Lawrence Weschler was in town recently and stopped by the store. In talking with Jan and Paul, he mentioned that he had a list of recommended books. Here it is:

A Weschler Table, in no particular order

Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting

Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows (Muybridge)

Jonathan Schell, Unconquerable World

or better: Observing the Nixon Years

Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt

Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould’s Secret (or the whole Up in the Old Hotel collection)

Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Selected Essays

David Graeber, Debt

Ian Frazier, Out of New York

      Great Plains

William Finnegan, Cold New World

Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Emperor

Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Dave Eggers, Zeitoun

Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye

Mark Salzman, True Notebooks

Richard Halpern, Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence

Edward Snow,  Inside Breughel

Harry Berger, Manhood, Marriage & Mischief (Rembrandt’s Night Watch)

Benjamin Binstock, Vermeer’s Family Secrets

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (but the U Calif /Arion Press edition!)

David Eagelman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife

Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

Larry McMurtry, Duane’s Depressed

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Ford Madox Ford, The Fifth Queen,

    or  The Good Soldier

Emma Donahue, Room

Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories and Forty Stories

  (though if they were available, I’d prefer: Sadness, and Amateurs)

Grace Paley, Selected Stories

(though if they were available I’d prefer Enormous Changes…)

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

Bruce Duffy, The World as I Found It

Jose Saramago, Blindness, or

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ 

Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Assn, J. Henry Waugh proprietor

Maira and Tibor Kalman, Unfashion

Michael Benson, Beyond

Dennis Adams, Double Exposure

Chris Marker, La Jetee (the book, but also the DVD)

W.H. Auden, Poems (would have preferred Thank You, Fog)

Nazim Hikmet, Things I Didn’t Know I Loved

Wislawa Szymborska, Collected Poems

Zbigniew Herbert, Barbarian in the Garden

Report from the Besieged City

Czeslaw Milosz, Collected Poems

Christopher Logue, War Music

Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan Smartest Boy in the World

Lauren Redniss, Radioactive

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

 

Overflow (Others I wish I could have included, but this is getting ridiculous):

John Berger, G.

Nicholas Mosely, Hopeful Monsters

John McPhee, The Control of Nature

Janet Malcolm, The Crime of Sheila McGough

John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact

Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

Noelle Oxenhandler, The Eros of Parenthood

Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City

Hope in Dark Times

Danilo Kis, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger

Philip Roth, The Great American Novel

The Breast

Mark Salzman, Lying Awake