The Man and His Bookshelf: Christopher Hitchens
A non-exhaustive list inspired by author, writer and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens’s book recommendations.
Literature, Rhetoric, and Criticism (800)
Watership Down by Richard Adams, 1972
Daughter of Fortune by Elizabeth Allende, 1998
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, 1955
Martin Amis’s novels, particularly The Rachel Papers, 1973, Success, 1978, and Money, 1984
Collected Poems by W.H. Auden, 2004
Austen’s Persuasion, 1818
J.G. Ballard’s Crash, 1973; High Rise, 1975; Empire of the Sun, 1984
Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy, 1991–95
Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes, 2008
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, 1953
John Buchan’s Greenmantle, 1916
Cain by Lord Byron, 1821
The Fall by Albert Camus, 1957
The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s by Humphrey Carpenter, 2002
Chaucer’s The Canterbury’s Tales, 1400
Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope, 2002
Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, 1859
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, 1866
Middlemarch by George Eliot, 1871–72
Put Thou Thy Tears into My Bottle by James Fenton, 1969
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
The Ship by C.S. Forester, 1940
The Liar by Stephen Fry, 1991
I, Claudius, 1934, and The Greek Myths, 1955, by Robert Graves
Greek and Roman mythologies, including Aeneas, Apollo and Cassandra, Homer’s Iliad, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Romulus and Remus
Graham Greene’s novels Brighton Rock, 1938; The Power and the Glory, 1940; The End of the Affair, 1951
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, 1961
Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, 1940
Huxley’s Brave New World, 1932
Ulysses by James Joyce, 1904
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, 1916
On the Road by Jack Kerouac, 1957
Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, 1894; Kim, 1901; and My Boy Jack, 1916
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, 1940
Faggots by Larry Kramer, 1978
Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems, 2003
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence, 1928
The Golden Notebook, 1962; The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories, 1978; and The Day Stalin Died, 2002, by Doris Lessing
How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn, 1939
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, 1924
Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel, 2009
Ian McEwan’s novels, particularly The Cement Garden, 1978; The Comfort of Strangers, 1981; Atonement, 2001
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, 1949
Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1667
Lolita, 1955, and Pale Fire, 1962, by Vladimir Nabokov
Edmund Burke by Conor Cruise O’Brien, 2002
Orwell’s early social novels about English life, particularly A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935; Coming Up For Air, 1939; Keep The Aspidistra Flying, 1936
Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, 1938
Orwell’s Animal Farm, 1945
Orwell’s 1984, 1949
All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays by George Orwell (edited by George Packer), 2008
The War Poems of Wilfred Owen, 1994
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, 1957
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, 1963
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (French: À la recherche du temps perdu), also translated as Remembrance of Things Past, 1913
Salman Rushdie’s novels Shame, 1983; The Satanic Verses, 1988; The Moor’s Last Sigh, 1995
The Complete Works of Shakespeare, fifth edn., 2003
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
Dracula by Bram Stoker, 1897
The Story of the Night by Colm Tóibín, 1996
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, 1869
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, 1876
Julian, 1964, and Lincoln, 1984, by Gore Vidal
Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, 1928; Brideshead Revisited, 1945; the Sword of Honour Trilogy, 1952–61
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891, and The Importance of Being Ernest, 1895
P.G. Wodehouse’s stories (‘read for fun!’) particularly The Inimitable Jeeves, 1923; Carry On, Jeeves, 1925; Very Good, Jeeves, 1930; and Sunset at Blandings, 1977
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, 1987
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 2000
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1924
History and Geography (900)
London Under, 2012, by Peter Ackroyd
Infidel: My Life by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 2006
Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 2010
Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum, 2003
The Benn Diaries by Tony Benn, 2005
The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Anthony Beevor, 2003
What is History? by E. H. Carr, 1961
The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield, 1935
The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940 by Isaac Deutscher, 2003
Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figes, 2002
Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel, 1946
The Meaning of Hitler by Sebastian Haffner, 1978
World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made by Irving Howe, 1976
(Two volumes, 1998) I Will Bear Witness 1933–1941 and 1942–1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years by Victor Klemperer
Move Your Shadow: South Africa Black and White by Joseph Lelyveld, 1985
Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World by Kanan Makiya, 1994
Bosnia: A Short History by Noel Malcolm, 2002
The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz, 1953
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford, 1960
George Orwell: Diaries, 2010
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama, 1989
Orientalism by Edward Said, 1978
Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge, 1963
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973
Portrait of an Age by G. M. Young, 1936
Science (500)
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, 1859
The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins, 2011
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking, 1988
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose, 2004
Cosmos by Carl Sagan, 1980
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, 1995
Philosophy (100) and Religion (200)
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life by Theodor Adorno, 1951
Content and Consciousness by Daniel C. Dennett, 2010
Reason, Faith and Revolution by Terry Eagleton, 2009
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, 2004
Leviathan: The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civill by Thomas Hobbes, 1651
The philosophy of David Hume, in particular A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739–40; An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779
On The Nature of Things (De rerum natura) by Lucretius, First-century BC
The Holy Bible: King James Version, 1611
A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch, 2009
Milton’s Areopagitica, 1644
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity by William Paley, 1802
The Two Faces of Islam by Stephen Schwartz, 2002
The writings of Voltaire, including Letters on the English, 1733; Candide, 1759; and Treatise on Tolerance, 1763
Politics and Economics (300)
Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas by Perry Anderson, 2005
The Clinton Tapes: Conversations With A President, 1993–2001 by Taylor Branch, 2010
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, 1988
The Essential Chomsky by Noam Chomsky, 1998
The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way by Peter Hitchens, 2009
Karl Marx’s notable works A Communist Manifesto, 1848, and Das Kapital, 1867–83
Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution by Leszek Kołakowski, 1976
Writers and Politics: Essays and Criticism by Connor Cruise O’Brien, 1965
The writings of Thomas Paine, including The Rights of Man, 1791, and The Age of Reason, 1794
Leon Trotsky’s writings, including Stalin – An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence, 1940; In Defence of Marxism, 1942
The United States Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston), 1776
References
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22 (London: Atlantic, 2010)
Christopher Hitchens, And Yet…:Essays (New York City: Simon & Schuster, 2015)
Christopher Hitchens on Hatred, the Left, and His Favourite Authors – P. G. Wodehouse (1993), The Film Archives, 9 June
John Lloyd, ‘Life before Death’, Financial Times, 31 August 2012
Ian McEwan, ‘Christopher Hitchens, Consummate Writer, Brilliant Friend’, New York Times, 16 December 2011
Open Culture, ‘Ailing Christopher Hitchens Creates a List of Essential Books for an 8-Year-Old Girl to Read’, 7 September 2012
‘Paxman interviews Christopher Hitchens – Newsnight archives’, BBC Newsnight, 15 October 2015
Peter Whitby, ‘Christopher Hitchens obituary’, Guardian, 16 December 2011
The Aura of Abstraction 
You must be logged in to post a comment.