Mark Kurlansky is the author of Cod, Salt, and 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. His first novel, Boogaloo on Second Avenue, will be published this spring.
The Famished Road by Ben Okri (Anchor, $15). An astonishing novel that makes the reader casually accept magic as a gritty commonplace reality. Could Okri be the greatest of Nigeria’s many great writers? Every chapter leaves you breathless with the experience, told through the eyes of a young boy with the gift of wonder. Will wonders never cease, one character asks, and the boy responds in innocent curiosity, “Why would they?”
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The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola (out of print). Food as a metaphor full of social commentary, anger, and irony. A story about the people who are fat and the people who are thin, set amid beautifully described mountains of food, in a time of political turmoil. The book is out of print in English, but I’m currently working on a new translation for Modern Library.
The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh (Riverhead, $13). A small, simple book; a novel of the Vietnam War that fills the heart with almost unbearable sadness. In 1969, Bao Ninh from Hanoi was one of 500 who went south with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. He was one of 10 who came back. From that experience he has written a haunting novel of a veteran’s search for an inner peace.
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Mariner, $14). How is it that one of the most important and powerful books ever written could be about a pesticide? To be first is something of value, and this book, with the power of language, ideas, and argument, did much to launch environmentalism, which makes it one of the most important books of the 20th century.
Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer (Plume, $15). Was journalism ever better written or by a more interesting mind? Mailer put himself in the middle of one of the first major demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and his commentary resembles the best of conversation, with inquiries and suppositions leading in endlessly surprising directions.
Coney Island of the Mind
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