Summer Reading, Summer Lists VIII
Back in July of 2014 the New Yorker ran a piece titled “A Prisoner’s Reading List” by Alex Halberstadt. It is a profile of Daniel Genis, who served a variety of prison terms at a dozen maximum and medium security prisons, and in the course of doing so, compiled a reading list of 1046 books. The article does not provide the complete list (nor would we have room to reproduce it here) but referenced in the article among the books that became the anchors this man’s life are:
- Memoirs from the House of the Dead by F. M. Dostoevsky
- The First Circle by Aleksandr I. Solzheni︠t︡syn
- Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover
- The Collected Writings of Rousseau edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly
- Hunger by Knut Hamsun
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
- The Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides
- Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson
- Naked by David Sedaris
- The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope
- Arabian Nights: the book of a Thousand Nights and a Night selected tales translated and with the original footnotes by Sir Richard Burton
- Vanity fair: A Novel Without a Hero by William Makepeace Thackeray
- Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories by Herman Melville
- The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil
- A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul