If you believe everything you read, better not to read.

This list represents my approximate reading list since the beginning of graduate school. The green represents the book(s) that I'm reading currently; anything I've finished is given a rating. If you would like to recommend anything, please let me know--especially in the categories that are lacking in quantity.

Spanish

• Don Quixote (Cervantes) *****
  Highly entertaining.
• Casa de Los Espiritus (Allende) ****
  Prime example of magical realism.
• Niebla (Unamuno) ***
  Weird but poetic. Interesting introspection.
• La Casa de Bernarda Alba (Lorca) *****
  One of my favorites.
• Kiss of the Spider Woman (Puig) *****
  The narrative style is very clever and really brings out the character development.
• Collected Fictions (Borjes)
• A Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez)

French

• The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas) **
  Entertaining, but not that compelling.
• L'Etranger (Camus) ***
  I think it could have been summed up by the last few pages alone.
• Les Miserables (Hugo) *****
  While a compelling story about miserable people, it's more importantly an inspiring story about virtue despite misery.

Russian

• The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky) ****
  Sometimes too wordy, but a few of the chapters are brilliant.
• Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) *****
  With respect to analysis and introspection on relationships, probably the best book I've ever read. The final section, which focused on religion, almost seemed to detract from the completeness of the rest of it.
• The Cherry Orchard (Chekov) ***
  An interesting set of character studies; part of the charm is the difficulty in sympathising with them.
• The Seagull (Chekov)

German

• Metamorphosis (Kafka) ***
  There are some interesting metaphors here, but mostly I thought it was just bizarre.
• Young Torless (Musil)
• Faust (Goethe)

English (British)

• A Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) *****
  It's like a perfect world where everyone is perfectly witty.
• The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde) *****
  Keep in mind that "earnest" was code for "gay" back then.
• A Modest Proposal (Swift) *****
  Hilarious.
• Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) ***
  Not as compelling as I had hoped, though strikingly introspective. Miss Kilman was a brilliantly written character.
• The Divine Comedy (Dante)
• Paradise Lost (Milton)

Enlish (American)

• The Invisible Man (Ellison) ****
  The character progression was a bit hard to believe at times, but gives a pretty shocking look at the politics of the times.
• Beloved (Morrison) *****
  One of the few books for which I will use the cliche "powerful".
• The Life of Pi (Matel) **
  A poor telling of Gulliver's Travels maybe, minus the satire; I didn't find it compelling.
• Letters to the Earth (Twain) ***
  Hilarious, but not as satirical as I had hoped.
• Blood Meridian (McCarthy) ****
  Really compelling, but a bit hard to digest.
• Moby Dick (Melville) ***
  Too much about whaling, and the end was a bit blunt.
• In Cold Blood (Capote) ****
  A really interesting study in capitol punishment and the character of Perry, but I found the story of Capote himself to be much more interesting.
• Heart of Darkness (Conrad) *****
  A clever analysis of the role of 'civilized society'; I especially like the irony of Marlow's insinuation that his quest for truth in the Congo is justifiable.
• The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) ****
  In Jason I think that Faulkner managed to create the most despicable (but not the most evil) character of all the books on this list.
• Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner) ***
  Hard to get into at first, due to the narrative style, but ends quite well. A great indirect telling of the Civil War as suffered by the people of the South.
• Lolita (Nabokov) *****
  One of the positively creepiest books I've ever read... Nabokobv's ability to conjure a ephebophile is uncanny, and the believability of the writing is profound.
• Ulysses (Joyce)

Eastern

• The Art of War (Sun Tzu) **
  I know this is still hailed as great, but I didn't find it very personally relevant.

Middle-Eastern

• The Koran

Non-fiction

• Into Thin Air (Krakauer) ***
  Entertaining. Seems to want to glorify mountain-climbing, but fails to do so.
• The White Album (Didion) *****
  Joan Didion is the author with my favorite writing style/voice, hands down. This essay is exceedingly clever.
• Games People Play (Berne) ***
  Interesting look at social interactions, but it's a bit dated--the author tends to blame most psychological problems on the inferior personalities of women.
• Against Love: A Polemic (Kipnis) ****
  The author could have supported some of her claims better, but overall the read is a compelling argument against the traditional monogamous coupledom that Western society has implicitly adopted.
• The Middle-East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years (Lewis) *
  I found this biased and poorly grounded enough that I stopped reading after the raw history--in the middle of the section with author's commentary on the region.
• Blink (Gladwell) ***
  Although the book is full of fascinating stories from social psychology, the author does a lot of speculating that could have been better supported.
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig) **
  Entertaining but underwhelming. The author writes about a character smarter than himself and excuses his amateur meandering through philosophical concepts with amnesia. Although this book would be a good way to spark an interest in philosophy for some, I found it to be of the same genre of novice philosophy as Ayn Rand, except that where Rand's work is horrific, unoriginal, and incoherent, Pirsig's work is pleasant and thought-provoking.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

• Steel Beach (Varley) *
  The author clearly worships Heinline and just recycles all of his ideas in a pretty unoriginal manner.
• The Use of Weapons (Banks) ****
  Creative view of the future and totally entertaining. Very clever as well--not just mindless sci-fi.
• Ender's Game (Card) **
  I would have liked it if I were a little kid when I read it.
• His Dark Materials trilogy (Pullman) *****
  Another fantasy series for children primarily, but beautifully creative. The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass.
• The Talisman (King and Straub) ***
  Steven King's writing translates well into fantasy, but the fact that no character in this book was anything but completely good or completely evil turned me off.
• The Children of Hurin (Tolkein)