Randy Cohen writes “The Ethicist” column for The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of The Good, the Bad & the Difference: How to Tell Right From Wrong in Everyday Situations (Doubleday, $24). Here he chooses “;six books that aren’t such unarguably immortal works of genius that it would be dull, obvious, or self-aggrandizing to list them.”
Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright by Steven Millhauser (Vintage, $12). A novel in the form of the biography of one 11-year-old boy as written by another, it is smart, funny, and touching. (This would also go on my list of Six Terrific Books With Unreliable Narrators.)
Rates of Exchange by Malcolm Bradbury (Viking Penguin, $12). The comic misadventures of Professor Petworth (or Petwurt or Pitwit or Pervert) as he travels to Slaka, capital of an imaginary Soviet-bloc nation, to deliver a lecture on language as a medium of exchange. A satire of academic life, an ingenious analysis of how language works, a chocolatey dessert cake—except for the part about the cake.
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Talking Heads by Alan Bennett (BBC Publications, $12). Six plays, monologues, that are simultaneously incredibly funny and heartbreakingly sad. It’s easy to be first one, then the other, but to do both at the same time is rare and moving and true.
The Face of Battle by John Keegan (Viking Press, $15). Military history, but not for buffs. In relating the experience of ordinary people in appalling circumstances, from Agincourt to the Somme, Keegan asks profound questions about human experience, including that most profound of all: Why do we do what we do?
How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev (Routledge, $20). A little book with a big idea about race in America. It will make you see the world differently.
Life of Johnson by James Boswell (Oxford Univ. Press, $19). Okay, this is unarguably an immortal work of genius, but it is so teeming with life, so rich with understanding of the human heart that it can’t be omitted. (Bonus: witty conversations and vivid anecdotes of debauchery.)
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