A Reading List of Favorites

This list represents several novels and plays that I highly recommend for your next excursion into fiction. When you feel like reading a novel or play that uses powerful narrative voice to identify something genuine about the human condition, come to this list. These books are by no means 'light' reading, but there is far too much of that fluff out there anyway.

Some of the authors will be recognizable, and some you will have to look up. All of them are an excellent read. The books are not in any particular order.

So without further ado...

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

This novel submerges the reader in a tale of murder, intrigue, philosophy, art, and semiotics. Set in a monastery, the tale directly involves the unsolved murders of several monks, but turns out to involve much more. Labyrinthine libraries, Catholic inquisitors, and ideological warfare form the epic scope of this novel of the Middle Ages. Eco creates a complete world in this book, and it should not be missed.

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

Perhaps Hemingway's best novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls follows the path of a soldier in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. When given orders to blow a bridge behind the Fascist lines, Robert Jordan hooks up with Spanish partisans for support. Hemingway was a journalist in Madrid during this time, and witnessed the horrors of the war firsthand. His powerful portrait of the war through one man represents one of the greatest novels of our time.

Fury, Salman Rushdie

One of Rushdie's most recent novels, it tells the story of Malik Solanka, a successful and learned man who suddenly finds himself filled with unbelievable rage. Alone on the streets of New York, the reader follows him through the decadence and futility of modern culture. Rushdie has constructed a vehicle of deconstruction with this novel that tears aside the shallow trappings of our lives to expose the emptiness of our hearts, our hunger for genuine communication, and our inner rage at the institutions of society.

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

Roy has come upon the scene as a shining example of what the Western canon has lacked because of its exclusion of non-Western authors. Roy's fluid and sensual prose leads the reader through a tragic and powerful love story about social law, and how it contrives to destroy. Set in India, Roy envelopes the reader in the sights, sounds, and smells of her native land. A beautiful and well-crafted novel.

Woman at Point Zero, Nawal al Saadawi

Only barely fictional, this harrowing story follows a woman through the torture of female genital mutilation, rape, third-class citizenship, and total disempowerment. The novel presents a horrific story that mirrors the experience of thousands of women worldwide.

The Condemned of Altona, Jean-Paul Sartre

The Condemned of Altona represents a twisted drama about post-war Germany from the original author of existentialist philosophy. The destructive power of guilt couples with the aimless conflict of stagnant relationships in this darkly comic piece about the real psychological dissonance created by war.

A Farwell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

In this novel, Hemingway draws on experience as an ambulance driver in WWI. The short, terse style typical of Hemingway resonates strongly in this novel about love, war, and loss.

Baudolino, Umberto Eco

Baudolino has the gift of language. Within minutes, he can fluently speak a foreign tongue. Through a chance meeting with the Frederick I, Baudolino is raised from the status of a peasant into a royal adviser. Finding friends at school and at the court, Baudolino constructs a quest to find the lost tribe of Israel in a strange and distant land that lives only in his mind (or does it?). This novel plumbs the depths of the medieval imagination while at the same time exploring the inner relationships of language, lies, religious faith, and symbolism.

Richard II, William Shakespeare

This play follows the life of the weak king Richard from the height of his power to his eventual demise at the hand of traitors. At its core, the story is one of unbridled hubris which meets its demise at the hands of Henry Bolingbroke, whose strength and decisiveness contrasts sharply with Richard. However, Richard's journey from throne to tomb presents a man unwittingly born into a role he was not fit to serve and who furthermore has his world torn down around his ears.

The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer

This play by the lately deceased Larry Kramer covers the early unwillingness of the press to educate the public about the AIDS virus in the 1980's. A stunning and heartbreaking drama, this play stands as a call to action against prejudice and ambivalence in the face of human suffering.