My bibliothæca idealis
Of course, as a reader, from time to time I like to think about this beautiful wooden library with a long ladder on its side, where I would store sort of 'classic' books I enjoyed. I don't think I will have such a library because I am not a particularly big fan of accumulating things just cause. But the library exist in my mind I guess
Please, follow me to the Bibliotheca Idealis. Not in any particular order... Lot's of French titles, for the interested.
1. Le petit prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
It's one one the first book that really touched me. Easy to read and short, you can finish it in a couple of hours. This little classic is the fantastic story of quest for the meaning of love and friendship of a lonely little Prince with curly blond hair. Leaving his tiny planete and his only love a single rose, the prince meets a series of strange and sad characters, until he meets a true friend: the fox...
Saint-Exupery (1900-1944), was a French pilot, poet and author. Saint-Exupery occupied a variety of odd jobs, and was on and off in the French, as well as the American Army. He started writing while in Dakar, to releive bordom between assignment flying mail on a dangerous route from France to Morocco. His most famous work, Le Petit Prince 1943, was written during his stay in the United States. He was killed in action in 1944, while in the American Air Force stationed in north Africa.
2. L'étranger, Albert Camus (1913-1960)
L'Etranger seems to be a boring story about a poor and apparenlty insensitive guy whos life abruptly turns from ordinary to tragic. Camus gives meaning to the story in one sentence: "if a man doesn't cry at his mothers funeral, he runs the risk of facing death penalty". But under this mask of absurdity, the main character, Meursault portrais the highest of humain qualities, perhaps unconciously: authenticity to one's own human experience, regardless of the expectations of society.
Born in Algeria, Camus begins his life modestly but gets a grant to go to the French "Lycée" where he discovers philosophy with the help of his teacher and friend Jean Grenier. Later he becomes journalist for an underground left wing paper where he is introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre. His novel "L'Etranger" is published at Gallimard and acclaimed by the critics but Camus refuses the existentialist label attached to his work. In 1957, he wins the Noble Prize in Literature. He dies in a car crash with is friend and publisher, Michel Gallimard in 1960.
3. 1984, George Orwell (1903-1950)
London, 1984, largest population center of Airstrip One. Airstrip One is part of the vast political entity Oceania, eternally at war with one of two other vast entities, Eurasia and Eastasia. In a grim city and a terrifying country, where Big Brother is always Watching You and the Thought Police can practically read your mind, Winston is in grave danger. He knows the Party's official image of the world is fiction. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization, dedicated to the destruction of the Party.
Orwell was born in India, but moved to England as a child. He began to write at an early age, but he did not enjoy school and failed to win a university scholarship. He worked low paying jobs in India and Europe for a while, then decided to become a professional writer in 1928. In 1933 he assumed the name "George Orwell". Toward the end of the second World War, he wrote Animal Farm which made Orwell prosperous. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was written "to alter other people's idea of the kind of society they should strive after". Sadly Orwell died from tuberculosis in 1950 and never lived to see how successful would become.
4. L'écume des jours, Boris Vian (1920-1950)
In the sureal fiction "Foam of the Daze", Chick, Alise, Chloé and Colin are young men and women in love, they listen to Duke Ellington, skate, and laugh a lot. In this world where pianos are also cocktail mixers, reality does not seem to have much hold on the characters who ignore "work", a dark little factory plant, a distant ugly spot in the landscape. But after a while Chick gets obsessed with the philosopher, Jean-Sol Partre and starts ignoring Alise, then Chloe gets sick and the world starts closing in onto the characters...literaly.
Boris Vian was born in 1920. He was trained as an engineer, but was also inventor, poet, fiction writer, signer, jazz and trumpet player. He was an icon of the 1950's subversive French youth. He wrote under various different names like Vernon Sullivan and Bison Ravi. He also loved the american culture and translated various poems and fictions in French. He died from cardiac arrest in 1959, at the opening of the movie "J'irai crache sur vos tombes", an adaptation of his novel which he was denouncing.
5. L'alchimiste, Paulo Coelho
6. Le nom de la rose, Umberto Eco
7. Le portrait de Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
8. Catcher in the Rye, Jerome David Salinger
9. Don Quichotte, Miguel de Cervantes
10. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
11. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
12. La chartreuse de Parme, Stendhal
13. La vie devant soi, Romain Gary
14. La nausée, Jean-Paul Sartre
15. Fables, Jean De La Fontaine
16. Les chants de Maldoror, Isidore Ducasse de Lautréamont
17. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
18. La métamorphose, Franz Kafka
19. Histoires extraordinaires, Edgar Allan Poe
20. Contes fantastiques, Guy de Maupassant
21. Demian, Hermann Hesse
22. A prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
23. Poil de Carotte, Jules Renard
24. Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Douglas Adams
25. Gargantua et Pantagruel, Rabelais [1494 - 1553]
26. Princesse de Clèves, Mme de La Fayette (1634-1693)
27. Contes, like "Le Petit Poucet", Charles Perrault (1628-1703)
28. Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 -1778)
29. Léviathan, Paul Auster
30. chasse-galerie (La), Honoré Beaugrand
31. The Bhagavad-Gita [author ?]
32. Selected Poems, Jalal al-Din Rumi
33. Jin Ping Me [author ?, 16th century]
34. The Concentric Deaths, Jack London
35. The Thousand and One Nights, according to Galland
36. Stories, Julio Cortázar
37. The Book of the Dead
38. The Divine Comedy, Dante
39. Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile Gautier
40. The Conduct of Life + Poems, Ralph Waldo Emerson
41. Leaves of Grass + The Complete Poems, Walt Whitman
42. Le second sexe, Simone de Beauvoir
43. Triste Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss
44. Memoires d'Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
45. A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
46. Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
47. The Guide, R. K. Narayan
48. An Imaginary Life, David Malouf
49. Complete Poems, EE Cummings
50. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
51. The Collected Stories, William Faulkner
52. A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
53. Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
Arthur Asher Miller was an Jewish-American playwright and author, and a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over 61 years. Miller's best-known works are The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons (which won the 1947 Tony Award for best play), and Death of a Salesman, which are still widely studied and performed world wide. He was also known for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe (1956-1961)!
Please, follow me to the Bibliotheca Idealis. Not in any particular order... Lot's of French titles, for the interested.
1. Le petit prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
It's one one the first book that really touched me. Easy to read and short, you can finish it in a couple of hours. This little classic is the fantastic story of quest for the meaning of love and friendship of a lonely little Prince with curly blond hair. Leaving his tiny planete and his only love a single rose, the prince meets a series of strange and sad characters, until he meets a true friend: the fox...
Saint-Exupery (1900-1944), was a French pilot, poet and author. Saint-Exupery occupied a variety of odd jobs, and was on and off in the French, as well as the American Army. He started writing while in Dakar, to releive bordom between assignment flying mail on a dangerous route from France to Morocco. His most famous work, Le Petit Prince 1943, was written during his stay in the United States. He was killed in action in 1944, while in the American Air Force stationed in north Africa.
2. L'étranger, Albert Camus (1913-1960)
L'Etranger seems to be a boring story about a poor and apparenlty insensitive guy whos life abruptly turns from ordinary to tragic. Camus gives meaning to the story in one sentence: "if a man doesn't cry at his mothers funeral, he runs the risk of facing death penalty". But under this mask of absurdity, the main character, Meursault portrais the highest of humain qualities, perhaps unconciously: authenticity to one's own human experience, regardless of the expectations of society.
Born in Algeria, Camus begins his life modestly but gets a grant to go to the French "Lycée" where he discovers philosophy with the help of his teacher and friend Jean Grenier. Later he becomes journalist for an underground left wing paper where he is introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre. His novel "L'Etranger" is published at Gallimard and acclaimed by the critics but Camus refuses the existentialist label attached to his work. In 1957, he wins the Noble Prize in Literature. He dies in a car crash with is friend and publisher, Michel Gallimard in 1960.
3. 1984, George Orwell (1903-1950)
London, 1984, largest population center of Airstrip One. Airstrip One is part of the vast political entity Oceania, eternally at war with one of two other vast entities, Eurasia and Eastasia. In a grim city and a terrifying country, where Big Brother is always Watching You and the Thought Police can practically read your mind, Winston is in grave danger. He knows the Party's official image of the world is fiction. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization, dedicated to the destruction of the Party.
Orwell was born in India, but moved to England as a child. He began to write at an early age, but he did not enjoy school and failed to win a university scholarship. He worked low paying jobs in India and Europe for a while, then decided to become a professional writer in 1928. In 1933 he assumed the name "George Orwell". Toward the end of the second World War, he wrote Animal Farm which made Orwell prosperous. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was written "to alter other people's idea of the kind of society they should strive after". Sadly Orwell died from tuberculosis in 1950 and never lived to see how successful would become.
4. L'écume des jours, Boris Vian (1920-1950)
In the sureal fiction "Foam of the Daze", Chick, Alise, Chloé and Colin are young men and women in love, they listen to Duke Ellington, skate, and laugh a lot. In this world where pianos are also cocktail mixers, reality does not seem to have much hold on the characters who ignore "work", a dark little factory plant, a distant ugly spot in the landscape. But after a while Chick gets obsessed with the philosopher, Jean-Sol Partre and starts ignoring Alise, then Chloe gets sick and the world starts closing in onto the characters...literaly.
Boris Vian was born in 1920. He was trained as an engineer, but was also inventor, poet, fiction writer, signer, jazz and trumpet player. He was an icon of the 1950's subversive French youth. He wrote under various different names like Vernon Sullivan and Bison Ravi. He also loved the american culture and translated various poems and fictions in French. He died from cardiac arrest in 1959, at the opening of the movie "J'irai crache sur vos tombes", an adaptation of his novel which he was denouncing.
5. L'alchimiste, Paulo Coelho
6. Le nom de la rose, Umberto Eco
7. Le portrait de Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
8. Catcher in the Rye, Jerome David Salinger
9. Don Quichotte, Miguel de Cervantes
10. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
11. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
12. La chartreuse de Parme, Stendhal
13. La vie devant soi, Romain Gary
14. La nausée, Jean-Paul Sartre
15. Fables, Jean De La Fontaine
16. Les chants de Maldoror, Isidore Ducasse de Lautréamont
17. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
18. La métamorphose, Franz Kafka
19. Histoires extraordinaires, Edgar Allan Poe
20. Contes fantastiques, Guy de Maupassant
21. Demian, Hermann Hesse
22. A prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
23. Poil de Carotte, Jules Renard
24. Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Douglas Adams
25. Gargantua et Pantagruel, Rabelais [1494 - 1553]
26. Princesse de Clèves, Mme de La Fayette (1634-1693)
27. Contes, like "Le Petit Poucet", Charles Perrault (1628-1703)
28. Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 -1778)
29. Léviathan, Paul Auster
30. chasse-galerie (La), Honoré Beaugrand
31. The Bhagavad-Gita [author ?]
32. Selected Poems, Jalal al-Din Rumi
33. Jin Ping Me [author ?, 16th century]
34. The Concentric Deaths, Jack London
35. The Thousand and One Nights, according to Galland
36. Stories, Julio Cortázar
37. The Book of the Dead
38. The Divine Comedy, Dante
39. Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile Gautier
40. The Conduct of Life + Poems, Ralph Waldo Emerson
41. Leaves of Grass + The Complete Poems, Walt Whitman
42. Le second sexe, Simone de Beauvoir
43. Triste Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss
44. Memoires d'Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
45. A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
46. Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
47. The Guide, R. K. Narayan
48. An Imaginary Life, David Malouf
49. Complete Poems, EE Cummings
50. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
51. The Collected Stories, William Faulkner
52. A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
53. Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
Arthur Asher Miller was an Jewish-American playwright and author, and a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over 61 years. Miller's best-known works are The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons (which won the 1947 Tony Award for best play), and Death of a Salesman, which are still widely studied and performed world wide. He was also known for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe (1956-1961)!
posted by minetto at 11:12 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home