George Stade

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Ulysses by James Joyce (Vintage, $17). An epic of the human body, Joyce called it, the source of our values, ideas, longings. This novel is tough-minded and charitable, written with unmatched verbal dexterity. Its goal: to produce in the reader philosophic “equanimity.”

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Nostromo by Joseph Conrad (Penguin, $10). The nightly news illustrates how much Conrad got right about imperialism and revolution and the human types who make them happen. The prose is marvelous, the characters unforgettable, the implicit theme a cure for consoling delusions.

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The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (Vintage, $10). Set in a parallel world that comments on the one we all live in. Ideas come to life, seem to exist apart from their inventors, romp, coax, caress, possess, kill with their brain-softening credibility.

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Collected Poems: Yeats (Picador, $18). I can’t formulate exactly what it is in Yeats that gets to me, but I know that some of his poems have sunk down into my bone marrow where they stimulate the production of antibodies to humbug. And the man had an ear.

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The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (Avon, $7). Freud’s first full-blown demonstration that dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, puns, poems, work—all the things humans do—are full of significance we didn’t know was there. He restored meaning to what had been wiped clean by the death of God, but this time the meaning was not alien and inhuman.

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Tarzan of the Apes

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