Books On My 2007 Reading List
Explore my 2007 reading list featuring top books I read that year. Discover must-read titles, hidden gems, and literary favorites from my personal collection.
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The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays
by Albert Camus
One of the most influential works of this century, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide; the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.
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The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Argues that belief in God is irrational, and describes examples of religion's negative influences on society throughout the centuries, such as war, bigotry, child abuse, and violence.
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The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic tale of one man’s pure innocence in the face of a society obsessed with power, money, and manipulation The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and “be among people.” Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder as Dostoevsky traces the surprising effect of this “positively beautiful man” on the people around him, leading to a final scene that is one of the most powerful in all of world literature. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s masterful translation of The Idiot is destined to stand with their versions of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Demons as the definitive Dostoevsky in English.
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Casino Royale
by Ian Fleming
For incredible suspense, unexpected thrills and extraordinary danger, nothing can beat James Bond in his inaugural adventure. "Die Another Day, " starring Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry, will be in theaters in fall 2002.
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The Castle
by Franz Kafka
From the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle. Translated and with a preface by Mark Harman. Arriving in a village to take up the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of a castle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter and baffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about his duties. The Castle's original manuscript was left unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death. Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman’s new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power previously unknown to English language readers.
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The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
by John Maynard Keynes
Originally published: New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936.
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Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
A darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue from one of the leading writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of Lolita. "Half-poem, half-prose...a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. One of the great works of art of this century." —Mary McCarthy, New York Times bestselling author of The Group An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, Vladimir Nabokov's witty novel achieves that rarest of things in literature—perfect tragicomic balance.
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A Beautiful Mind
by Sylvia Nasar
A biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994.
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The Orchid Thief
by Susan Orlean
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean—and the reader—will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion. In this new edition, coming fifteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after she first met the “orchid thief,” Orlean revisits this unforgettable world, and the route by which it was brought to the screen in the film Adaptation, in a new retrospective essay. Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. Praise for The Orchid Thief “Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean’s] gifts in full bloom.”—The New York Times Book Review “Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times “Orlean’s snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures.”—The Washington Post Book World “Orlean’s gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description.”—Boston Sunday Globe “A swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great.”—The Wall Street Journal
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The Wanderers
by Richard Price
The Wanderers, a teenage gang in the 1960s Bronx, are coming of age and drifting apart. Tormented by cold-hearted girls and cold-blooded ten-year-olds, maniacal gangs and murderous parents, they are caught between the juveniles and the adults. This is the acclaimed writer's first book, which he wrote when he was only twenty-four, and the basis for a major feature film.
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Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
The story of Saleem Sinal, born precisely at midnight, August 15, 1947, the moment India became independent. Saleem's life parallels the history of his nation.
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Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Presents Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist novel, first published in 1938, in which Antoine Roquentin, a French writer, chronicles his reactions to the world and people around him, which combine to give him an overpowering feeling of nausea.
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Last Exit to Brooklyn
by Hubert Selby
The decadence and violence of the urban streets is graphically portrayed in this novel set in a post-WWII Brooklyn slum.
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The Rum Diary
by Hunter S. Thompson
The irreverent writer's long lost novel, written before his nonfiction became popular, chronicles a journalist's enthusiastic, drunken foray through 1950s San Juan.
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Democracy in America
by Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country's equality of conditions, its democracy. The book he wrote on his return to France, Democracy in America, is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone. When it was published in 2000, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop's new translation of Democracy in America—only the third since the original two-volume work was published in 1835 and 1840—was lauded in all quarters as the finest and most definitive edition of Tocqueville's classic thus far. Mansfield and Winthrop have restored the nuances of Tocqueville's language, with the expressed goal "to convey Tocqueville's thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today." The result is a translation with minimal interpretation, but with impeccable annotations of unfamiliar references and a masterful introduction placing the work and its author in the broader contexts of political philosophy and statesmanship.
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Terrorist
by John Updike
From one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century—and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series: “A chilling tale that is perhaps the most essential novel to emerge from September 11” (People) about an eighteen-year-old devoted to Allah, who’s convinced he’s discovered God’s purpose for him. “The most satisfactory elements in Terrorist are those that remind us that no amount of special pleading can set us free of history, no matter how oblivious and unresponsive to it we may be.” —The New York Times Book Review The terrorist of John Updike’s title is eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three. Devoted to Allah and to the Qur’an as expounded by the imam of his neighborhood mosque, Ahmad feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping New Jersey factory town of New Prospect. Neither Jack Levy, his life-weary guidance counselor at Central High, nor Joryleen Grant, his seductive black classmate, succeeds in diverting Ahmad from what the Qur’an calls the Straight Path. Now driving a truck for a local Lebanese furniture store—a job arranged through his imam—Ahmad thinks he has discovered God’s purpose for him. But to quote the Qur’an: Of those who plot, God is the best.
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The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe
Wolfe details his wild cross-country ride with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, offering a vivid portrayal of the hippy subculture in its own joyful, psychedelic, excessive, and terrifying colors.