Ex Libris

‘“You read something which you thought only happened to you,” James Baldwin once said, “and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. That is why art is important.”‘

After a lifetime of reading, Michiko Kakutani has come up with her list of 100 books to read and reread. She excluded a lot of classics, she tells us; there are lots of great classics lists out there. Instead, she tried to focus on recent books, the novels, stories, and memoirs by contemporary authors that help illuminate many of our present troubles.

I don't agree with all of her choices—I'm not a fan of Educated or Americanah, for example, and Housekeeping is the weakest Marilynne Robinson, I think—but she includes wonderful commentary in addition to her list that explains her choices and that is important, too.

What did I add to my list of books to read? Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark. The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov.