I didn’t read Around the World in 80 Books by David Damrosch, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard, but want to share the list of those books. They span the globe, illuminating various times, cultures, genres, and spaces. Damrosch was born in Maine (I like that ) and hopes “that the range of books * * * and the varied approaches to them here, can illustrate the opportunities that an expanding literary canon offers us to open out our world.”
London: Inventing a City
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
P.G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh
Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps
Paris: Writers’ Paradise
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Julio Cortazar, The End of the Game
Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood
Krakow: After Auschwitz
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Paul Celan, Poems
Czeslaw Milosz, Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004
Olga Tokarczuk, Flights
Venice—Florence: Invisible Cities
Marco Polo, The Travels
Dante Aligheiri, The Divine Comedy
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
Donna Leon, By Its Cover
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Cairo—Istanbul—Muscat: Stories within Stories
Love Songs of Ancient Egypt
The Thousand and One Nights
Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days
Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies
The Congo—Nigeria: (Post)Colonial Encounters
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman
Georges Ngal, Giambatista Viko, or the Rape of African Discourse
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck
Israel/Palestine: Strangers in a Strange Land
The Hebrew Bible
The New Testament
D.A. Mishani, The Missing File
Emile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly’s Burden
Tehran—Shiraz: A Desertful of Roses
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds
Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz
Ghalib, A Desertful of Roses
Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight
Calcutta/Kolkata—Rewriting Empire
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World
Salman Rushdie, East, West
Jamyang Norbu, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
Shanghai—Beijing: Journeys to the West
Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West
Lu Xun, The Real Story of Ah-Q and other Stories
Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City
Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
Bei Dao, The Rose of Time
Tokyo—Kyoto: The West of the East
Higuchi Ichiyo, In the Shade of Spring Leaves
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility
James Merrill, “Prose of Departure”
Brazil—Columbia: Utopias, Dystopias, Heterotopias
Thomas More, Utopia
Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism
Joaquim Maria Machada de Assis, Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
Clarice Lispector, Family Ties
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Mexico—Guatemala: The Pope’s Blowgun
Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs
Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Selected Works
Miguel Angel Asturias, The President
Rosario Castellanos, The Book of Lamentations
The Antilles and Beyond: Fragments of Epic Memory
Derek Walcott, Omeros
James Joyce, Ulysses
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands
Bar Harbor: The World on a Desert Island
Robert McCloskey, One Morning in Maine
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
E.B. White, Stuart Little
New York: Migrant Metropolis
Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
Saul Steinberg, The Labyrinth
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
I’ve read 24 of these books (bolded), some a whole lifetime ago, and none of them disappointed me, so I have high hopes for the other books in the list. For sheer fun, I recommend The Lord of the Rings, which details a raucous romp through Middle Earth, featuring a battle between good and evil. If you want to read a book quickly (to add to your total of books read on this list), I recommend One Morning in Maine, which is a children’s picture book. When Things Fall Apart does a remarkable job exploring what happens when a European culture supplants an existing indigenous culture—spoiler alert, it isn’t pretty for the natives. One book that I tried to read, and will not pick up again, is Ulysses (almost as unreadable as Carlyle’s The French Revolution). Another I am unlikely to read in toto is In Search of Lost Time; I have read one of seven volumes.
Most of these books were written in languages other than English and I cannot vouch for the existence or quality of the English translations. (The first two books I requested from the library are not in its collection, suggesting that they might not have been translated.) Given the constraint of only 80 books, there are some obvious gaps. For instance, Korea and most of South America are not included. Of course, it they had been, something else would have to be deleted. At a minimum, it seems that replacing Stuart Little with a Mark Twain book would improve the list.
I just ordered The secret life of Saeed: the Pessoptimist from the library because I love the “word” “Pessoptimist.” The summary from the library website states that Saeed’s “life is lived in constant fear, yet he is never without hope.” Despite knowing nothing else about the book or the word, that’s about what I would guess the mashup word means.
For future reference, if you’re trying to write a 1,000-word blog post, letter, or anything else, and you want to do it fast, include a 500-word list. Please let me know about any of these books that you especially recommend, otherwise I’ll have to attack the list haphazardly, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Merry Christmas
Thanks for this awesome list. Can I forward it on to reading friends?
Of course. It’s in the public domain now.