Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread

by Michiko Kakutani

Judd Apatow was a comedy freak as long as he can remember. Growing up, he circled the names of comedians in TV Guide so he wouldn’t miss one of their appearances on a talk show. When he was in the fifth grade, he wrote a thirty-page

The Larry Sanders Show, that the key in storytelling was “to try to get to the emotional core of each character” and that “comedy is about truth and revealing yourself.”

With ink in his pen and rhymes in his brain,

Tupac Shakur.

I always say Shakespeare’s plays: they are endlessly fascinating, so layered and complex, so staggering in simple terms of language, that you could read and reread them, again and again, until a rescue boat arrived (or didn’t arrive). His plays remind us of the miracle of the human imagination, which defies the most basic laws of physics—the creation of something from nothing (or nearly nothing—some shards of old recycled plotlines), and the

invention of teeming, populous worlds, now known to schoolchildren across the globe.

is the clowns who tell the truth.”

It’s been read as a parable about the dangers of men trying to usurp the powers of God or appropriate the procreative power of women, and as an allegory about Western imperialism and the terrible human costs of colonialism and slavery.

Victor is guilty of unaccommodated ambition and pride.

“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Gary Shteyngart

“the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”