My Favorite Books II: history politics music literature
Discover a curated reading list blending history, politics, music, and literature. From Malcolm X’s autobiography to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Joyce’s Ulysses, explore favorite books that illuminate culture and power.
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Ulysses
by James Joyce
This revised volume of the acclaimed novel follows the complete unabridged text as corrected in 1961. Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce constructs a novel of extraordinary imaginative richness and depth. Unique in the history of literature, Ulysses is one of the most important and enjoyable works of the twentieth century. This edition contains the original foreword by the author and the historic court ruling to remove the federal ban. It also contains page references to the first American edition of 1934.
Book
Black Boy
by Richard Wright
Richard Wright describes what it was like growing up in Jim Crow-era Mississippi.
Book
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X
If there was any one man who articulated the anger, the struggle, and the beliefs of African Americans in the 1960s, that man was Malxolm X. His AUTOBIOGRAPHY is now an established classic of modern America, a book that expresses like none other the crucial truth about our times. "Extraordinary. A brilliant, painful, important book." TEH NEW YORKTIMES
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The Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro
From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day, here is a novel that is at once a gripping psychological mystery, a wicked satire of the cult of art, and a poignant character study of a man whose public life has accelerated beyond his control. The setting is a nameless Central European city where Ryder, a renowned pianist, has come to give the most important performance of his life. Instead, he finds himself diverted on a series of cryptic and infuriating errands that nevertheless provide him with vital clues to his own past. In The Unconsoled Ishiguro creates a work that is itself a virtuoso performance, strange, haunting, and resonant with humanity and wit.
