30 Books to Read Before You Die (Pt. 42)

We’re on part 42 and if you’ve stuck around this far, I’m honestly thankful for that. I’m also thankful for all the nice messages and comments I’ve been getting from these lists. I work my ass off making them and I’m not gonna lie, it’s getting harder and harder to think of things to talk about involving books now we’ve got to 42 sections. But, I still have a few things up my sleeve I’d like to discuss. In this section, I’d like to discuss why I love reading Russian Literature and what is so special about it for me.

Russian Literature became an obsession for me when I hit my late teens and just before I started university. I began reading books like Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, and Dead Souls. I was not only obsessed with Russian Literature, I was obsessed with everything Russian. I wanted to learn about the class culture, the Romanovs, the art and architecture, the work life and everything in between. Over time, I began to read wider into the works of Gogol and Nabokov, Dostoevsky’s The Double and Notes from Underground fascinated me. But, as you probably know—two Russian novels, Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov hold a special place in my heart (purely because Pierre from War and Peace made me mad as hell the way he treated his lover! I love that book too though, but Anna Karenina is better). After this, I started reading Chekhov and Pushkin, Turgenev and Bulgakov. And then, Gorky, Goncharov and the amazing—Anna Akhmatova.

I find that Russian novels, especially of the golden age, help us to understand our own lives better by representing them in characters we feel are most removed from ourselves, but are actually just like us in so many ways. Russian novels have something special and magical about them that you really don’t find elsewhere. I’m going to say the cliché thing and tell you that the Golden Age novels are some of the best novels ever to be written. Not only in the Russian language, but in any language. The best novels to be written and translated—ever.

Now that I’ve said some nice things about Russian novels and their novelists, you can go and read them all because really, they are absolutely amazing. We’re going to do the same thing as always for now though. I’m going to give you 30 books I have read and then mark my favourites with an (*) and finally, I’ll talk about one or two intermittently if you haven’t had enough of me talking to you already. Let’s get on with it then, without further introduction—here’s the list!

1231-1240

1231. The Physician by Noah Gordon

1232. Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

1233. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

1234. The Never Ending Story by Michael Ende

1235. Deception Point by Dan Brown

1236. The Holy Sinner by Thomas Mann

1237. The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende*

1238. Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

1239. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

1240. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

1241-1250

1241. Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende

1242. 'Other Voices, Other Room' by Truman Capote

I bought this when I really knew I shouldn’t have been spending money on more Capote books. But, this one was just so addictive—it has a really intense and dark storyline with some great psychological themes. Basically what happens is that a boy is sent to live with his father and when he gets there, it’s actually someone else living there that he must live with. It’s nothing as he expected and the rest is just an incredibly torturous story about how little you should trust people, no matter how well you know them.

1243. Maurice by EM Forster

1244. The Monk by Matthew Lewis

1245. The Collected Stories by Stefan Zweig

1246. Moonfleet by JM Faulkner

1247. The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1248. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

1249. The Inheritors by William Golding

1250. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

1251-1260

1251. The Sun King by Nancy Mitford

1252. The Garden of Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

1253. Green Mansions by WH Hudson

1254. Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

1255. A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift

1256. Daylight and Nightmare by GK Chesterton

1257. Moon Whales by Ted Hughes

1258. Life’s Little Ironies by Thomas Hardy

1259. The History of Rasselas by Dr. Samuel Johnson

1260. The Old English Barron by Clara Reeve