Throughout 2019 I’ve written a weekly books column in the Irish Times, where each Saturday I write about a favourite pre-21st century book. My introductory spiel is here.
Week 1: ‘The Unwomanly Face of War’ by Svetlana Alexievich
Week 2: ‘Antwerp’ by Roberto Bolaño
Week 3: ‘Notes From Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Week 4: ‘Practicalities’ by Marguerite Duras
Week 5: ‘Essays and Aphorisms’ by Arthur Schopenhauer
Week 6: ‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Virginia Woolf
Week 7: ‘The Gladiators’ by Arthur Koestler
Week 8: ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’ by Friedrich Nietzsche
Week 9: ‘America’ by Jean Baudrillard
Week 10: ‘But Beautiful’ by Geoff Dyer
Week 11: ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead’
Week 12: ‘Valis’ by Philip K. Dick
Week 13: ‘Quartet’ by Jean Rhys
Week 14: ‘The Dispossessed’ by Ursula K. Le Guin
Week 15: ‘The Fight’ by Norman Mailer
Week 16: ‘À Rebours’ by J.K. Huysmans
Week 17: ‘Holy the Firm’ by Annie Dillard
Week 18: ‘The Baader-Meinhof Complex’ by Stefan Aust
Week 19: ‘Erotism’ by Georges Bataille
Week 20: ‘Tropisms’ by Nathalie Sarraute
Week 21: ‘The Trouble With Being Born’ by E.M. Cioran
Week 22: ‘The Bloody Chamber’ by Angela Carter
Week 23: ‘Cain’s Book’ by Alexander Trocchi
Week 24: ‘Meditations’ by Marcus Aurelius
Week 25: ‘Whatever’ by Michel Houellebecq
Week 26: ‘Água Viva’ by Clarice Lispector
Week 27: ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’ by Sigmund Freud
Week 28: ‘The Archaic Revival’ by Terence McKenna
Week 29: ‘Woodcutters’ by Thomas Bernhard
Week 30: ‘SCUM Manifesto’ by Valerie Solanas
Week 31: ‘Nadja’ by André Breton
Week 32: ‘Writing on Drugs’ by Sadie Plant
Week 34: ‘The Art of the Novel’ by Milan Kundera
Week 35: ‘The Adversary’ by Emmanuel Carrère
Week 36: ‘Against Interpretation’ by Susan Sontag
Week 38: ‘London Fields’ by Martin Amis
Week 39: ‘Play It As It Lays’ by Joan Didion
Week 40: ‘Reader’s Block’ by David Markson
Week 41: ‘Moby Dick; or, The Whale’ by Herman Melville
Week 42: ‘Stalingrad’ by Antony Beevor
Week 43: ‘Baise Moi’ by Virginie Despentes
Week 44: ‘From the Berlin Journal’ by Max Frisch
Week 45: ‘Moral Maxims or Reflections’ by La Rochefoucauld
Week 46: ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’ by Carl Jung
Week 47: ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ by JG Ballard
Week 48: ‘The Death of Adam’ by Marilynne Robinson
Week 49: ‘Fictions’ by Jorge Luis Borges
Week 50: ‘Confessions’ by Saint Augustine