24 books that shaped me
A biographical list for the curious reader
Following the interest in my post 100 Books to Read Before It Is Too Late, I thought I would make a series of these lists. They do not make a canon. Instead, they prompts more enriching, more enjoyable, more globally diverse reading.
During the week I really enjoyed a post by Natalie McGlockin, 22 books to read before you die? how about book experiences instead. I entirely recommend her approach of pursuing experiences, rather than canon checklists. I especially liked her experience, “a book that makes you see the world differently.” That is what I aim for the Burning Archive to offer you.
According to my writing schedule, this week’s post was to be week seven of my eight-week China leg of my World History World Tour. But I have been laid low with a winter cold, and so have given myself a couple of days to recover my health rather than write through brain fog. Don’t worry the World History World Tour will resume next week.
Rather than leave you in the lurch, I decided to repost a piece I wrote in 2016. Yes, nine years ago! This is a history publication after all. I republished this piece “A list of 21 books that shaped me” in my book From the Burning Archive: essays and fragments 2015-2022.
In addition to the 21 books from this list I have added three books that have shaped me, especially over the last decade. Together they make my list of 24 books that shaped me.
24 books that shaped me
The three ‘new’ books that have shaped me are:
John Darwin After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000 which provides the framework narratives with which I interpret history and the world
Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible that enabled me to plumb the depths of the enigmatic, fearsome ruler of Russia, and to escape the maze controlled by this perfect symbol of power.
Zbigniew Herbert, Mr Cogito, the collection of the Polish poet published in 1974 from which
The original list of 21 books that shaped me, from From the Burning Archive is here.
A list of 21 books that shaped me
Originally posted on The Burning Archive blog 2 August 2016
This list may never end, or so the green dream of the solitary reader goes.
1. A book of modern verse whose name I cannot recall but it was from this fawn paperback that I first absorbed, reading and hearing verses as a child, the taste for modernism.
2. A Teach Yourself Russian book, from which, though I never got much past da and nyet, I created a vision of an Other Land in my memory.
3. Wisden. From its statistics and spirit of English summer wistfulness, I elaborated a now defunct philosophy of sport.
4. A now forgotten historical young adult fiction or chivalric romance of the crusades that gave me a love of history.
5. Russell Braddon’s Year of the Angry Rabbit (1964) which I confused with a political world of apocalyptic possibility and corrupted cynicism.
6. Trollope’s Palliser novels that gave me a preternatural sense of political and bureaucratic life, but left me for a long time a denizen of the nineteenth century.
7. Anna Karenina, the first great novel I read in my teen years, in a Penguin paperback edition that had a cover illustration of a magically impossible, for me, scene of aristocratic skaters in winter Moscow or St Petersburg.
8. Alfred Jarry’s Père Ubu, which I heard, but did not read, on ABC Radio National’s Radio Helicon, back when there were true arts programs on the radio. Its energy of pre-WWI cultural breakdown and artistic rebellion returned me to the twentieth century.
9. Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, for reasons I have elaborated on elsewhere on this blog (see “Madness and History”).
10. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, out of whose tradition of rescuing the poor stockinger from the condescension of posterity I conceived in rootless error my failed early academic research career that sought to recover the lived experience of the workers of nineteenth century Australia.
11. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, which took me to giddy heights of abstraction but still taught a sophisticated discipline in conceiving and perceiving social phenomenon. Blessedly, it also inoculated me against the academic vice of Marxist nostalgia.
12. Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that showed me both the uncanny power of ideas and how even a sociologist can write to seek salvation from personal torment.
13. Thomas Bernhard, The Loser, The Lime Works, Concrete, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, and others. Of all the great post-1945 modernist authors who I discovered through the recommendations of critics, Bernhard intrigued me most, with his musical, obsessive rants by intellectual outsiders.
14. Proust, In Search of Lost Time. I still feel like Proust, on a search for redemption through art or culture (beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all there is to know and all that ye need to know on this earth) – and to escape the force of self-defiling habit that is among the banal evils of the world.
15. Szymborska’s View with a Grain of Sand, which made me realise that I could write poetry again.
16. A Book of Luminous Things: an International Anthology of Poetry, edited by Czeslaw Milosz, which sustained my spirit and mind through many dark years of disconsolate wandering through the outer corridors of power.
17. The Tempest, as imagined through Greenaway’s film, Prospero’s Books, which reanimated my enchantments and made me spurn my own Milan and find again my precious books in my own solitary isle.
18. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, which brought me back again into history, and cured me of the latent violence of political radicalism.
19 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Millenium: A History of our Last Thousand Years that introduced me to global history and made me in mid-life an explorer again.
20. W.G. “Max” Sebald, The Rings of Saturn that mesmerised me with its melancholic mental events, and made me rethink whether I need ever write within the shackles of a genre again.
21. Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism that revealed to me the conservative disposition I had long cloaked in discontent with what life had dealt to me.
9 I read all of Foucault when my topic of focus was supposed to be Latin American literature . The students obsessed over Bakhtin and carnivalizaton … and I heard something different and still hear it, thankfully.