters until they are reduced to crawling in circles in a forest or floundering in a ditch in the mud, others stuck in urns or rubbish bins or buried up to the neck in sand. Space is reduced almost to zero and there is nothing left but time and the voice.”
Illuminating history of drug policies and Nationalist fascism in China in the early decades of the 20th century.
One of the greatest novels ever written in any language, but the complex, shifting-viewpoint narrative needs patience.
A most incisive study of North Korea, the contemporary world's great tragedy of an entire nation confined to a concentration camp. Things have marginally improved under Kim Jong Un, largely due to the regime's new method of generating income through organized hacking of global businesses, but the country remains a basket case. I myself visited North Korea in 1995. At the time, the extent of the 1990's famine was unknown to the rest of the world. Indeed, most North Koreans had no idea of the famine's extent, who could be disappeared for the slightest public complaint of lack of food; most were so brainwashed by the regime they were in utter denial they were starving until they literally dropped dead. A stark, shocking read.
Whether or not you agree with her, Dworkin stands in a respectable line of American iconoclasts and troublemakers, essential for a democratic society.
Illuminating account of Nazi Germany told from the perspectives of the Germans living through it.
Truly unique account of matching various psychedelic drugs to particular museum and concert experiences.
Eyewitness account of Tiananmen Square 1989; a kind of memoir, but the author generally prefers fading into the woodwork to focus on the lives of former classmates, a la Peter Hessler.
I've now read all the plays (many multiple times) except for King John and Henry VI (1-3) & VIII, which I'll get around to at some point. My views on Shakespeare (garnered after years of teaching him as well) are summed up in my concise essay “A Shakespeare sex-and-violence starter kit” (https://ishamcook.com/2012/01/29/shakespeare-sex-and-violence-starter-kit/). I had David Bevington, the editor, as my teacher in several courses at the University of Chicago back in the '80s. Now, for sheer ability to create worlds through speech and dialogue alone (the Elizabethan stage largely lacked props and scenery), Shakespeare is the gold standard for all fiction and drama writers. I say this as a skeptic of the timeworn piety that “Shakespeare” the writer and Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon were the same person. Who really wrote Shakespeare's plays is the greatest literary mystery of all time. No, it's neither Edward de Vere nor any of the other long trotted-out usual suspects. We just don't know (a good place to start is Diana Price's “Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography”).