Archives for 2011

How Francois Mauriac mentored Elie Wiesel for the Love of Jesus

Francois Mauriac

Philip Yancey in What is so Amazing about Grace? recounts a lovely story about a meeting between Mauriac and Elie Wiesel. Mauriac was at that time France’s most famous writer, and the greatest Roman Catholic writer of his century.

Wiesel is networking. Using the old man for his connection, to inveigle an interview with the French Prime Minister. But Mauriac wants to talk about Jesus. A little secret, inward smile plays about his face as he talks about Jesus.

I love that, that 20 centuries later, people can be so in love with Jesus, that a secret, inward smile lights their faces when they talk about him. Wiesel writes

I was a young journalist in Paris. I wanted to meet the Prime Minister of France for my paper. He was, then, a Jew called Mendès-France. But he didn’t offer to see me. I had heard that the French author François Mauriac — a very great Catholic writer and Nobel Prize winner, a member of the Academy — was his guru. Mauriac was his teacher. So I would go to Mauriac, the writer, and I would ask him to introduce me to Mendès-France.

Mauriac was an old man then, but when I came to Mauriac, he agreed to see me. We met and we had a painful discussion. The problem was that he was in love with Jesus. He was the most decent person I ever met in that field — as a writer, as a Catholic writer. Honest, with sense of integrity, and he was in love with Jesus. He spoke only of Jesus.

Whatever I would ask: Jesus. Finally, I said, “What about Mendès-France?” He said that Mendès-France, like Jesus, was suffering. That’s not what I wanted to hear. I wanted, at one point, to speak about Mendès-France and I would say to Mauriac, “Can you introduce me?”

When he said Jesus again I couldn’t take it, and for the only time in my life I was discourteous, which I regret to this day. I said, “Mr. Mauriac,” we called him Maître, “ten years or so ago, I have seen children, hundreds of Jewish children, who suffered more than Jesus did on his cross and we do not speak about it.” I felt all of a sudden so embarrassed. I closed my notebook and went to the elevator.

He ran after me. He pulled me back; he sat down in his chair, and I in mine, and he began weeping. I have rarely seen an old man weep like that, and I felt like such an idiot. I felt like a criminal. This man didn’t deserve that. He was really a pure man, a member of the Resistance. I didn’t know what to do. We stayed there like that, he weeping and I closed in my own remorse. And then, at the end, without saying anything, he simply said, “You know, maybe you should talk about it.”

Read more about the interview here.Mauriac challenged Weisel to write about his experiences, which eventually became the tight Holocaust memoir, Night. Mauriac pushed through its publication against resistance.

I also LOVE this quote from Dorothy Day, about to write her autobiography. She writes, My Life, opens her book on a new page, “But then I found I could not do it. I just sat thinking of our Lord, and of his visit to us all those centuries ago, and I thought it was my great good fortune to have had him on my mind for so long a time in my life.”

The Spirit Sent Him into the Wilderness

By Anita Mathias

⁹ At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰ Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. ¹¹ And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

¹² At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, ¹³ and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted^[g] by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.

This is exactly how the spiritual life works, and knowing it can help us be on guard.

There are moments of high exaltation when God seems close enough to touch. With the eyes of faith, we see him. Heaven seems opened above our heads, the Spirit descends on us, and God demonstrates to us, and to the world, that he is blessing us. We hear a voice from heaven say, “You are my daughter, whom I love, with you I am well-pleased.”

Why the affirmation? Because he loves us.

Yeeeeees.

And?

Because he know we are going to need it. For after the moments of affirmation comes the days of testing.

The affirmation, the experience of God’s love and the open heaven is to strengthen us for our season in the desert.

The season of loneliness, hunger, thirst, cold, self-doubt, solitude, silence. Of temptation of every kind from Satan.

Inevitably, the season of hardship and temptation follows close on the heels of the season of blessing and affirmation.

But we are never completely abandoned by Christ. Even in the desert, we have the companionship of animals, and are attended by angels.

Amanda Hocking, Star of Self-Publishing

By Anita Mathias

Storyseller

By STRAWBERRY SAROYAN

The New York Times

Amanda Hocking, the star of self-publishing, was sitting in the front seat of her Ford Escape earlier this spring when she spotted a messenger delivering flowers to her home in Austin, Minn.

“They’re probably from, like, my mom,” she said as she walked up to her porch. “Or my dad. He always sends flowers.”

Inside, Goldman had set the assortment of gerbera daisies and roses on the coffee table.

“Who are they from?” Hocking asked.

“St. Martin’s Press,” Goldman said. “That’s your new publisher.”

That morning, Hocking’s deal with St. Martin’s was announced: $2 million for her next four books, a series she’s calling “Watersong.”

She casually opened the card. “ ‘Thrilled to be your publisher,’ ” she read. “ ‘Thrilled to be working with you. Sincerely, people.’ ”

People?

“Well, ‘Sincerely, Matthew Shear and Rose Hilliard,’ ” she said before trailing off, referring to a head of St. Martin’s and the woman who would be her editor there.

If Hocking seems a bit blasé about signing her first deal with a traditional publisher, and a multimillion-dollar one at that, it’s hard to blame her. Since uploading her first book on her own last spring, she has become — along with the likes of Nora Roberts, James Patterson and Stieg Larsson — one of the best-selling e-authors on Amazon. In that time, she has grossed approximately $2 million. Her 10 novels include the paranormal-romance “Trylle,” a four-book vampire series that begins with “My Blood Approves” and “Hollowland,” which kicks off a zombie series whose second book will come out in the fall. Her character-driven books, which feature trolls, hobgoblins and fairy-tale elements and keep the pages turning, have generated an excitement not felt in the industry since Stephenie Meyer or perhaps even J. K. Rowling. “She’s just a really good storyteller,” Hilliard says. “Whatever that thing is that makes you want to stay up late at night to read one more chapter — she has it.”

Hollywood feels the same way: the “Trylle”series was optioned by Media Rights Capital,which was involved with “The Adjustment Bureau,” among other films; the screenplays are being written by the woman who co-wrote “District 9.’’

Given this success, it’s fair to ask why Hocking has decided to go with a so-called legacy publisher at all.

“I’d always known that if I could get the right deal, I would take it,” she said. “But I wouldn’t have gotten this kind of deal six months ago.” It’s a deal that pays less than what Amazon, in partnership with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, bid, but there were doubts about whether the big bookstore chains would carry a book published by their competitor. (Also, Hocking says, Amazon wanted to restrict e-book rights to the Kindle and offered a lower rate of royalties than she often gets from what has been self-published.) And Hocking wants to reach as many people as possible among the 85 percent or so of the population who don’t have e-readers yet. “For me to be a billion-dollar author,” she would tell me later, “I need to have people buying my books at Wal-Mart.”

Hocking took a bite of a chocolate and looked at Goldman, who also works as her assistant. “Get my mom on the phone,” she said. “Tell her I got flowers. She’ll freak out.”

Hocking, who is 26, comes across as a hipster schoolgirl. The first day we met, she wore aTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt, jeans, a giant glittery dime-store frog ring and no shoes, revealing her electric-blue toenails. She was living in a home the size of a modest Manhattan one-bedroom. Its porch was decorated with a plastic pink flamingo and little pink-flamingo-shaped Christmas lights.

Hocking gave a self-deprecating tour. In the kitchen, she pointed out a hole in the ceiling that her cats, Squeak and Nikki, like to crawl up into so they can nap in the eaves. In her office there was a framed check from Amazon for $15.75 for her first royalties, from a year ago. When we settled down in her living room, Hocking described what was, for someone who becomes a writer, a not-unfamiliar childhood. “I was seriously depressed for most of my life,” she said. She channeled her feelings into fan fiction. “A lot of stuff I did was different takes on ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Labyrinth.’ I was going to end up with Luke Skywalker and stuff.” What was unusual, however, was her age: she started writing, or at least telling stories, at 3 or 4. “I remember one when I was 8 or 9. It was about a girl and a leopard who rescued people. They were like a duo.” (The plot of “Hollowland” involves a girl and a lion helping people escape the zombie apocalypse.) At 11, her parents separated, and when she got a computer that year, she said, “that was like the biggest lifesaver ever.”

High school was rough, though not outlandishly so. “She says no one remembers her today, but she was in the punk-arty group,” said Goldman, to whom she has referred on her blog as “my platonic life mate.” Hocking was also a bit of a loner, Goldman added. “She would always be home writing when people were hanging out.”

By the time she was 17, Hocking had completed her first novel, “Dreams I Can’t Remember,” which she sent to every agent she could find through Google and “Writer’s Market.” All of them — “about 50,” she said — rejected her, mostly with form letters. Today she doesn’t think the agents made a mistake, and blames her query letter as much as the work itself. “I was whiny and depressed and thought life was going to be handed to me.”

She kept at it, intermittently. She also worked as a dishwasher at Oriental Express, watched her B.F.F. fall in love, dated a bad boy. “He was in a band with some friends of mine — what instrument did he play?” she asked Goldman.

“Second guitar,” Goldman replied. He turned to me. “The band was called Tranquil Chaos.”

As bad boys in bands called Tranquil Chaos tend to do, she says, he broke her heart. Then she was fired. Then her best friend married and moved away. Hocking wondered what she was doing with her life.

Inspiration struck when she caught a clip on YouTube of Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus talking to Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz. It was short and simple — essentially, Hoppus encourages all the kids out there to make their dreams come true. “I was like, That’s it!” Hocking said. “This whole time I’ve had a passion and I’ve waited for it to happen. I need to do it.”

It was January 2009, and Hocking started treating writing as a job. Before, it was “something I always did . . . like playing video games.” After, she wrote even when she didn’t feel like it. Over the next year, she wrote “at least five or six new novels.” Initially, these were like her earliest books, darker than her current ones, more cerebral and less “fun,” as Hocking might say. They were romances, like her later, published books — but without paranormal elements, and she was still developing her technique. She described one novel, “Reckless Abandon,” as being about “a girl and a guy falling in love, but there wasn’t a lot going on. It was just terribly long.”

After studying bookstore shelves and researching the industry to see what was published, as well as reading lots of Y.A. novels, Hocking figured out that romance was an evergreen when it came to popularity, but that paranormal elements really helped books take off. “My Blood Approves” and its sequels emerged from this recognition. Then, trying to be more innovative, Hocking moved beyond vampires and, in the “Trylle” series, onto trolls. Why trolls? “I didn’t want to write about shifters or fairies. I don’t really like fairies.” At first, she wasn’t a fan of trolls either — “they kind of freaked me out” — but when she ran across a line in her research that said they could sometimes be attractive, she decided to rethink her position. “They’re not so common, and I thought: No one else is doing this. Let’s go for it.”

She made quick progress. Her actual time spent writing a novel, she said, is two to four intensive weeks. “But I say that and people are like, ‘Whoa, that’s fast.’ And it is. But the series I sold to St. Martin’s, for example, I’ve been really working on it in my head for over a year. So by the time I sit down to write, it’s already written.”

Still, she continued to receive nothing but rejections from New York. “There were a couple days where I was like: I’m giving up. This is horrible. I’m never going to be able to do it.” She sighed. “I sent off my last letters to them at the end of that year.” Her last rejection came in February 2010. It was a form letter.

Two months later, Hocking uploaded “My Blood Approves” to Amazon and, about a month later, to Smashwords, a service that makes her books compatible not only with the Nook but also with less popular devices like BeBook and Kobo. (When, in October 2010, it became possible to self-publish directly on Barnes & Noble’s site for the Nook, she did so.) It’s a surprisingly simple process in each case — much like signing up for Facebook. She took the e-leap because she thought that even if she sold her vampire books, there was going to be a reaction against them before they made it into stores.

The first day, she sold five books. The next, five more. “I took screen shots a lot,” she said. Then she uploaded another novel and sold a total of 36 books one day in May. “It was like: 36 books? It’s astounding. I’m taking over the world.”

Soon she started selling hundreds of books a day. That June, she sold 6,000 books; that July 10,000. “And then it started to explode. In January, it was over 100,000.” Today, she sells 9,000 books a day.

Hocking is at a loss to explain the phenomenon. “I’ve seen other authors do the exact same things I have, similar genre, similar prices” — like many self-published authors, she prices her books radically below what traditional publishers charge; typically hers cost between 99 cents and $2.99 — “and they have multiple books out. And they all have good covers. And they’re selling reasonably well, but they’re not selling nearly as well as I am.”

The stories themselves are most likely the answer: part quirky girl-like-Hocking characters, part breakneck pacing, part Hollywood-style action and part bodice-ripping romance — they are literature as candy, a mash-up of creativity and commerce.

It’s a formula, however, that took a while for Hocking to concoct. She recalls a moment of truth around the time she was 21. “My whole life I would always read things like I write — lighter young-adult stuff. But I would also read stuff that was darker, like Kurt Vonnegut and Chuck Palahniuk, and that was the kind of stuff I would try to write. Because I was like, these books are good” — worthy, highbrow, of artistic value.

One day, Goldman intervened. “He just said: ‘These books you’re writing are not you. You’re forcing yourself. That’s not who you are. You’re a silly, fun person who likes silly, fun things. Stop trying to be a dark person.’ ” She paused. “I told him: ‘No, you’re an idiot. Those books are crap.’ ”

But she took his advice and started writing stuff that resonated more personally. She summed up the difference between her books and the likes of Vonnegut thus: “Theirs are not actually character-driven, they’re not books about people. People are just used to explain an idea. And my books are about people — who might happen to have ideas.”

Later in my visit, Hocking agreed to show me the house she was moving into a few weeks later; it was one of her few indulgences, she said. (Another is a model of a life-size Han Solo figure encased in carbonite that cost “about $7,000,” she admitted shyly.) We drove a few miles, then pulled into a spacious and tidy area in front of a ranch-style home. Compared with her current place, it was the Taj Mahal: well-kept grounds, total quiet, McMansions on either side.

A conservative-looking woman, Hocking’s real estate agent, greeted us. “That’s what all the rooms are going to be painted,” she said when we entered the dining room, referring to a creamy beige on its walls. “It will be a nice primer for you.”

“Cool,” Amanda said, checking out a chandelier on the ceiling. “This is going to be a music room. I’m going to put a piano here” — she pointed to a near corner — “and some high-backed chairs in funky colors. This room will be painted a dark purple. I like color.”

We headed into the living room, which has 40-foot-high vaulted ceilings. The place, I thought, evoked the castles or fantasy worlds her characters often ascend to (in “Switched,” the troll’s castle has “vaulted” ceilings, and a chandelier figures in a major plot point). “My stepdad is going to build a bench to go here so it will be like a window seat,” she told me excitedly.

Hocking led the way down the hall, pointing out a guest room, then the room which would be Goldman’s — “I lived alone and I hated it,” she said. “I don’t go out that much” — and finally stopped in the master bed and bath, which included a claw-footed bathtub the size of her current office. “This tub is crazy,” she said.

Downstairs, a room lined with built-in bookshelves would be her new office, and a large room with a stone fireplace the “movie room.” There was also a “craft room” with its own kitchen.

Throughout the tour, Hocking seemed surprisingly mature, comfortable in her own skin. Back in the car, she agreed, attributing this to her writing breakthrough, and to Goldman’s counsel, too. “When I stopped judging myself, that was actually a huge turning point in my whole personality. I realized that it’s O.K. to like things like ‘The Breakfast Club’ even though it’s not critically acclaimed. It’s O.K. to like the Muppets. I’d always been a closet lame person,” she said and laughed. “I think I became cooler when I stopped trying to be cool.”

The next evening, Hocking gathered at Steve’s Pizza with Goldman; her mother, Lorraine Felt, a medical transcriptionist dressed in a light green cardigan and floral dress; and her stepfather, Duane Felt, who works in I.T. and sported jeans, a flannel shirt and a Reebok cap. A local institution, Steve’s is a place that Hocking and Goldman favor, and it was full of local families. (Hocking’s father, Rick Hocking, a truck driver, lives in nearby Blooming Prairie.)

Settling into a table upstairs in the “game room,” which featured old-school pinball machines and photos of Austin High cheerleaders on the wall, the group ordered two pizzas and talked about Goldman’s 25th-birthday celebration the previous night.

“We bought $8 champagne,” Hocking said, waving the finger with her frog ring on it in the air. “I had half a flute.”

Duane caught sight of her ring and dubbed it “big pimp bling.”

Lorraine, her curls bobbing, laughed along with Hocking, and then talk turned to the changes her parents have experienced in the wake of Hocking’s success.

Duane told the group he was at the post office earlier that day and overheard someone saying, “You hear about this kid making all this money?” (Hocking was on the cover of both local papers, after the St. Martin’s deal.) When Duane identified himself, a postal worker gave him special treatment.

Lorraine listened and then turned to her daughter. “You don’t think you’re better than everybody else,” she said. “But you are.” She put her arm around Hocking.

“I just write books that are silly,” Hocking replied.

“But they’re relaxing,” Lorraine said. “They’re a break from reality. Readers get to ride along, and they don’t have to think about it.” Indeed, Hocking’s books are the John Hughes version of paranormal romance and action: picture a young Molly Ringwaldbeing drawn into the world of vampires, say, or a “My So-Called Life”-era Claire Danesbeing told she is actually a princess troll and has to fight bad guys.

Watching this scene, though, I realized that Hocking herself has undergone a change as major as that of any of her characters. In managing to reach people via the Internet first, and then breaking into the traditional book industry that way, she has become her generation’s first literary phenomenon.

The idea brought to mind an earlier moment when Hocking was talking about how she’d never visited New York City — at least since she was a small child and her father passed through on a job and “my mom was sure we were going to get raped and murdered.” So now that she’s made it, would she want to live it up, move away, become a “princess”? I asked.

She shook her head. “When I was younger, I wanted to move out of Austin. But I think if I moved to the city now, I would still just sit in my house and go to Wal-Mart and Kwik Trip. . . . I like my friends, I like my family. I don’t really want to make new ones.” She also likes her fantasies — and can have those anytime, at home, just like her readers.

The Spirit Sent Him into the Wilderness

By Anita Mathias

¹² At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, ¹³ and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted^Share131

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 June 2011 14.34 BST

Article history

The greatest non-fiction books live here … the British Museum Reading Room.

Art

The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes (1980)
Hughes charts the story of modern art, from cubism to the avant garde

The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich (1950)
The most popular art book in history. Gombrich examines the technical and aesthetic problems confronted by artists since the dawn of time

Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972)
A study of the ways in which we look at art, which changed the terms of a generation’s engagement with visual culture

Biography

Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari (1550)
Biography mixes with anecdote in this Florentine-inflected portrait of the painters and sculptors who shaped the Renaissance

The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791)
Boswell draws on his journals to create an affectionate portrait of the great lexicographer

The Diaries of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys (1825)
“Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health,” begins this extraordinarily vivid diary of the Restoration period

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918)
Strachey set the template for modern biography, with this witty and irreverent account of four Victorian heroes

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
Graves’ autobiography tells the story of his childhood and the early years of his marriage, but the core of the book is his account of the brutalities and banalities of the first world war

The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933)
Stein’s groundbreaking biography, written in the guise of an autobiography, of her lover

Culture

Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag (1964)
Sontag’s proposition that the modern sensibility has been shaped by Jewish ethics and homosexual aesthetics

Mythologies by Roland Barthes (1972)
Barthes gets under the surface of the meanings of the things which surround us in these witty studies of contemporary myth-making

Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
Said argues that romanticised western representations of Arab culture are political and condescending

Environment

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
This account of the effects of pesticides on the environment launched the environmental movement in the US

The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
Lovelock’s argument that once life is established on a planet, it engineers conditions for its continued survival, revolutionised our perception of our place in the scheme of things

History

The Histories by Herodotus (c400 BC)
History begins with Herodotus’s account of the Greco-Persian war

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776)
The first modern historian of the Roman Empire went back to ancient sources to argue that moral decay made downfall inevitable

The History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1848)
A landmark study from the pre-eminent Whig historian

Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (1963)
Arendt’s reports on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and explores the psychological and sociological mechanisms of the Holocaust

The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)
Thompson turned history on its head by focusing on the political agency of the people, whom most historians had treated as anonymous masses

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970)
A moving account of the treatment of Native Americans by the US government

Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel (1970)
Terkel weaves oral accounts of the Great Depression into a powerful tapestry

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński (1982)
The great Polish reporter tells the story of the last Shah of Iran

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm (1994)
Hobsbawm charts the failure of capitalists and communists alike in this account of the 20th century

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Familes by Philip Gourevitch (1999)
Gourevitch captures the terror of the Rwandan massacre, and the failures of the international community

Postwar by Tony Judt (2005)
A magisterial account of the grand sweep of European history since 1945

Journalism

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)
An examination of the moral dilemmas at the heart of the journalist’s trade

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
The man in the white suit follows Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they drive across the US in a haze of LSD

Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
A vivid account of Herr’s experiences of the Vietnam war

Literature

The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson (1781)
Biographical and critical studies of 18th-century poets, which cast a sceptical eye on their lives and works

An Image of Africa by Chinua Achebe (1975)
Achebe challenges western cultural imperialism in his argument that Heart of Darkness is a racist novel, which deprives its African characters of humanity

The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)
Bettelheim argues that the darkness of fairy tales offers a means for children to grapple with their fears

Mathematics

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
A whimsical meditation on music, mind and mathematics that explores formal complexity and self-reference

Memoir

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
Rousseau establishes the template for modern autobiography with this intimate account of his own life

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845)
This vivid first person account was one of the first times the voice of the slave was heard in mainstream society

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)
Imprisoned in Reading Gaol, Wilde tells the story of his affair with Alfred Douglas and his spiritual development

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence (1922)
A dashing account of Lawrence’s exploits during the revolt against the Ottoman empire

The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi (1927)
A classic of the confessional genre, Gandhi recounts early struggles and his passionate quest for self-knowledge

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)
Orwell’s clear-eyed account of his experiences in Spain offers a portrait of confusion and betrayal during the civil war

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
Published by her father after the war, this account of the family’s hidden life helped to shape the post-war narrative of the Holocaust

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951)
Nabokov reflects on his life before moving to the US in 1940

The Man Died by Wole Soyinka (1971)
A powerful autobiographical account of Soyinka’s experiences in prison during the Nigerian civil war

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975)
A vision of the author’s life, including his life in the concentration camps, as seen through the kaleidoscope of chemistry

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (2000)
Sage demolishes the fantasy of family as she tells how her relatives passed rage, grief and frustrated desire down the generations

Mind

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1899)
Freud’s argument that our experiences while dreaming hold the key to our psychological lives launched the discipline of psychoanalysis and transformed western culture

Music

The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen (1998)
Rosen examines how 19th-century composers extended the boundaries of music, and their engagement with literature, landscape and the divine

Philosophy

The Symposium by Plato (c380 BC)
A lively dinner-party debate on the nature of love

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (c180)
A series of personal reflections, advocating the preservation of calm in the face of conflict, and the cultivation of a cosmic perspective

Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
Montaigne’s wise, amusing examination of himself, and of human nature, launched the essay as a literary form

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621)
Burton examines all human culture through the lens of melancholy

Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (1641)
Doubting everything but his own existence, Descartes tries to construct God and the universe

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (1779)
Hume puts his faith to the test with a conversation examining arguments for the existence of God

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781)
If western philosophy is merely a footnote to Plato, then Kant’s attempt to unite reason with experience provides many of the subject headings

Phenomenology of Mind by GWF Hegel (1807)
Hegel takes the reader through the evolution of consciousness

Walden by HD Thoreau (1854)
An account of two years spent living in a log cabin, which examines ideas of independence and society

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)
Mill argues that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
The invalid Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and the triumph of the Ubermensch

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962)
A revolutionary theory about the nature of scientific progress

Politics

The Art of War by Sun Tzu (c500 BC)
A study of warfare that stresses the importance of positioning and the ability to react to changing circumstances

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
Machiavelli injects realism into the study of power, arguing that rulers should be prepared to abandon virtue to defend stability

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
Hobbes makes the case for absolute power, to prevent life from being “nasty, brutish and short”

The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791)
A hugely influential defence of the French revolution, which points out the illegitimacy of governments that do not defend the rights of citizens

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
Wollstonecraft argues that women should be afforded an education in order that they might contribute to society

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
An analysis of society and politics in terms of class struggle, which launched a movement with the ringing declaration that “proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”

The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois (1903)
A series of essays makes the case for equality in the American south

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
De Beauvoir examines what it means to be a woman, and how female identity has been defined with reference to men throughout history

The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon (1961)
An exploration of the psychological impact of colonialisation

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967)
This bestselling graphic popularisation of McLuhan’s ideas about technology and culture was cocreated with Quentin Fiore

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
Greer argues that male society represses the sexuality of women

Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988)
Chomsky argues that corporate media present a distorted picture of the world, so as to maximise their profits

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (2008)
A vibrant first history of the ongoing social media revolution

Religion

The Golden Bough by James George Frazer (1890)
An attempt to identify the shared elements of the world’s religions, which suggests that they originate from fertility cults

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
James argues that the value of religions should not be measured in terms of their origin or empirical accuracy

Science

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)
Darwin’s account of the evolution of species by natural selection transformed biology and our place in the universe

The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynmann (1965)
An elegant exploration of physical theories from one of the 20th century’s greatest theoreticians

The Double Helix by James Watson (1968)
James Watson’s personal account of how he and Francis Crick cracked the structure of DNA

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
Dawkins launches a revolution in biology with the suggestion that evolution is best seen from the perspective of the gene, rather than the organism

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
A book owned by 10 million people, if understood by fewer, Hawking’s account of the origins of the universe became a publishing sensation

Society

The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan (1405)
A defence of womankind in the form of an ideal city, populated by famous women from throughout history

Praise of Folly by Erasmus (1511)
This satirical encomium to the foolishness of man helped spark the Reformation with its skewering of abuses and corruption in the Catholic church

Letters Concerning the English Nation by Voltaire (1734)
Voltaire turns his keen eye on English society, comparing it affectionately with life on the other side of the English channel

Suicide by Émile Durkheim (1897)
An investigation into protestant and catholic culture, which argues that the less vigilant social control within catholic societies lowers the rate of suicide

Economy and Society by Max Weber (1922)
A thorough analysis of political, economic and religious mechanisms in modern society, which established the template for modern sociology

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)
Woolf’s extended essay argues for both a literal and metaphorical space for women writers within a male-dominated literary tradition

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)
Evans’s images and Agee’s words paint a stark picture of life among sharecroppers in the US South

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)
An exploration of the unhappiness felt by many housewives in the 1950s and 1960s, despite material comfort and stable family lives

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
A novelistic account of a brutal murder in Kansas city, which propelled Capote to fame and fortune

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968)
Didion evokes life in 1960s California in a series of sparkling essays

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
This analysis of incarceration in the Soviet Union, including the author’s own experiences as a zek, called into question the moral foundations of the USSR

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (1975)
Foucault examines the development of modern society’s systems of incarceration

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez (1996)
Colombia’s greatest 20th-century writer tells the story of kidnappings carried out by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel

Travel

The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta (1355)
The Arab world’s greatest medieval traveller sets down his memories of journeys throughout the known world and beyond

Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869)
Twain’s tongue-in-cheek account of his European adventures was an immediate bestseller

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (1941)
A six-week trip to Yugoslavia provides the backbone for this monumental study of Balkan history

Venice by Jan Morris (1960)
An eccentric but learned guide to the great city’s art, history, culture and people

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977)
The first volume of Leigh Fermor’s journey on foot through Europe – a glowing evocation of youth, memory and history

Danube by Claudio Magris (1986)
Magris mixes travel, history, anecdote and literature as he tracks the Danube from its source to the sea

China Along the Yellow River by Cao Jinqing (1995)
A pioneering work of Chinese sociology, exploring modern China with a modern face

The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald (1995)
A walking tour in East Anglia becomes a melancholy meditation on transience and decay

Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban (2000)
Raban sets off in a 35ft ketch on a voyage from Seattle to Alaska, exploring Native American art, the Romantic imagination and his own disintegrating relationship along the way

Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (2002)
Vargas Llosa distils a lifetime of reading and writing into a manual of the writer’s craft