Christopher Hitchens's Book Recommendations

"I have read The Cruel Sea about 50 times before I was 15."

"[I read this book] about 50 times before I was 15."

"The gold standard."

"This biography reaches the heart of the labyrinth—the intense and wondrous life of Jorge Luis Borges."

"[The author's] complex, majestic, rhythmical twelve-volume novel sequence."

"[The author]'s neglected masterpiece novel."

"Once [the author] succeeded in getting [this series printed], it became obvious that something terminal had happened to the edifice of Soviet power."

"[Could make you] weep."

"The Great English Novel of the 1980s."

"Magnificent."

"Was, and still is, considered more or less the book to beat."

"[The best document] in human history that [is] the product of a committee."

"Great attendant volume."

"Possibly the most penetrating of his many books about Saddam and Saddamism."

"A study of the relations between literature, sexuality, and power under Muslim theocracy."

"Brilliant."

"An essential complement to their predecessors."

"[The author's] masterpiece."

"Suggests that in several ways [cricket] is not really a 'sport' at all, but more of a classical art form."

"Plainly influential on the early writings of V.S. Naipaul."

"[The author's] monumental work."

"Many good judges regard as the earliest and best fictional representation of the show trials."

"One of the finest autobiographies of that same century."

"The most witty and penetrating first-hand account of [1970s Belfast]."

"When I myself first read The Bell Jar, the phrase of hers that most arrested me was the one with which she described her father's hometown."

"Returns often to the suicide of Cesare Pavese, who took his own life at the apparent height of his powers."

"At the age of twelve I had summoned the nerve to borrow from the headmaster, and to read War And Peace."

"Emboldened by the sheer bulk of the thing, I swerved into History of the Conquest of Mexico."

"Leaves an ineradicable 'scratch on the mind.'"

"The transition to me between reading 'books for boys' and 'adult reading' was How Green Was My Valley."

"A life-changing book."

"I was re-reading Darkness at Noon for what felt like (and quite possibly was) the third time in a month."

"I couldn’t sleep for two nights after first reading Crime and Punishment."

"A revisionist history of the First World War."

"I became consumed with the subject [of World War I] and got hold of All Quiet on the Western Front."

"An anti-war British novel of the trenches."

"In these pages, I found some specimens of exactly the lower-middle-class family that was familiar to me from life."

"There is a timeless, even transcendent, quality to this little story."

"We were all expected to read Animal Farm and 1984, which had been placed on the syllabus as part of the curriculum of the Cold War."

"I was fairly soon immersed in Homage to Catalonia."

"Excellent."

"Excellent."

"Have somehow made all this mania and ritual appear 'normal,' even praiseworthy."

"Discourses on aspects of the Bacchic and the Dionysian."

"How can I forget the moment when [I] learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language—always the language—was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry?"

"[The author was] more celebrated still for Power."

"Still a potent and eloquent reminder of a braver time."

"Plainly intended to suggest that the gamekeeper had sodomized his boss’s wife."

"Astonishing trilogy."

"[The author's] path-breaking anatomy of the Ba'ath regime."

"About the Saddam tyranny and the wars and famines and plagues it had sponsored."

"About being a shambolic conscript in some forgotten cookhouse in the wartime British Army."

"One of the best pieces of closely marshaled evidence and reasoning ever to emerge from the wonk-world."

"Christopher Hitchens mentioned Shakespeare's work in the "Hitch-22" book."

"[The author's] first collection of published poems."

"[The author's] imposing collection of essays."

"I winced with recognition when I first read the expression 'British teeth' in The Judgment Of Paris."

"You might think that the contempt shown by the reporters for both their subjects and their readers is overdone, but you would be wrong."

"A huge critical and commercial grand slam."

"[The author] was perhaps not such a fool when he wrote in Doctor Zhivago that all conceptions are immaculate."

"I was able to return [Martin Amis] the favor in a way which was to help change his life in turn, by pressing on him a copy [of this book]."

"By then, 'everyone' had been mesmerized by First Love, Last Rites."

"By then, 'everyone' had been mesmerized by In Between the Sheets."

"The book of still another friend, [the author]’s ultrahomosexual effort."

"The book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido."

"Shortly after I arrived in New York, [this author] claimed to have diagnosed the same syndrome in The Bonfire of the Vanities."

"[The acronym 'WASP' was] first minted by [this author in this book], the term stood for 'White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.'"

"[In this book, the author] says that most of his friends and colleagues have never even visited Washington except to protest."

"Had spoken to my depths because it understood that the treason at midnight in 1947, and the monstrous birth of a spoiled theocracy in Pakistan, was a tragedy for the English too."

"[Anatomizes] the heap of madnesses and contradictions that went to make up the nightmarish state of Pakistan."

"About a voyage to revolutionary Nicaragua."

"A book that made one think."

"It was with [the author's] much lesser effort, Covering Islam, that I began to realize that there was an apparently narrow but very deep difference between us."

"At [the author's] request I even wrote an uninspired introduction to Peace And Its Discontents, but my heart was not quite in it."

"[Wrote that] men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected."

"Made a beautiful corkscrew or double-helix-shaped aphorism about the Hays Office."

"[The main character] manages to lay so many women that, afterward, even the females who didn’t receive his attentions prefer to claim, rather than appear to have been overlooked, that they were included, too."

"Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy."

"[The author's] masterpiece."

"Illustrates [Wroclaw's] eminence as a hub of Bohemian and Prussian life as well as the epicenter of the Silesian question."

"The best history of the German-Jewish relationship."

"Combats the wretched image of European Jews as fatalistic and passive."

"[In this book], my father appears under the name (no first or 'Christian' name) of Lieutenant Hale."

"Contains several assertions and affirmations that make me desire to be wearing a necklace of the purest garlic."

"[A] meditation on death."

"While recently rereading The Enigma of Arrival, I was struck all over again by the breathtakingly observant operations of [the author's] eye and brain."

"Astonishing (and astonishingly authorized) biography."

"One of the great tragicomic novels of our day."

"A welcome wake-up call."

"[The author] essentially recast his friend Thomas Carlyle’s pessimistic version of the French Revolution in fictional form in A Tale of Two Cities."

"[Combines] the sad indistinctness of a melancholy memoir with the very exact realization that a huge injustice had been done to the 'native' inhabitants of the land."

"[Combines] the sad indistinctness of a melancholy memoir with the very exact realization that a huge injustice had been done to the 'native' inhabitants of the land."

"[Deserves] reprinting in any anthology of the prose of the 20th century."

"[This story] was so good, and [it] seemed so much to know what I might be thinking myself, that I was almost afraid to read on."

"Somewhat too romantic an account of the rebels fighting the Red Army in Afghanistan."

"Evokes [the author's] homeland's natural beauty and the straitened sexual manners of the early 1960s."

"[The author's] most imposing work is probably Principia Mathematica."

"[The author's] best-ever essay."

"Epic."

"Was the first and in many ways the most penetrating critique."

"There is a horrid fascination in reading this day-by-day chronicle as it unfolds."

"Actually a very moving and despairing assault on biblical literalism and servile human credulity."

"[The author's] 1939 classic."

"[I] re-read it in one session, marveling again at how fine it is."

"[The author's] book about the 'first' Gulf War."

"The most powerful of [the author's] plays."

"In Brave New World, one can often detect strong hints of a vicarious approval of what is ostensibly being satirized."

"[The author managed] to synthesize the comic achievements of Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse."

"Predated Solzhenitsyn by some years in providing a morbid anatomy of Stalinism."

"[A] depiction of a coming environmental and societal apocalypse."

"Prescient and haunting."

"[The author's] enthralling memoir."

"Marvellous."

"Soothingly pessimistic."

"A rugged study of British Great War generalship."

"Shows the germinal, contradictory force of revolutionary politics."

"[One of] the two greatest freehand exercises in English periodization."

"[One of] the two greatest freehand exercises in English periodization."

"Has many merits."

"Charming and melancholy album of silhouettes."

"One of the finest hymns of hate to authority to have come down to us."

"We all take some intellectual baggage when we set off, but [this author's], is positively weighed down."

"Admirable."

"Endlessly consultable."

"[The author] found he'd taken on all the great American themes, from the original 'dream' itself to the corresponding loss of innocence."

"[The author's] most superbly rendered fictional creation."

"One of the few faultless three-act plays ever written."

"[The author]'s ability to evoke a sense of place and time, [...] are encoded in this book as in no other."

"A very good history of the general events without which the American Revolution couldn't have taken place or would have taken a different form."

"Christopher Hitchens mentioned this as one of his favorite books in a C-SPAN interview in 2007."

"Christopher Hitchens mentioned this as one of his favorite books in a C-SPAN interview in 2007."

"Christopher Hitchens said he was reading this book in a C-SPAN interview in 2007."

"Begin with, say, 'Sredni Vashtar' or 'The Lumber-Room' or 'The Open Window.' Then see whether you can put the book down."

"Exceptional."

"[The author's] imperishable novel."

"Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets."

"Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets."

"Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets."

"Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets."

"Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets."

"Can and should be defended from the faint praise and outright sneering which have been directed at it."

"Influenced me very greatly."

"Instead of making you want to write, [makes] you wonder why you bother."

"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]."

"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]."

"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]."

"[Appears] not to be written by [a human being]."

"One of [this author's] less-regarded but most magical and musical fictions."

"I recommend it very highly."

"A great book."

"Tremendous biography."

"The most eloquent of the anti-Jeffersonian nonfictions."

"Imperishable book."

"It is an honor, even when it is not a pleasure, to register disagreement with Jefferson and His Time."

"The best fictional re-creation of the period."

"For me the most various and illuminating account of the slavery question."

"Wonderful book."

"Classic."

"[The author's] finest novel."

"[Part of a] magnificent trilogy."

"[Part of a] magnificent trilogy."

"Don't start I Will Bear Witness, Volume 1 late at night, you will not get to bed."

"Don't start I Will Bear Witness, Volume 2 late at night, you will not get to bed."

"Won the Geoffrey Faber Prize."

"Won the Hawthornden Prize."

"If my mighty, critical pen could flash from its scabbard and secure a vast public for any unjustly neglected author, it would flash for [this author]."

"If my mighty, critical pen could flash from its scabbard and secure a vast public for any unjustly neglected author, it would flash for [this author]."

"[A] fine novel."

"Showed [the author] to be a highly evolved product of post-1960s disillusionment in France."

"Showed [the author] to be a highly evolved product of post-1960s disillusionment in France."

"Was almost proscribed by law in France before being properly distributed."

"My favorite book on Islam."

"Argues that in order to appreciate the pluralist, tolerant side of Islam, we must confront its ugly, extremist side."

"The best critique of ['Orientalism' by Edward W. Said]."

"The best anatomy of the topic that I've yet read."

"[Questions] the moral heroism of India's most revered figure."

"Exquisite."

"Such an exciting book."

"Brilliantly done."

"Very absorbing."

"[A] marvelous novel."

"One of the best books I've ever read. I have no choice but to say so."

"Asks all the right questions about animal rights, even if it doesn't canvass all the possible answers."

"The parts of [this famous book] that I find most impressive are the deadpan reprints of animal-experiment 'reports.'"

"A noble edifice of work about the United States in the era of Martin Luther King."

"A noble edifice of work about the United States in the era of Martin Luther King."

"A noble edifice of work about the United States in the era of Martin Luther King."

"[The author] would tape his own memories of [his talks with Bill Clinton] on the drive back home. [This book] is the consequence."

"Since [Hitler's] suicide, no one has fully explained how a talentless crank was able to turn Europe into a charnel house. [This book] supplies a piece of the puzzle."

"You can chuck out your Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest and Hugh Trevor-Roper biographies, in my opinion, and read only [this] relatively short book."

"Brilliant."

"I recommend."

"[The author is] one of the finest volunteers in this cause."

"Describes the escape of a young Somali woman from sexual chattelhood to a new life in Holland."

"I would urge you all to go out and buy The Caged Virgin."

"[The author's] critique of impure reason."

"Very interesting."

"Evokes the charms and hatreds of a lost world—and the enduring contradictions of anti-Semitism."

"A memoir by Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear physicist."

"The only Turkish historian to have talked of genocide."

"From reading Snow one might easily conclude that all the Armenians of Anatolia had decided for some reason to pick up and depart en masse."

"[With this book, the author] became a kind of register of this position, dwelling on the interpenetration of Islamic and Western styles."

"I would recommend Armenian Golgotha of exceptional interest and scholarship."

"I would recommend Rebel Land of exceptional interest and scholarship."

"These pages describe the steady, determined evolution of une femme serieuse."

"I was very struck by the courtesy and grace of this famous polemic and by the way that [the author] combined firmness on his own part with an understanding of the position of others."

"The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction."

"[The author's] electrifying first book."

"The narrator of Doctor Faustus is relating his story against the clock, as the German homeland finds itself pulverized and encircled in the spring of 1945."

"Unflinchingly discusses the ruins and the corpses."

"[The author's] heart-freezing account [...] of the rape and murder and humiliation that fell on Germans in the territory taken by the Soviet army in 1945."

"I think [people] should read [this author]. In particular they should read 'Dulce et Decorum Est.' The poem that first arrested me."

"[The author's] beautiful but patronizing memoir."

"When you read [this trilogy], you will straightaway notice that the veterans of the first world war are the instructors of the novices of the second world war."

"The odds in tonnage and gunnery are adjusted in favour of the British side by sheer discipline, pluck and morale."

"In these pages, I found some specimens of exactly the lower-middle-class family that was familiar to me from life."

"The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction."

"A service to the history it depicts, and puts the author in the very first rank of historical novelists."

"In these pages, I found some specimens of exactly the lower-middle-class family that was familiar to me from life."

"Christopher Hitchens said this author is one of his favorite poets."

"The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction."

"I think people should read George Elliot. In particular they should read 'Dulce et Decorum Est.' The poem that first arrested me. There is no reason to not read that."

"Beautiful but patronizing memoir."

"Can greatly enrich our understanding of how [the author] transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics."