Good Minds Suggest—E.L. Doctorow's Favorite Books About Memory
Posted by Goodreads on January 6, 2014
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
"Hemingway's chip-on-the-shoulder, sometimes nasty (as with his gossip about Scott Fitzgerald) memories of his life as a young writer in 1920s Paris."

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
"The master looking back, wresting meanings out of his hard-lived, unwillingly expatriate, literary, and lepidopterist life."

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
"Sebald narrates, in the restrained fictive voice of himself, the
lives of presumed relatives and others doomed one way or another by the
Holocaust."

Patrimony by Philip Roth
"Roth writes fearlessly and lovingly in this sad but magnificently clear-eyed recollection of his dying father."

The Mind of a Mnemonist by Alexander R. Luria
"A Russian psychologist's account of a man who was unable to forget
anything—who visualized every sound and was plagued by his astounding
hypermnesic capacity. This should be read with the great Jorge Luis Borges's story Funes the Memorius,
about a similarly affected young man who has to sit in the dark to
reduce the unforgettable sights and sounds pouring into his brain."

Comments Showing 1-15 of 15 (15 new)
date
newest »

message 1:
by
jordan
(new)
Jan 07, 2014 11:24AM

reply
|
flag









I agree, Sarah. They asked the guy for 5 recommendations. He gave them over to us. Do we really expect him to check them for political correctness first? Would anyone complain if a female author named five of her favorites and neglected to name one written by a white male?


Oh, come on, Sarah.Doctorow has chosen five of his favourite books on memory, if he had instead been obliged to make a list that did not offend any reader by way of excluding female or Chinese writers then he may yet have offended Irish transexuals by excluding writers from that group.