Andrew Solomon

Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (Scribner, $28), a 2001 National Book Award finalist, chooses his favorite books.

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (Knopf, $64). With each reading I discover new materials, new deceptions, and a richness beyond all previous hopes. While self-obsession and social narrative can drive me around the bend, I find that in Proust I get swept up in the endless self-examination of the narrator; I am particularly compelled by his delicious nostalgia.

Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud (W.W. Norton, $9). This volume contains the clearest explanation of the real difficulty of life—reconciliation of the personal and the social. Freud reveals the mechanisms of the mind with a calm brilliance that shines no less brightly for all the recent attacks on psychoanalysis.

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Learn to Wear Orchids by Kathleen and Jean Shepard (out of print). I found this in a secondhand bookseller’s shop when I was about 20, and I bought it entirely for its title. It’s a ridiculous little story about a dowdy language teacher who makes herself over into a glamorous seductress—but it’s written with all the charm and certainty of the world between the wars.

Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg (Harcourt Brace, $7). This grossly underappreciated collection is, in my view, the best of all children’s books. It’s wildly imaginative, gently moral, and quintessentially American, both in its diction and in a certain rough-hewn but kindly common sense. It was read to me by my father, so rereading it always carries me back to a very happy stage when I was more innocent than I knew.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (Viking Press, $14). I find reading Tolstoy a giddy experience: You are plunged headfirst into a reality that seems stronger and clearer than actual experience. If I could write like anyone, I’d want to write like Tolstoy—to have that vernacular of veracity that seems to strip characters to their purest essences. To read this book is to learn a great deal about both the violent and kind impulses of man.

Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf (Penguin USA, $10). It’s hard to choose one Virginia Woolf book, since she is, of all writers, the one who most clearly articulates the world as I live in and perceive it, and from whose work I draw the most acute comfort. The particular sadness of Jacob’s Room reminds me of times when life has taken me away from myself.