The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (NYRB, $20). This vast attic of a book is the strangest, funniest, and most consoling work I know. It’s the last full expression of the pre-modern world, a compendium of bizarre anecdotes, rough wisdom, and sardonic commentary. Open it anywhere and you’ll find something extraordinary.
Buy The Anatomy of Melancholy at Amazon
Italian Folk Tales by Italo Calvino (Harvest, $25). Folk tales are the fount, the origin of all storytelling. I might have chosen Grimm, but Calvino’s tales have a sunny and bewitching matter-of-factness—enlivened by his own inventive rearranging—that is irresistible.
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The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay (Dover, $8). This Australian children’s classic is the funniest children’s book ever written. Lindsay’s illustrations are marvelous—full of the same wicked energy that drives his prose. I’ve loved it for more than 50 years.
The Collected Letters by George Bernard Shaw (Out of print). Shaw the playwright has suffered a certain amount of neglect in recent years, quite unjustifiably: His plays are not all just talk, as they seem to be when badly directed, but intensely dramatic explorations of every kind of human emotion. And even those who find his plays too wordy might enjoy the letters. What continues to delight me even more than the brilliant wit and sparkling intelligence is the wide generosity, the unsentimental kindness of the man.
The Moomin books (all of them) by Tove Jansson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $7 each). Jansson was a genius of a very subtle kind. These simple stories resonate with profound and complex emotions that are like nothing else in literature for children or adults: intensely Nordic, and completely universal.
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