The Librarian of Celaeno’s Top 20 Book Recommendations, Part II

An Annotated Bibliography: Fiction

Here I conclude my top twenty general recommendations for books for my readers with a list of my top ten picks for fiction. As with nonfiction I’ve tried to steer clear of books that are very well-known or those I’ve mentioned before; on the latter point though there were some I simply couldn’t leave off. I should also note that my reading preferences differ from the casual reader in that my own time is mostly spent with nonfiction- I would guess at a 9.5-0.5 ratio- and that I have a further bias toward older stories. My general impression of Substack is that the fiction community here (or at least those I’ve dealt with) tend toward 20th and 21st century fantasy and sci-fi; this list will this hopefully supplement and inspire those among you who haven’t ventured much past those boundaries, as I have of course in turn learned much from you.

This list includes a mix of novels, short story collections, drama, and poetry. As with nonfiction, I will proceed in chronological order of publication.

Fiction

1. The Oresteia, by Aeschylus, ca. 458 BC.

I cheated a bit at the outset by listing a whole sequence of plays as a single work, but in fairness, this is how they were meant to be received. The Oresteia is a trilogy, a connected set of tragedies that won the prize for drama in the year they debuted. All Greek tragedies were meant to be parts of trilogies; tragically (ironically) we have but this one complete set. Their author was the approximately 30 year old Aeschylus, a veteran of Marathon and one of the most important innovators in drama (he introduced the concept of two characters talking to each other rather than just singing).

The cycle centers on the cursed family of Agamemnon, whose remote ancestor Tantalos tried to trick the gods by offering them the flesh of his own sacrificed son as an offering. Agamemnon’s father Atreus, suspecting his wife’s infidelity with his brother, killed said brother’s sons and fed them to him. The brother then raped his own daughter to produce a new son specifically for revenge, Aigisthos. Aigisthos then took up with Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra after Agamemnon departed to fight in Troy; she further plots to murder her husband because he had to sacrifice their daughter Iphigenia for a favorable wind. It’s that kind of family.

It makes this look like Full House.

I won’t spoil the story by revealing how it all ends, but know that in my opinion, no tale of family horror rivals the Orestia, not even Hamlet. Aeschylus is a brilliant observer of human emotion and using passion expressed through dialogue to establish a grim mood. You know in the opening scene of the first play that the titular character Agamemnon is doomed and why- his family curse, the weight of the deaths he’s responsible for, and his own overweening pride. His speech to the citizens of Argos is spectacular in its dark cynicism, showing the audience that behind his proclamations of glory he knows he’s hated, and not because of his failings, but his greatness. I could write a whole post just about this trilogy, but I’ll leave with my favorite quote from the first play, as recited by RFK:

You can read in online here, or be a man and buy the Loeb version here.

You can also watch two scenes performed in Attic Greek by the Barefaced Greek theater group from Ireland, the Watchman and Agamemnon’s speech. They are both excellent.

2. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, by Omar Khayyam (?) ca. 1100, trans. Edward Fitzgerald, 1859.

This is a favorite of mine for many reasons. I bought a copy of Fitzgerald’s translations of the Persian quatrains when I was a teenager and read them over and over until I had many of them memorized. Even though the poems represent a skeptical and epicurean sentiment (Chesterton hated them), I have always found the spare but witty fatalism of the Khayyam’s rubaiyat to be somehow charming in its disarming despair.

Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise

To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;

One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;

The Flower that once has blown forever dies

In English, a rubai generally has an AABA or AAAA rhyme scheme and free metre. Khayyam’s quatrains are generally each freestanding, but some follow each other.

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
     About it and about; but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went.

With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labour'd it to grow:
     And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd --
"I came like Water and like Wind I go."

There’s a funny thing about these poems though. Omar Khayyam was very much a real person, a Persian philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived from the late 11th to the early 12th century. And he did write poems in addition to his scientific work. However, beyond that, there is enormous controversy about exactly how much of Fitzgerald’s translations are actually the work of Khayyam. Some are probably authentically attributed, some were written by others much later and credited to Khayyam, and some others, well, Fitzgerald may have more or less made up (his translations were very loose). The Rubaiyat is in many ways an amalgam of the mind of a medieval Persian scholar and that of a Victorian dilettante who paradoxically (for a dilettante) became obsessed with a poet he believed endorsed his own rebellion against tradition and religious authority. Read for yourself and decide, bearing in mind that Fitzgerald produced a whopping five editions of his own work, each set of translations differing a bit from the others.

Click here to get the hardcover.

Read it online here.

3. The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, ca. 1350.

I’ve written about this masterful anthology before, so I won’t belabor the same points I’ve made already. To call this a collection of stories would be to do it a profound disservice; Boccaccio essentially created the genre of post-apocalyptic literature, and did so having lived through an actual apocalypse. The basic framing narrative is that a group of three young men and seven young women meet in a Church in Florence, Italy at the height of the Black Plague, only to discover that they’re essentially the only ones left in town. They thus decide to ride out the disaster in the countryside and pass the time telling stories, one from each person for ten days for 100 overall. It’s telling that in a society like ours disaster lit involves roving gangs and zombies; for medievals, closer to the rhythms of life and with fewer technological dependencies, they can make due fairly well without a great deal of disruption. Do give it a read.

Get the annotated hardcover here.

Read it online here.

4. The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, ca. 1400

This is the book you read part of in high school, almost certainly the prologue and in modern English. That is, unless you had that English teacher, the one with the “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” placard in her classroom, the one you ran into at the Renaissance Festival that time, her period-appropriate Rubenesque frame stuffed into a bodice fighting for its life. The one always correcting the misapprehensions she was sure you had about life in the Middle Ages even though you didn’t have any ideas about it in the first place and just wanted your f****** diploma. If you had her, well, Chaucer was an event. You got to see her in her Rennfaire outfit in class and got an extended recitation in what she imagined was Middle English (she learned it at an SCA event while everyone else was swinging). She probably gave you a project where you were supposed to dress up as a pilgrim and act out your character. No, this didn’t happen to me; my high school was full of illiterates immune to such earnestness and no one tried it. I’ve met her since…

It’s never this lady. She just sells stuff on Etsy.

But if that was your sole experience with Chaucer, give his masterpiece another read. It’s everything one could want in excellent anthology fiction; tales retold at the hand of a genius, a man both worldly in his command of human nature but with an eye for the particular characteristics of individuals. Some of his characters, like the Wife of Bath (that English teacher loved her), the threadbare Oxford Cleric and the unctuous conman Pardoner, are simply classics. The latter’s story is a favorite of mine, one I’ve been fortunate to share with those few of my students interested in Middle English over the years. I am also fortunate to have a copy of The Riverside Chaucer, a collection of all of his works, edited and annotated, in the original language, and having taken a proper class in the subject I’ve come to love it even more.

Find the excellent Riverside Chaucer here.

Read it in Middle and Modern English online here.

5. Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, 1820

Much has been written about why boys don’t read fiction anymore (feel free to tag your own takes in the comments). If you want a master-class in exactly the kind of story boys (and men as well) like, though, this is the best single volume work I can think of for the purpose. Tolkien is far grander in his scope; Kipling is more realistic; Robert Howard more visceral and action-driven, etc. But taken as a whole, as a solid read for a young man, Ivanhoe has it all.

The story concerns a man freshly returned from the third Crusade to an England under the tyranny of the regent Prince John. Ivanhoe is from a Saxon family hostile to the Norman ascendency; his father hated his joining Richard the Lionheart’s quest in the Middle East. Ivanhoe also has personal foes acquired from his adventuring days, enemies bound up in turn with the political intrigues surrounding the whereabouts of Richard. If elements of that plot sound familiar, it’s because they’ve been repurposed a million times in various Robin Hood movies, because, yes, this is the book that basically defines the character of Robin Hood in the popular imagination- an ally of Ivanhoe who in subsequent literature becomes protagonist in his own right, along with his Merry Men. It’s one of Scott’s best works, along with Rob Roy, and makes for an enjoyable and surprisingly textured read fit for all ages.

Tote the paperback around with you instead of your phone.

They cast Liz Taylor as Rebecca in the movie version because they couldn’t find any Jews in Hollywood.

6. Mosses from An Old Manse, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1846

If most people remember Hawthorne it’s from high school and from one of his few novels, The Scarlet Letter. This is unfortunate, not because The Scarlet Letter is bad, but because the work is unrepresentative of Hawthorne’s general output. He was a specialist in the short story and his style was a sui generis blend of horror, cynicism, romance, and the uncanny. Poe gets the reputation for Gothic weirdness- not undeserved- but Hawthorne was every bit the macabre spectator of the human condition in his own right, and in many ways a deeper thinker than his contemporary.

Mosses From An Old Manse represents Hawthorne at his best, and if you’ve read any of his short stories, they’ve probably come from this volume. “Young Goodman Brown” drops the reader in medias res into a nighttime procession that is only gradually revealed to be a Witches’ Sabbath featuring all the titular protagonist’s small town associates. Was it all a dream? “Rappacini’s Daughter” is a complex allegory about literal toxic femininity. “The Celestial Railroad” features Yankee ingenuity at work constructing a shortcut to Heaven in darkly humorous parody of A Pilgrim’s Progress. As it happens, Poe liked the collection, but still faulted Hawthorne for hanging out with the Transcendentalists, and to be fair, they were irritating hippies.

Get yours here.

Read it online.

7. Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, 1915.

I like to say I don’t like free verse; it’s really easy to do badly, though some pull it off well. But if there’s one collection of poetry that moves me, it’s Spoon River Anthology, in its day a wildly popular modernist classic that doesn’t get the attention it deserves anymore. The premise of the collection is that the poems are the true epitaphs of deceased members of the eponymous community, their words from the grave revealing their candid thoughts on their own lives and that of their neighbors. It’s quite literally haunting, an extended meditation on mortality and the joys and sorrows of small-town life, heavy on the latter. The story of Minerva Jones always hit me hard.

It’s not light reading to say the least. The characters were drawn from people Masters knew from Lewiston, Illinois, some only thinly disguised, and the fact that the collection of candid stories was a kind of roman á clef led to the book actually being banned in the town until the 70s, with Masters’ own mother (who served on the school board) voting to refuse to allow the book in the local system. This is perhaps understandable to a degree, though it’s to their loss, as Masters could express elements of a teacher’s experience that frankly take me aback in their authenticity.

8. Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaires, 1962

Edgar d’Aulaire was a Swiss-German-Italian from France (yes, really) who married the Norwegian daughter of a clergyman who translated old Norse and moved to the US with the insurance money he got from getting hit by a bus. Besides all that, the pair were both talented artists in multiple mediums, and taking up residence in New York they worked as high-end portraitists until someone suggested they get into children’s literature (the Boomer market was, well, booming). It turned out they had a real talent for this as well, and would go on to produce illustrations for numerous works of the period in their characteristic style. They spent their entire collective career living in Connecticut, producing drawings that charmed a generation.

But they also created their own books, books which reflected their deeply-felt connection to Europe’s mythic lore. D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths is simply a beautiful tome in any format and, though intended for young people, is really suitable for any age, especially for those adults not well-versed in Greek mythology. A companion volume, published in 1967, covers Norse myth with the same blend of child-friendly simply-yet-erudite prose and loving illustrations in both sepia and full color.

The photos I uploaded don’t do justice to the real warmth and depth of the art. I got my oldest daughter this book for her 7th birthday, and she carries it around like a beloved doll. I plan to give my youngest the Norse volume, and we also have the d’Aulaire book on Trolls (disclaimer: it’s not useful for internet arguments). While Edith Hamilton’s Mythology is the best book about myth, I can wholeheartedly recommend d’Aulaires as the best general collection of myths, Greek or Norse, for a kid or casual adult amateur.

Buy your deluxe hardcover version here. Kids will reduce a paperback to shreds with love.

9. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, 1992

I’ve written an entire article about why this book is important, so as with Boccaccio I would belabor points I’ve already made. This is the only book on the list by a living author, in my view one of the most talented writers of fiction around. There have been rumors for years that a movie will be made from it, which I have dreaded as the Woke Era metastasized, but with that dread tide perhaps ebbing it may be possible to imagine a faithful interpretation. Give your ideal cast in the comments.

Buy it here.

10. A Season in Purgatory, by Dominick Dunne, 1993

I come full circle on the Kennedys with this offering. Mark Steyn summed up Dunne’s oeuvre better than I ever could in his great obituary, “No Wonder The Kennedys Hated Him.” Dunne was not only a novelist but a prolific true crime reporter, a man with a knack for knowing the right people and being able to get them talking. He was also the father of a beloved daughter killed in a senseless murder, which made him the particular antagonist of predatory men (he wrote extensively about Phil Spector and OJ Simpson).

A Season in Purgatory is a thinly-veiled fictional account of the real-life murder of Martha Moxley at the hands of Michael Skakel, (though the conviction was later controversially overturned) a nephew-by-marriage of the Kennedy family. Interestingly, though, the fictional murderer, Constant Bradley, is an allegory not of Skakel but of JFK, and the Skakel father becomes more-or-less Joseph P. The book is a searing indictment of the attractions and consequences of proximity to wealth and power, a theme that runs through all of Dunne’s work, as well as undercurrents of disturbed sexuality and desperately-hidden insecurities. The characters are never caricatures; even the incidental players feel fleshed out and real, and the ‘Bradley’ family father especially is layered with his vulpine appetites juxtaposed with his real love and ambitions for his dysfunctional children. More than anything, though, the book represents a curtain pulled back on a world the reader will likely never know, written by a man always close enough to observe the powerful without spooking his quarry.

Buy it here.

That closes out my list of top twenty book recommendations. I hope you find them useful and edifying. I plan to make more specific lists in the future, and as I cast about for ideas for things to add for psi subscribers, I may start offering custom programs of study for people who want them. It’s one of many things I’m considering as I grow.