Best books...chosen by David Denby

David Denby’s new book, Do the Movies Have a Future?, offers a rousing defense of the role traditional cinema can play in our digital age. Below, the veteran New Yorker film critic names his favorite books.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Bantam, $7). What is there to say except that it’s the greatest of all realist novels? Tolstoy, like Virgil, is completely adequate (by which I mean amazingly capable) for any situation that he chooses to look at—love, sexual disgust, family, social life high and low, physical labor, despairing death.

Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dover, $4). Tolstoy’s opposite—the partial view, the embittered view. The narrator is a retired civil servant, still young but full of disgust. This is among the greatest of meta-novels—a book about creating a voice in which the voice keeps undermining itself.

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