TPM Investigative Reporter Josh Kovensky: 5 Books That Get Me Unstuck 

TPM Article Topics
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We’re asking our fellow TPMers to share their own personal reading recommendations: books they love or that have shaped their lives.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1422336
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@joshkovensky It’s been several years since my last read of Moscow to the End of the Line. I recommend this book to anyone willing to listen. I think I’m going to go mix up a pitcher of Aunt Clara’s Kiss and pull this book off the shelf for another read. Thanks!

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@joshkovensky I found “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” astonishingly moving – and heartbreaking. It’s one of those books in which I remember little of the “plot,” but certain scenes are burned into memory (particularly the brutal experience of characters in Manchuria).

I should pick up “The Argonauts.” I’ve heard many good things.

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Amazing list. It’s now at the top of my book plans. I always suspected that Josh is really smart, but this list just seals that conclusion.

I’m seriously impressed and wished to hell that I had friends with this kind of provocative and thoughtful taste.

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I love this list. Josh Kovensky is, as they say, a man of parts.

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Lists like this always remind me how pedestrian my reading habits are.

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Great list. I’m adding at least two of those books to the top of my Up Next list. Let me offer two suggestions: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. A tough look at Jamaican political history In the 70s loosely centered around the attempted murder of (unnamed) Bob Marley. And, The Bone People by Keri Hulme. A poetically written love story set in New Zealand between an isolated partially Maori artist, a damaged but trying Maori man, and the literally washed ashore European kid he has come to raise as his son. Subtle political overtones about colonialization, not to mention unique family dynamics in a culture very different from mine anyway.

Both are fantastic. And but thanks Josh!

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IIRC George Orwell is assumed to have gotten TB in Paris.

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Everyone has their favorites…

I just finished Salka Viertel’s THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS which manages to combine her making connections for Nazi refugees in Hollywood and her own intense familial devotions. The book’s funniest set piece has got to be the meeting that she brokered and witnessed between Arnold Schoenberg & Irving Thalberg.

I’ve read two unrhymed translations of Goethe’s FAUST, PART 1 ( Stuart Atkins for Princeton University Press, and C. F. MacIntyre for New Directions). They explore heights and depths rare in literature.

Brecht’s THE CAUCASION CHALK CIRCLE illustrates with wit and irony clashes between more or less ordinary people who also include a comedian of sorts. The prologue, seemingly unrelated, sets the story in place.

NJAL’S SAGA, the best known of the many Icelandic sagas, has their virtues of swift action, tart dialog, memorable characters. You have to get over the seemingly endless introduction of new characters to enjoy it, or the other sagas.

Natalia Ginzburg’s novel ALL OUR YESTERDAYS (also translated as A LIGHT FOR FOOLS) brilliantly gets the seeming randomness of life, with its many stories and portraits.