Books on my bedside shelf part one
Discover a curated bedside bookshelf featuring literary classics like Steppenwolf, Brave New World, The Master and Margarita, and more. Explore this thoughtful reading list of fiction and existential must-haves for your nightstand.
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Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's story shows a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability. An ominous warning to the world's population, this literary classic is a must-read.
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The Sorrow of War
by Bảo Ninh
The daring and controversial novel that took the world by storm-- a story of politics, selfhood, survival, and war. Featured in The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick airing September 2017. Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier, provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. Originaly published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its nonheroic, non-ideological tone, The Sorrow of War has won worldwide acclaim and become an international bestseller.
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We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Before Brave New World... Before 1984...There was... WE In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier -- and whatever alien species are to be found there -- will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason. One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful 1-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State. The discovery -- or rediscovery -- of inner space...and that disease the ancients called the soul. A page-turning SF adventure, a masterpiece of wit and black humor that accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism, We is the classic dystopian novel. Its message of hope and warning is as timely at the end of the twentieth century as it was at the beginning.
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The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosinski
A young boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, wanders alone from one village to another in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.
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Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
An autobiographical novel featuring Harry Haller in "an experimental mix of symbolism, realism, and fantasy."--Cover.
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Peter Camenzind
by Hermann Hesse
After a young writer leaves his Swiss mountain village to experience the world, his illusions are crushed by the suffering he witnesses, until a friendship with an invalid restores his hope.
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Александр Исаевич Солженицын
Recounts the experiences of Shukhov, a prisoner at a Soviet work camp in Siberia, as he struggles for survival.
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August 1914
by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenit︠s︡yn
Expanded by Solzhenitsyn to almost twice the length of the original edition, this novel reconstructs the assassination of tsarist Prime Minister Pyotr Stolupin and the outbreak of the First World War
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The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
Originally published: Dana Point, Calif.: Ardis, 1995.
