Hey there, I just came across your blog and I was genuinely interested in your works. I am 18 BTW, I wanted to start reading philosophy and literature and wanted some unconventional start, you know. Not with the classics and all. Can you recommend me some books? That's it and I really admire you, just by reading one of your blogs...
Hello there! I definitely have lots of recommendations, and I figured I'd make this public so it could benefit anyone in search of a read. I'll do my best to stray away from well-known titles and give you my personal favorites, in no particular order or organised manner. Most of these are going to be originally french though, I have a cultural bias.
κ©For No Good Reason, Nathalie Sarraute. A short play that strays away from anything you might expect from theatre. It explores the dynamic between friends that might not be as close as they realise.
κ©The Seagull, Anton Tchekov. A little bit more into the classics realm, I think it's not spoken about nearly enough. A family lakehouse becomes the decor to all sorts of relationship drama, between the love of a young couple to the difficult family ties between a mother and her son.
κ©The Wanting Seed, Anthony Burgess. A striking dystopic construction that will impact you just as much, if not more, than 1984. It's just as relevant and not nearly as well known.
κ©La Marge Molle, Johann TrΓΌmel. A wonderfully dark satire that follows a pitiful specimen of the human race as he grapples with his dreams of oddity and greatness. (This book might be difficult to get your hands on, however, it wasn't printed much. I recommend looking on second-hand reseller websites.)
κ©Appetites for thought, Michel Onfray. Philosophy and food become intertwined. What more could you want?
κ©And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Definitely on the weirder side, heavily inspired by a true story experienced by the authors in their youth, before fame in the literary world. One of my favorite novels ever, and a decently short read.
κ©Midaq Alley, Naguib Mahfouz. Unlike anything else I've read, a charming and brutal portrait of the underbelly of 1940s Cairo. So full of life and unexpectedly emotional.
κ©Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre. Again, leaning towards better known classics, but this one in particular is a philosophical novel that blends so many aspects of day to day life we never tend to look at. I think about some moments daily, the impact on my life was considerable. Quite a more difficult read, and not at all lighthearted.
κ©Borderline, Vercors. I swear when i started this book i had no idea where it was going. An unexpected exploration of what makes us human and how blurry the line that separates us from animality truly is.
κ©Claudine Γ l'Γ©cole, Colette and Willy. One of her first books, I believe, and my favorite one from the series of four. It's witty, it's entertaining, it's outlandish and it's by far one of the most joyful depictions of teenage girlhood I've seen (a nice change from what I'm used to).
This is all i can come up with for now, I truly hope this helps! I'll try to keep updating this list if I remember more titles worth mentioning.
