Book Weeks. . .

Because someone else was playing this game earlier.  . .

Books are the greatest invention human beings ever game up with. Books are what justify our existences. Books are the encapsulation of human souls.

Here are the ones that matter most to me in no particular order:

The Halloween Tree - Ray Bradbury. 
Just about the only book I know that completely changes shape when you read it later in life: what was thrilling, whimsical and charming as a child becomes horrifying to the adult. But it is not an indictment of childhood naivete, but of adult cowardice.

Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury 
What do you fear? Mr. Dark knows! How can you stop him? Only you know. . .












Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury. 
Notice a trend here? About books themselves - lose them and we lose our souls. It's happening now, it's happening now. Books aren't being burnt, but we're not reading them. Pay attention, look around. . .






Life and Fate - Vasily Grossoman. Sandwiched between Hitlerism and Stalinism, war and genocide, tyranny and anarchy, can human dignity survive? In Grossman, it can and it has.








The Captive Mind -Czeslaw Milosz  Why did so many sell their souls to Stalin? Would you be any different?

Breaking the Spell - Daniel Dennett. It amounts to. . .what do we really know about ourselves?  How can we know? That's largely what I took from it anyway. . .

"Politics and the English Language" - George Orwell. I'm including essays - they count. To really know Nineteen Eighty Four, you have to know the context from whence it came. Read all the Orwell wrote, but most especially read this. Language has power. Don't fuck with it. If there is a way to save ourselves from ourselves (by no means a sure proposition), it lies with Orwell. Read this. Pay attention, and never EVER allow language to be distorted or abused. Seriously, read this. I mean it.

Momo - Michael Ende. 
I only reluctantly read this in grade nine. Only late did its significance really sink in. I believe it's a true story. Evil forces in the world are after your time and your stories. Only children can save you.

"Baloney Detection Kit" by Michael Shermer. An update of the Carl Sagan kit of the same name, this is an inoculation against bullshit. Don't worry about the nonsense Shermer puts on his Twitter feed, this is still valuable.









Harlan Ellison - Harlan Ellison. 

Neil Gaiman compared Harlan Ellison to a massive piece of performance art, of which the stories were just a part. A professional liar by admission, Ellison was a walking story, he lived and breathed stories, he was a story that never old and never got stale. It's impossible to list any one work, as they all seem part of a continuum, inseparable from the man himself. Ellison himself was the book, and every story, anecdote and aphorism a chapter.


The Farthest Shore - Ursula LeGuin. Something by LeGuin had to get in. Anything that can make sense of death deserves mention.

TimeQuake - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 

Though by far not his best work, it does nevertheless encapsulate what Vonnegut was about.










The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams. 
Profound in ways nobody got the first time.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera. Deeply important, but I've forgotten why. . .













A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens. 

Something by Dickens needed to get in. Courage, sacrifice, humanity. His boldest statement of purpose, his greatest moment of moral clarity.  Perhaps not as uplifting as A Christmas Carol but .. .fuck, I'll include that too.







"A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. Cliche be damned, the book is joy-in-a-box. It's not about buying shit at Christmas time. It's an appeal to our better natures. Kindness is the only value that matters, and remains the only worthy goal of any philosophy or religion. Amazing how simple, but how difficult that can be.  . .






Hamlet - William Shakespeare. 
It's a play, so it doesn't really count. But it is the greatest story ever told by the most honest writer who ever lived. The writer who almost made all the others redundant. . . .