By Dante Alighieri
Yes, that old classic from 14th-century Italy. But it's the last thing from dusty or dull. It's a thrilling work, morally sharp, and totally engrossing. The sort of book you lose yourself in. It tells the story of how Dante, “lost in the woods,” finds his way back to the light. To get there, he must travel though Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. It's a fantastical road trip, and the greatest allegory ever written. I loved the
translation by the American poet John Ciardi.
By J. M. Coetzee
Likely my favourite living writer. It's astonishing how much he does with so little.
Disgrace is a spare and searing work about the changing South Africa, told through the story of a professor whose life goes all wrong.
By Knut Hamsun
Hamsun was a cranky Norwegian writer and
Hunger is his crankiest novel. It tells the story of a homeless man who wanders the streets of Christiania—as Oslo was then known—starving and dreaming. Hamsun shines as a writer because he was such an anti-conformist individual. He got into trouble in his advanced old age, confusedly seeing in Hitler some sort of salvation against the spectre of America, but that's the man, not his books.
Hunger is a unique work.
By Dino Buzzati
A great Italian writer who should be better known and more widely read in the US. This, his greatest novel, tells the story of a young officer who is posted to a remote fort on the edges of an unnamed country. There, he waits for an invasion of barbarians that never comes, he waits for thirty years, he waits his entire life.
The Tartar Steppe is a sober and luminous work. The luminosity is literal: the fort is set amidst high mountains and is bathed in pure light and thin air. But the story also achieves a philosophical brightness as it follows one man’s endless waiting in a setting that is stripped of all excessive adornment.
By Zora Neale Hurston
For the language of it.
A novel published in 1937, Hurston wrote it in the African-American vernacular. Which doesn't make it quaint or paternalistic or any other nonsense. It takes a language already established and in reshaping it to tell the life of one Janie Crawford, Hurston tells her story powerfully and expressively, besides reinventing the English language.
I know, I know, that's more than five. But you can't always be reading Great Books. I love the NYT crossword puzzle. One of the great achievements of civilization, I'd say, at least in the domain of shits and giggles. I'm not very good at it, can never get much beyond Wednesday in the daily edition, but Monday and Tuesday, I'm in bliss as I try to get all the clues.
