Image courtesy of Theen Moy on Flickr.
2,475 words
If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company. — Lord Byron
There’s more to life than books, you know,
But not much more.
— Morrissey
Writing has a lot in common with sex and driving in that those who take part in these activities believe themselves to be very good at them. Road traffic casualties and disappointed lovers could produce contrary arguments, but it takes a little more intellectual engagement to detect both bad writing and good. And to whom does that task fall? Why, gentle reader, to you and me, to the reader, the vital other without whom there is no writing, or even its possibility. So, it’s the reader’s turn. We already read all the “Why I write” stuff. Now it’s time for “Why I read.”
Why should writers hog the limelight? We know all about writers, all the angst and the alcoholism, the writer’s block and the desperate and desolate blank page. But writing and reading are properly dialectical, each implying the other, symbiotic and mutually supportive. Without reading, there can be no writing. Without reading, writing would be Bishop Berkeley’s tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it fall. Even a writer who writes purely for his own pleasure becomes a reader to himself. Readers deserve to be more than just a footnote in a treatise on writing.
Reading books is also becoming a small act of rebellion, a thumb of the nose at the forced cultural degradation of the West. Put simply, you should read because there are people in global positions of power who don’t want you to. Books are an antidote to the state-endorsed sleaze we are being drip-fed, and the doctor doesn’t want you to have the medicine. So read now, while you can, before the temperature reaches Fahrenheit 451.
Personal reading, the literary tracks in the snow we all leave, is also an adventure story in which not the writers but the books themselves are the main characters. Think of your own reading history, the first books, the first by those who became your favorite writers, the places where you have read books and reread them, the books you gained and the books you lost, the books you wouldn’t give up even for a worthwhile culture, never mind the foul-smelling swamp being churned out of the fresh soil of white achievement. I don’t include whiteness as a tag to keep me in with the dissident in-crowd, but because books, their whole being and purpose, is a core white project, one of which non-whiteness is no longer capable, its great civilizations being only just visible in the distant past. Whatever drove you to books, why they became a part of your life, is a large part of who you are.
I wasn’t a bookish kid. The earliest scuffle I remember with serious literature was an attempt to read Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and never getting past page 10. I finally read it a few years ago and thought maybe the boy was right. I also had a real flirtation with “The Lady of Shallott,” Tennyson’s dark poem of courtly love and possession. But reading only started when I was 12 or 13, when I discovered science fiction and stayed with it, pretty much uninterrupted, until I was 16.
So it was that I kept the company of Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Moorcock, Heinlein, Vonnegut, and many more up until I started sixth-form college. I read Lord of the Rings when I was 14 — an appropriate age, I feel — and would race home from school to read my 50 pages before bed. Then, in my first A-level English Literature class, I pocketed my copy of Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker in favor of a book lent to me by another student: Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Serious literature opened up to me, like an Eleusinian Mystery. I went to university to read Philosophy with Literature and ended up cheating on literature and walking out arm-in-arm with the Lady Philosophy. The first time I saw the philosophy section in the university library, I wished the books I needed would announce themselves to me, make themselves known. But it doesn’t work like that; you have to go looking. Then, when you do, the old phrase of the alchemists will come into play; one book opens another.
I won’t bore you any longer with the life and times of a compulsive book-reader, but I just wanted to illustrate that we all have our story of how we found books, or how they found us. And they do find us. Recently, in a bar which has a few battered old books on its shelves, I found an original Penguin copy of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. I had to sellotape the covers back on, but I read its sepia-edged pages with all the more enjoyment. Two of my favorite modern novels, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, came from the same charity shop on different visits. I had heard of neither author prior to my visits. I talked music and books with a fellow boater on the deck of my canal boat one evening, and lent the guy my copy of Nowhere to Run, Gerri Hirshey’s brilliant history of soul music. When I woke next morning, the other boater had gone. With my copy of Nowhere to Run. I was slightly miffed until I saw, on my deck but covered against the rain always possible in England even on the finest day, a copy of one of George McDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, which I had bemoaned the night before never having read. I’ve all 12 now. Some books do find you; they do call out and make themselves known, the way Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea made itself known to the 21-year-old Nietzsche in a secondhand bookshop in Leipzig.
A book walked into my life this last week. I have just moved house and, after a long day, I felt like reading a book — a real book. Much as I venerate the existence of e-books, and the fact that the complete works of Plato, Shakespeare, Zola, and Conrad are all on my phone and cost me a combined total of around the price of half a pint of beer in London, I do require the reality of a physical book from time to time. The problem is I only have about 30 books, having left over a thousand in England when I jumped ship, and as a result I have read all of them at least twice. Books are not ideally suited to the nomadic life, and were a huge headache for Byron as his entourage trundled across Europe. Nietzsche often cursed the impracticability of his own trunk of the books he felt he couldn’t travel without.
You can buy Mark Gullick’s novel Cherub Valley here.
My landlord invited me to look at his shelves, and I selected an old volume more or less at random. It is The Life and Death of a Spanish Town by Elliot Paul, and it was published in 1937.
“Oh, that,” he said. “It’s about Ibiza.”
Now, the Spanish island of Ibiza is a familiar name to most Brits, but for unsavory reasons. For the past few decades, it has been the favored destination of the most depraved, degraded, and debauched young Britons those islands can muster. They go there to drink, drug, and copulate themselves into the void, and all set to a nihilistic musical soundtrack. They will not have packed much in the way of holiday reading and are unlikely to have an interest in Spanish history. But Life and Death was published two years before the Second World War, and so was unlikely to include a guide to finding safe Ecstasy pills.
My landlord’s mother had lived much of her life on Ibiza, and he had himself lived on the island for a time. The book is a history of Santa Eulalia, a town on the island, from the point of view of its people as they approached the Spanish Civil War. This is not a review of the book, as I am halfway through its 400-odd pages, and it is one to savor. But the opening paragraph is worth quoting in full as it is as good a come-on for a book as I have read, plus its first sentence is masterful. I read it, and felt secure in the knowledge that I would both read and enjoy what was to come:
There is so much revolution and class war going on in all parts of the world that I believe it will be of interest to American readers to know how fascist conquest, communist and anarchist invasion, and the bloodiest war yet on record affect a peaceful town. By a town, I mean its people. I knew all of them, their means and aspirations, their politics and philosophy, their ways of life, their ties of blood, their friendships, their deep-seated hatreds and inconsequential animosities. Because Santa Eulalia is on an island, the inhabitants were unable to scatter and flee, and therefore I was able better to observe them and to know what happened to them as I shared their experience.
And that is the ground note for reading, a book which asks you to read it. Not an author with cover blurbs from her mates all over her latest piece of sensitivity reader-sanitized fodder, and her slot on morning telly sorted by an agent, but a first paragraph that guarantees I will finish the book and like it. There are only two authors two or more of whose books I have started but never finished any of them. For my part, you may consign to the flames the works of Stephen King and Norman Mailer. The only book whose last page I read before turning back immediately to page one to start reading it again is Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The Life and Death of a Spanish Town is also historical, and what there is of my historical knowledge comes as much from fiction as fact. In the book’s first half, the town and its people are laid out minutely, the coming war scarcely mentioned. Franco’s war against the Republicans is just disturbingly and uncomfortably present in the book, like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Mr. Paul has some gemlike phrases. “Patience,” he writes, “makes women beautiful in old age.” And the author’s opinion on the impractical Spanish temperament made me smile, as it is applicable across the Latino world:
As a matter of fact, Ramon was the best mechanic on the island, which is not saying much. Mechanical work is not a Latin gift . . .
After adjusting to the languid but detailed prose style, I realized that although the coming conflict is only occasionally alluded to in the first half, it is foreshadowed in the slightly sinister constructions and phrases present even in the most mundane of scenes:
Very often the postmaster’s cross old wife, sitting with her back to the road and the passers-by, spins wool from local sheep into yarn with a rattling ancient spinning wheel and later knits white socks of the highest grade for her defective menfolks [sic] to wear.
Another aspect of reading, should you so wish, is that each book turns into its own mystery story (even if it is a mystery story). I am now into the second half, and war and the rumors of war have begun in earnest. It will be an education, given that the entirety of my knowledge of the Spanish Civil War comes from Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. The best books are the ones you think about as soon as you wake, eager to get back into the fray and move on to the next. I read two books a week, around 100 a year. I’m 63. Let’s say I make 75. 1,200 books left. That thought worries me far more than nuclear war or cancer.
Where you read is as important as the choice of club to a golfer. It has to be just right, and I have yet to settle in my new apartment. An old friend of mine once showed me his room, dominated as it was by a vast and good-quality wicker chair. “That,” he said wistfully, “is where I read everything.” I understood immediately, as I, too, had my reading chair where I read the world, or as much of it as I could.
One reason I miss English pubs is that I can’t read in them anymore. I am so convinced of my headstone epigraph, I even had Google Translate Latinize it for me: Sextuarius in una manu et liber in altera. “A pint in one hand and a book in the other.” “Pint” is translated as sextuarius, and when you translate it back, you get “liter.” On perusing Wikipedia — how much more do we read since the Internet? — I discover that a sextuarius was equivalent to around 95% of a good old British pint, so I believe the construction stands. Anyway, a decent boozer with a decent book was Elysian Fields to me. A red-letter day was a visit to a town close to my hometown which had, at one time, five different charity shops — or “thrift stores” in American — in its high street. All of them sold books, and I would sit in The Foxley Hatch (now refurbished and spoiled, I’m told, but at least still open) and go through my piratical haul. A pub and a book allow you to be both bibulous and biblious.
Of course, there is no need to be obsessive about reading. Reading and writing form the greater part of my waking life, but I appreciate that folk do have other things to do and can’t lounge about turning pages and stroking their chins all day. That is not supposed to indicate the ease that comes with comfortable wealth, incidentally. I live well under the poverty line as defined by the World Health Organization — way under it. But reading is a poor man’s occupation. It is also an expression of your personal liberty in an age where powerful people wish to curtail your freedoms. “Libraries,” as Manic Street Preachers observed, “make us free.”
So, and without being avuncular, if reading is not a part of your life, then make it so, and if it already is, make it more so. Reading provides solace in an increasingly chaotic, disjointed, and unlikable world; a separate peace, a world apart. And unlike that world, books will never let you down, they will be your best friends forever, just like the kid at your infant school said he would be that time in the playground. But the kid lied; little children are always lying. Books, even if what they contain is not true, never lie.
30 comments
That was inspiring! Question: list top five favorite books. Open to anyone who wishes to respond. Mine: LOTR, Worm Ouroboros, Slan, Dying Earth by Vance, Hobbit.
My top 5:
Crime and Punishment
Lord of the Rings
Death of Ivan Ilyich
Steppenwolf
Iliad
Steppenwolf
Is it a book about ancient Türks, something like Bozkurtlar dilogy by Nihal Atsiz?
No. It’s about a man going through an existential crisis brought on by his bourgeois life.
Ha, but such interesting Türkic title. :))
Hard to pick but here are some of my favorite fictions:
Poetic Edda (Anonymous)
The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Pet Sematary by Stephen King
I never got into the surprisingly Russian early/mid canon of literary fiction, such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gorky. I suppose my inner philistine found it a tad overrated. Instead, I’ve always found the most profound commentary on the human condition to scribed in genre fiction.
Agree—overblown. I tried Roadside picnic based on its movie Stalker, but found it unreadable
Five is very small a number indeed ; even ten would lead to an unfair selection. There are more than five summits in the mountainous skyline of my favorite books ; I would rather name five authors :
Nietzsche, Koestler, Heinlein, Balzac and Dumas père.
Or Debord, Chamfort, Leiber Jr., Merritt and Bardèche.
Or C.S. Lewis, H.P.L., Baudouin de Bodinat, Buchan and Homer.
Or Fruttero & Lucentini (they count for one), Boutang, Raspail, Tocqueville and Papini.
Or Schopenhauer, Spengler, Joly, Nicolas Gomez Davila and Jünger.
Or Fraigneau, Spooner, Caraco, Leopardi and Anatole France.
Or… no, really, too many great minds to mention.
As for books, well, these are among my favorite ones, while again, five is really too limited in scope :
— Maximes et pensées, produits de la civilisation perfectionnée (Chamfort)
— L’évangile du rien (Gripari)
— Le dernier pape (Veraldi & Paternot)
— The circus of Dr Lao (Finney)
— The Worm Ouroboros (Eddison)
Or…
— Traité de la servitude volontaire (La Boétie)
— Un homme fini (Papini)
— Le mauvais choix (Jean-Louis Curtis)
— Le camp des saints (Raspail)
— The sleepwalkers (Koestler)
Or…
— Le Questionnaire (von Salomon)
— Latin for all occasions (Henry Beard)
— Atlas Shrugged (Rand)
— Wasp (Eric Frank Russell)
— Eumeswil (Jünger)
Or… I’d better stop here, I’ve cheated enough with the Rule of Five. 😉
Circus of Dr Lao, that’s an interesting but weak choice in terms of quality. But it has some interesting points. To probe why you like it, what does the scene with the bear in the cage represent?
You like Koestler? Interesting! Thanks for your long reply!
What I wanted you to talk about is that there is a parade at the beginning, which basically allegorizes all the happenings in the world. A satyr drawing a bear man in a cage goes by. A bystander remarks that the satyr “looks Jewish.” A satyr has horns and hoofs, similar to a devil, right? Basically it says, the satanic Jewish Bolsheviks hold the Russian bear in bondage. I’m only explicating it to point out the racist depravity of our ancestors. I myself would never think anything like that.
Good conversation starter! Very hard to give an answer; there’s so much! I tend to think in terms of authors and their entire oeuvres, rather than single volumes. I also tend to show bias for what I’ve read in the past few years, which, alas, isn’t all that much in terms of books. I do the best I can in that regard, but until I can fully retire (after which point I will mostly devote myself to reading and writing, though I also want to try to do some small-scale activism for our people, and have some ideas in that regard – but this only after I’ve escaped to my preferred Red State), most of my reading (and thus my “favorite” stuff, I guess) has consisted of shorter non-fiction essays and articles in these venues (order of preference):
Print publications:
First Things, Chronicles, The Occidental Quarterly, The Wall Street Journal (this is more of a daily habit/addiction than a source I particularly like), The New York Review of Books, National Review (this latter is really pretty awful, it has declined so far since my previous subscribership of the late 70s-mid-90s, but they keep allowing me to renew for under $1 per issue, so I can’t seem to help myself -and then I do read some of it).
Websites:
Counter-Currents, First Things, The Postil, The Occidental Observer, American Renaissance, RealClearPolitics, a bunch of Substacks, Vdare, Aporia, etc etc!
IOWs, it’s hard for me to find time for books, at least non-fiction ones, even though I have such a huge number stored up for retirement that I get depressed thinking about them.
Among favorite books, I’d put the stories of Tolstoy and Chekhov (there are too many individual ones to name, but included here are obviously novellas like Ivan Ilyich, A Dull Story, etc); Collected Stories of Saul Bellow (an actual title); Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas; Dostoyevsky, The Idiot and Demons; Conrad, Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, Nostromo (but really, everything); Bowles, The Sheltering Sky; stories of Kipling; stories of Mavis Gallant, Elizabeth Taylor (the English writer, not the film star!), and Alice Munro; Mann, The Magic Mountain; Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Raspail, The Camp of the Saints (brilliant, depressing, mesmerizing); Greene, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The Human Factor (how to pick a favorite? it’s the whole author’s biblio I love); Murdoch, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea (again, there’s so much); Waugh, Brideshead Revisited … I know I’m forgetting many.
Among most sheerly fun works of fiction, I’d place the noirs of James Ellroy, esp the American Underworld trilogy; stories/novellas of Lovecraft (all of which I’ve read one-to-many times); LOTR (read twice, want to read once more before I die); and the entire 66 mystery novel corpus of Agatha Christie (she wrote other, non-crime fiction), the entirety of which I’ve read once, and two-thirds of which (and ongoing) I’ve read twice.
Among non-fiction, my “favorites”, defined not as what I consider to be the best books I’ve read, but rather, the ones I’ve read two or more times: Oliver, America’s Decline; Brimelow, Alien Nation; Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority; Nelson, America Balkanized; Francis, Beautiful Losers and Revolution from the Middle; Johnson, A History of the American People and Modern Times; Pearson, Heredity and Humanity.
When I reflect upon my reading life, I must admit too much of it was and remains devoted to learned periodicals and websites (as well as plain newspapers). But I enjoy the lack of commitment that such reading makes as opposed to full books. There’s also a bit of an addictive quality to such reading. In my final years, my focus will be more on books, especially of the “timeless” variety (literature and scholarship, esp those works – philosophy, theology, history of ideas, history – relating to the “Big Picture” of the decline of the West ).
I meant just fiction books, really, and I suppose nonfiction for those who *hate* fiction, but it would take a special nonfiction book to be really important in one’s life, perhaps some memoir or something. I might have listed Kim by Kipling now that you mention it, but I’ve only read it once, but I really liked it. Kipling and Tolkien are the two geniuses of literature for me.
Yeah, I read way too many websites, mostly the same ones. Unz too a lot.
I, too, have often thought that, if I should have a deathbed, I’ll likely be thinking, wrt books, more of literature than scholarship. You did ask for “favorites”, which to me, if we’re getting technical, actually has more of a connotation of “enjoyable” than “meaningful”. Reading for fun as opposed to edification. On that note, how could I have forgotten the wonderful Flashman series? I just can’t recommend them too highly. They are much more enjoyable to me than Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels (of which, to be fair, I’ve only read the first three – of twenty-odd in total), which get way too bogged down in obscure historical-nautical terminology for my taste.
I wonder if there’s any conservative/progressive dichotomy wrt those two series, with rightists preferring Flashman, and [white] leftists preferring A/M (I can’t see very many nonwhites liking either)? No idea, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
I suggest “A tale of 2 Cities” by Charles Dickens and “A Man in full” by Tom Wolfe. Sydney Carton and Conrad Hensley are the 2 greatest characters I have have ever read about.
I agree, Mr Jackson
I can’t bring myself to read fiction. When it comes to novels, I do not want to spend money to buy them, to give them a space on my bookshelf, and to me the time to read. So I’ve been reading only non-fiction books for a long time now. Of the recent ones I read, I highly recommend Big Intel by J. Michael Waller. Of the earlier American Betrayal by Diana West, Willing Accomplices by Kent Clizbe, Disinformation by Ion Mihai Pacepa, and The Pentagon Wars by James Burton belong to my favorite “paper” books, and among e-books free available in the Internet all books by Prof. Revilo Oliver are for me the best of the best.
I can’t read fiction any more, either. I read tons of fiction until I was about 40, and then I segued into non-fiction. I no longer wanted science fiction, I wanted science fact.
There are so many interesting things in the real world, so why one need something fictive?
The novels which are indeed fictionalized memoirs could be interesting, like Die Geächteten (The Outlaws) by Ernst von Salomon. It is a good novel if you want to learn something about German Freikorps after the First World war.
Ibiza is where I spent two of the most delightful months of my life—NOV and DEC 1976. Santa Eulalia is the town to which I hitched once a week or so to buy provisions. I was backpacking, so I had only a few small books with me, but my landlady had a couple, which I read. Thanks for the bibliographic reference. I’ll see if I can track down a copy. To add to my already long “to read” list. At 77, I’m not at all sure that I’ll complete the list.
I can’t recommend that book highly enough. Paul was apparently an American journalist who was in Ibiza recovering from a nervous breakdown in Paris, as you do. The bars and stores in Santa Eulalia are mentioned a lot. Good luck, I hope you find a copy!
I read for all the usual reasons: access to information, crystallizing new ideas, and developing new methods of thinking. However, one underappreciated reason is simply for entertainment and escapism—the type of experience most people seek with a Netflix subscription but often find disappointing. Virtually any airport pulp published prior to 1990 offers a smart yarn devoid of political platitudes, and you can rest assured that you’ll have a great time reading it.
2,403 words into the article you say, “if reading is not a part of your life, then make it so.” Good advice, except non-readers will never see it.
Well it’s easy to get caught up in the neverending avalanche of online articles and neglect the older and more durable texts. Don’t think there are too many non-readers as such at counter-currents but it’s worthwhile discipline to aet aside some time each day to read a book. Thanks to Dr Gullick for the advice and “colinsky” for reinforcing it.
Considering the comments of this good paper, many readers here seem to no longer, or never could, appreciate fiction. Gustave Le Bon, who was not particularly irrational a mind, wrote this in defense of fiction, as Chesterton could have done it too :
//
“Les contes, les légendes, les oeuvres d’art, les romans même, sont beaucoup plus véridiques que les livres d’histoire. Ils expriment la sensibilité d’une époque, alors que le langage rationnel des historiens ne la fait pas connaître.”
//
English is a read-only language to me and I’m in a hurry, hence Google Translate’s result :
//
“Tales, legends, works of art, even novels, are much more truthful than history books. They express the sensibility of an era, whereas the rational language of historians does not make it known.”
//
Another rational mind wrote something similar, but in Latin :
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“Mirum videri possit, quare graves sententiae in scriptis poetarum, magis quam philosophorum. Ratio est quod poetae per enthusiasmum et vim imaginationis scripsere : sunt in nobis semina scientiae, ut in silice, quae per rationem à philosophis educuntur, per imaginationem a poetis excutiuntur magisque elucent.”
//
Translated to French :
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“Il peut paraître étonnant que les pensées profondes se rencontrent plutôt dans les écrits des poètes que dans ceux des philosophes. La raison en est que les poètes ont écrit sous l’empire de l’enthousiasme et de la force de l’imagination. Il y a en nous des semences de science, comme en un silex [des semences de feu] ; les philosophes les extraient par raison ; les poètes les arrachent par imagination : elles brillent alors davantage.”
//
And in English with the tool mentionned *supra* :
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“It may seem surprising that deep thoughts are found more in the writings of poets than in those of philosophers. The reason for this is that poets have written under the influence of enthusiasm and the force of imagination. There are seeds of knowledge in us, as in a flint [there are seeds of fire]; philosophers extract them by reason; poets tear them away by imagination: they then shine more brightly.”
//
I guess the author will be a surprise to many if not to all : this was written by Descartes (*Olympica*, “Les olympiques”). Yes, indeed, *the* Descartes.
Yes, yes, my belief is that philosophers simply make explicit the ideas expressed implicitly by the poets of the generation before them.
READ?!……READ?!……..Why bother to read? The act of reading requires the adoption of feminine passivity in the reader in relation to the written word. Such is not the way of an expansionist, martial spirit. The rectitude of our cause is self-evident! The arrival of THE BIG MAN will see the end of ALL our problems in this world and the next.
BURN ALL BOOKS!
HAIL VICTORY!
Genuinely funny. This is why we added the “like” feature.
“Un dernier verre pour la route” with five authors and five works I find instructive or enjoyable or both :
— Rivarol, Maurice Joly, Mencken, Chesterton and Robert Benchley… and Wodehouse… and H. H. “Saki” Munro too (yes, the last two names make for a *very* large value of five, as if assigning pi to a variable in case its value would change)
— *The catalog of lost books : an annotated and seriously addled collection of great books that should have been written but never were* by Tad Tuleja
— *The Natural History of Nonsense* and *The Spoor of Spooks and Other Nonsense* by Bergen Evans (yes, two books but both were united in the French translation *Histoire naturelle des sottises*)
— *The Set Up* by Vladimir Volkoff
— *The Systems Bible : The Beginner’s Guide to Systems Large and Small* by John Gall
— *Homer’s Daughter* by Robert Graves
Tempted to cheat again, but this is enough, I guess. “Tolle, lege”… aut noli legere.
I don’t feel great awe in front of *Game of Thrones*, whether the books or the series, but George Martin rephrased an old thought about reading in rather nice a way : “A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone” (said by Tyrion in the series ; I’m pretty sure the statement was more elaborate in one of the books)
“That was inspiring! Question: list top five favorite books. Open to anyone who wishes to respond.” – Dark Plato
The top five books of all the many books that have impacted me most deeply, and/or were thrilling to read: The Godfather (read it when I was 9-years-old, and it left quite an impression!); Swann’s Way; Steppenwolf; Dracula; The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
*Mea maxima culpa*, I mentionned Maurice Joly twice. Let’s replace the second mention of his name with this one : Philippe Muray.
And while we’re at it, let’s cheat again :
— *The Codebreakers* by David Kahn (the 1967 edition)
— *Mathematics and the Imagination* by Kasner and Newman
— *Lucifer’s Lexicon* by L. A. Rollins
— *The Closing of the American Mind* by Allan Bloom
— *Intellectuals* by Paul Johnson (*{U|I}nintellectuals* was more appropriate a title)
— *After Such Knowledge* by James Blish (I must admit it’s four books under one title in one volume)
— *Club Dumas* by Perez-Reverte
— *Le maître d’escrime* by Perez-Reverte
— *Le maître ou le tournoi de go* by Kawabata
— *Fictions* by Borges
— *City* by Simak (not to be confused with *[Not So] Smart City* by infamous Klaus Schwab et alii)
— *L’île des pingouins* by Anatole France
— *Le matin des magiciens* by Pauwels and Bergier
— *Musashi* by Eiji Yoshikawa
— *Bushido, l’âme du Japon* by Inazo Nitobe
So many good books to reread… but unfortunately, *vita brevis*.
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