A
Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner)
Ackerley, J. R.
Adolescent, The (Dostoyevsky)
After Nature (Sebald)
Ahab, Captain
A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), see Remembrance of Things Past
Allen, Esther
Ambler, Eric
Amulet (Bolaño)
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare)
Asimov, Isaac
“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame” (Hopkins)
Atxaga, Bernardo
Austen, Jane
Austerlitz (Sebald)
Averno (Glück)
B
Balzac, Honoré de
Barnes, Albert
Battel of the Books (Swift)
Baum, Frank
Beckett, Samuel
Beginning of Spring, The (Fitzgerald)
Bell, Anthea
Bennett, Arnold
Bernhard, Thomas
Berry, Wendell
Best of It, The (Ryan)
Best of Youth, The (film)
Bhat, Shashi
“Birches” (Frost)
Birnbaum, Alfred
Black Oak Books
Blue Flower, The (Fitzgerald)
Bolaño, Roberto
Boleyn, Anne
“Book” (Pinsky)
Bostonians, The (James)
Bring Up the Bodies (Mantel)
Brodkey, Harold
Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoyevsky)
Browne, Thomas
Browning, Robert
Buchan, John
By Night in Chile (Bolaño)
C
Canada (R. Ford)
Capote, Truman
Carver, Raymond
Cervantes, Miguel de
Chaucer, Geoffrey
Clayhanger (Bennett)
Cody’s Books
Coetzee, J. M.
Coffin for Dimitrios, A (Ambler)
Collins, Wilkie
Connelly, Michael
Conrad, Joseph
Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
Cromer, David
Cromwell, Thomas
D
Dahl, Arne
Dance, Dance, Dance (Murakami)
David Copperfield (Dickens)
“Death’s Door” (Gunn)
Defoe, Daniel
Demons (Dostoyevsky); deleted chapter of
Der Nister (Pinhas Kahanovitch)
de Waal, Edmund
Dickens, Charles; characters in; sentimentality in
Dickinson, Emily
Distant Star (Bolaño)
Dogs of Riga (Mankell)
Don Quixote (Cervantes)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor; flaws in; grandeur and intimacy in; narrator in; translators of
Double, The (Dostoyevsky)
Doyle, Arthur Conan
Dresden, bombing of
E
Elephant Vanishes, The (Murakami)
Eliot, T. S.
Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee)
Emigrants, The (Sebald)
Empson, William
End of Eternity, The (Asimov)
Enright, D. J.
Ephrussi, Charles
Executioner’s Song, The (Mailer)
F
Faceless Killers (Mankell)
Family Mashber, The (Der Nister)
Faulkner, William
Fine Balance, A (Mistry)
Finnegans Wake (Joyce)
Firewall (Mankell)
First Things to Hand (Pinsky)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Penelope
Ford, Ford Madox
Ford, Richard
Foundation’s Edge (Asimov)
Freud, Sigmund
Frost, Robert
G
Gabriel, Philip
Gambler, The (Dostoyevsky)
Garnett, Constance
Gersão, Teolinda
Gilmore, Gary
Glück, Louise
Golden Bowl, The (James)
Goldman, Emma
Goncharov, Ivan
Good Soldier, The (F. M. Ford)
“Grand Inquisitor, The” (Dostoyevsky)
Grant, Ulysses S.
Great World, The (Malouf)
Gunn, Thom
H
Hamburger, Michael
Hamlet (Shakespeare)
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Murakami)
Hare with Amber Eyes, The (de Waal)
Hartley, L. P.
Hazzard, Shirley
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Henry IV, Part One (Shakespeare)
Herzen, Alexander
Higgens, Humphrey
Highsmith, Patricia
Holmes, Sherlock
Homer
Hopkins, Gerard Manley
Howells, William Dean
Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
Hulse, Michael
I
Idiot, The (Dostoyevsky)
Iliad (Homer)
In Cold Blood (Capote)
Innocence (Fitzgerald)
In Search of Lost Time (Proust), see Remembrance of Things Past
Iphigenia in Forest Hills (Malcolm)
It’s a Wonderful Life (film)
I Will Bear Witness (Klemperer)
J
James, Henry; deliberate inconclusiveness of; grandeur and intimacy in; on interaction of characters and plot; narrator in; notebooks of
Jarrell, Randall
“Jolly Corner, The” (James)
Journalist and the Murderer, The (Malcolm)
Joyce, James
Jull Costa, Margaret
K
Kafka, Franz
Kahanovitch, Pinhas (Der Nister)
Kahneman, Daniel
Killer Inside Me, The (Thompson)
Kilmartin, Terence
King Lear (Shakespeare)
Klemperer, Victor
L
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence)
Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di
Lawrence, D. H.
le Carré, John
Leopard, The (Lampedusa)
Li Po
Lord Jim (Conrad)
Loser, The (Bernhard)
Lost Illusions (Balzac)
M
Macbeth (Shakespeare)
Macdonald, Dwight
Macdonald, Ross
Magarshack, David
Maias, The (Queirós)
Mailer, Norman
Malcolm, Janet
Malouf, David
Man for All Seasons, A (Bolt)
Mankell, Henning
Manning, Olivia
Man Who Loved Children, The (Stead)
Marías, Javier
McDuff, David
Melville, Herman
Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare)
Michaels, Leonard
Milton, John
Mistry, Rohinton
Moby-Dick (Melville)
Modern Library
“Modest Proposal, A” (Swift)
Montaigne
More, Thomas
Murakami, Haruki
Murray, Steven T.
My Father and Myself (Ackerley)
“My Last Duchess” (Browning)
My Past and Thoughts (Herzen)
Myshkin, Prince
Mysterious Island, The (Verne)
N
Nabokov, Vladimir
Neruda, Pablo
Nesbø, Jo
New Yorker, The
Nin, Anaïs
Norwegian Wood (Murakami)
Nostromo (Conrad)
Notes from Underground (Dostoyevsky)
“No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief” (Hopkins)
O
Oblomov (Goncharov)
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)
Old Wives’ Tale, The (Bennet
t)
1Q84 (Murakami)
“On Vanity” (Montaigne)
Orwell, George
Othello (Shakespeare)
Our Town (Wilder)
P
Pale Fire (Nabokov)
Parade’s End (F. M. Ford)
Paradise Lost (Milton)
“Pasture, The” (Frost)
Pevear, Richard
Phineas Finn (Trollope)
Pinsky, Robert
Place of Greater Safety, A (Mantel)
Plato
Platonov, Andrei
Plumed Serpent, The (Lawrence)
Portrait of a Lady, The (James)
Possessed, The (Dostoyevsky), see Demons
Pound, Ezra
Pride and Prejudice (Austen)
“Private Life, The” (James)
Project Gutenberg
Proust, Marcel
Pyramid, The: The First Wallander Cases (Mankell)
Q
Queirós, Eça de
R
Ransom (Malouf)
Raw Youth, A (Dostoyevsky)
Redbreast (Nesbø)
Remembrance of Things Past (Proust); English translations of; as simultaneously grand and intimate
Rings of Saturn, The (Sebald)
Ripley Under Ground (Highsmith)
“River-Merchant’s Wife, The: A Letter” (Pound)
Road to Wigan Pier, The (Orwell)
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe)
Robots of Dawn, The (Asimov)
Rosanna (Wahlöö and Sjöwall)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard)
Rubin, Jay
Ryan, Kay
S
Saramago, José
Scott Moncrieff, C. K.
Sebald, W. G.
Secret Agent, The (Conrad)
Segerberg, Ebba
Shakespeare, William; authority of; grandeur and intimacy in; invisibility of; and paradoxical relationship between audience and play; textual discrepancies in
Shteyngart, Gary
Sjöwall, Maj
Skin of Our Teeth, The (Wilder)
Sons and Lovers (Lawrence)
Sophocles
“Soul” (Platonov)
Spoils of Poynton, The (James)
St. Aubyn, Edward
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)
Stoppard, Tom
Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence)
Super Sad True Love Story (Shteyngart)
Swift, Jonathan
T
Tale of a Tub, A (Swift)
Tempest, The (Shakespeare)
Theroux, Paul
Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman)
This Boy’s Life (Wolff)
Thompson, Jim
Thompson, Laurie
Threepenny Review, The
Tolstoy, Leo
To the Lighthouse (Woolf)
Tragic Muse, The (James)
Transit of Venus, The (Hazzard)
Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer)
Trollope, Anthony
Troubled Man, The (Mankell)
“Tune” (Ryan)
Turn of the Screw, The (James)
Twain, Mark
U
Under Western Eyes (Conrad)
V
Vargas, Fred
Verne, Jules
Village Life, A (Glück)
Volokhonsky, Larissa
W
Wahlöö, Per
War and Peace (Tolstoy)
“Waste Land, The” (Eliot)
West, Rebecca
“When I Was Mortal” (Marías)
White Lioness (Mankell)
Whitman, Walt
Wilder, Thornton
Wild Iris, The (Glück)
Wild Sheep Chase, A (Murakami)
Williams, William Carlos
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The (Murakami)
Wings of the Dove, The (James)
Wire, The (TV series)
Wizard of Oz, The (Baum)
Woes of the True Policeman (Bolaño)
Wolff, Tobias
Wolf Hall (Mantel)
Woman in White, The (Collins)
Woolf, Virginia
Wordsworth, William
Y
Your Face Tomorrow (Marías)
ALSO BY WENDY LESSER
Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets
Room for Doubt
The Pagoda in the Garden (a novel)
Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering
The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters
A Director Calls
Pictures at an Execution
His Other Half: Men Looking at Women Through Art
The Life Below the Ground: A Study of the Subterranean in Literature and History
Hiding in Plain Sight: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography (editor)
The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues (editor)
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wendy Lesser is founder and editor of The Threepenny Review. She is the author of eight previous books of nonfiction and one novel. Her most recent book is the prizewinning Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen String Quartets. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. She divides her time between Berkeley, California, and New York City.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Wendy Lesser
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lesser, Wendy.
Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books / Wendy Lesser.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-374-28920-1 (hardback)
1. Books and reading. 2. Lesser, Wendy—Books and reading. 3. Literature—History and criticism. I. Title.
Z1003 .L543 2014
028'.9—dc23
2013033000
www.fsgbooks.com
www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks
eISBN 9780374709815