MINDFUL PLEASURES: October 2011

ABOUT THE BLOGGER

Brian A. Oard is the author of Suicide: A Memoir, as well as a collection of art criticism, Beauty and Terror: Essays on the Power of Painting, and a historical mystery novel, The Degas Manuscript. (Click on the last two titles to read them online.) He is also the creator of the epigrammatical blog Epigrams for Atheists. He lives in the United States, loves London and Paris, and enjoys the cheap objectivity of writing about himself in the third person. He can be contacted by email at baoard@aol.com.

MY TOP SHELF: BEST OF THE BEST NOVELS

ULYSSES by James Joyce
THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka
TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne
THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
MOBY DICK by Herman Melville
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME by Marcel Proust
ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by William Faulkner
WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy
SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION by Gustave Flaubert
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy
THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera
THE GHOST WRITER by Philip Roth
AUSTERLITZ by W. G. Sebald
THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie
AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon

SOME GREAT BOOKS MOST PEOPLE HAVEN'T READ

A COOL MILLION by Nathanael West
AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
BEAUTIFUL LOSERS by Leonard Cohen
CAMERA LUCIDA by Roland Barthes
CENTURY OF THE WIND by Eduardo Galeano
DOWNRIVER by Iain Sinclair
FADO ALEXANDRINO by Antonio Lobo Antunes
HUNGER by Knut Hamsun
INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino
JACQUES THE FATALIST by Denis Diderot
L'ASSOMMOIR by Emile Zola
MAN IN THE HOLOCENE by Max Frisch
ON THE YARD by Malcolm Braly
POEMS OF PAUL CELAN (trans. by Michael Hamburger)
PUDD'NHEAD WILSON by Mark Twain
SELECTED ESSAYS by John Berger
THE ASPERN PAPERS by Henry James
THE ATLAS by William T. Vollmann
THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY by Edmund White
THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa
THE LOSER by Thomas Bernhard

FAVORITE POETS

SOME FAVORITE NONFICTION BOOKS

A HISTORY OF NARRATIVE FILM by David A. Cook
A LIFE OF PICASSO by John Richardson
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn
AGAINST INTERPRETATION by Susan Sontag
BASIC WRITINGS ON POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM by Edward Said
DISPATCHES by Michael Herr
EXISTENTIALISM FROM DOSTOYEVSKY TO SARTRE edited by Walter Kaufmann
FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE by William H. Gass
FOOTSTEPS: ADVENTURES OF A ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER by Richard Holmes
IMPRESSIONISM: ART, LEISURE AND PARISIAN SOCIETY by Robert L. Herbert
INWARDNESS AND EXISTENCE by Walter A. Davis
LIGHTS OUT FOR THE TERRITORY by Iain Sinclair
MANUFACTURING CONSENT by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman
OUT OF SHEER RAGE: WRESTLING WITH D.H. LAWRENCE by Geoff Dyer
POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945 by Tony Judt
REMBRANDT'S EYES by Simon Schama
SEXUAL PERSONAE by Camille Paglia
STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by D.H. Lawrence
THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE by Harold Bloom
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Edward Gibbon
THE GAY SCIENCE by Friedrich Nietzsche
THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins
THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS by Sigmund Freud
THE RENAISSANCE by Walter Pater
THE SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Klein
THE SHOCK OF THE NEW by Robert Hughes
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann
UNITED STATES: ESSAYS 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal
VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS by John Ralston Saul