KAMILLA ISALIEVA / UNSPLASH
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Concerned about your free time, our journalist shares with you a list of 33 books to have read.
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We are sometimes booksellers from father to son. But it happens that there is a form of transmission from bookseller to bookseller. On a social network, Cyrille Falisse, owner of the Papiers Collés bookstore in Draguignan, tells us this story: “When I became a bookseller ten years ago, I replaced a bookseller who was retiring. I asked him to write down for me on a piece of paper a list of the books he liked the most and that I should have read. Here it is. » There follows a double-sided photo of a piece of unfolded and slightly torn paper, where the names of 33 books appear, written in blue ballpoint pen on small squares, in careful script.
To my great shame, I have read very few of them. While the authors are not at all unknown. The bookseller (forty years in the business!) obviously chose them with great care and perhaps a hint of mischief. This made me want to read all these books and in turn send you the atypical list. I wish you beautiful winter evenings!
1. J. D. Salinger: “A Dream Day for the Banana Fish” (a short story)
2. Hermann Hess : « Demian »
3. Robert Musil: “The Dismays of Student Törless”
4. Camilo José Cela: «the Family of Pascal Duarte» (a Nobel Prize)
5. Jorge Luis Borges: “Fictions” (short stories)
6. Paul Bowles: “Tea in the Sahara”
7. Yevgeny Zamyatin: “The Flood”
8. Larry Watson : « Montana 1948 »
9. Arundhati Roy: “the God of Small Nothings”
10. Magda Szabó: « la Porte »
11. Russell Banks: “Angel on the Roof” (nine short stories)
12. Raymond Carver: “Nine Stories and a Poem”
13. Imre Kertész: “Etre sans destin”
14. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Scarlet Letter” (1850, the oldest of the list?)
15. Joyce Carol Oates: “Zombi” (the story of a serial killer)
16. Chester Himes: “The Blind Man with the Gun”
17. Isaac Bashevis Singer: “Shosha” (another Nobel)
18. Richard Morgiève: “A little man from behind”
19. Melanie Rae Thon : « Iona Moon »
20. Ludmila Oulitskaïa : « Sonietchka »
21. Agota Kristof: “the Great Notebook”
22. Willa Cather : « Mon Antonia »
23. Tchinguiz Aïtmatov : « Djamilia »
24. Margaret Atwood: “the Blind Killer” (the title evokes that of issue 16, right?)
25. John Cheever: “The Angel on the Bridge”
26. Isaac Babel: “Red Cavalry” (short stories, published in 1926)
27. Varlam Shalamov: “Tales from Kolyma” (his life in a gulag)
28. Ella Maillart: “Forbidden oases” (Nicolas Bouvier was a fan)
29. Georges Duby: “Bouvines Sunday: July 27, 1214” (well, a history book)
30. Mikhail Bulgakov: “Morphine” (a short story)
31. Herman Melville : “Bartleby” (also a short story)
32. James Joyce: “The People of Dublin”
33. Julien Gracq: “At the castle of Argol” (his first novel)
