The first book I finished in 2004 was Otto Dietrich’s Hitler…
- Otto Dietrich – Hitler
- Evelyn Waugh – Decline and Fall (Another serendipitous find in one of the second hand bookshops in Hiroshima. Decline and Fall is at times viciously hilarious. I first read Decline and Fall at college when I was 18 and I do not think I entirely “got it”. I would recommend the first half of it as a suitable primer in classroom management techniques to anyone who must perforce earn his crust in the field of juvenile pedagogics.)
- Adam Nicolson – The Power and the Glory – Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible
- Arthur Schopenhauer – Essays and Aphorisms (This is the Penguin edition with an excellent introduction by R. J. Holingdale, the translator of this selection from the second volume of Schopenhauer’s Parerga und Paralipomena.)
- John Toland – Hitler: The Pictorial Documentary of His Life (This book was one of two free gifts that I received from a kind lady when I purchased a book from her on ebay. Thank you Betsy!)
- Edmund Burke – Reflections on the Revolution in France (I have been meaning to read this book for several years now, so I was happy to come across it in my favourite second hand bookshop in Hiroshima the other day…)
- William Thackeray – The History of Henry Esmond (Plucked from the 100 yen shelves of my favourite second hand bookshop in Hiroshima.)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby (This is the third time I’ve read GG. The edition I read was “the definitive, textually accurate edition” with notes and a preface by Matthew J. Bruccoli.)
- William Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet (New Penguin Shakespeare, ed. notes & intro. T. J. B. Spencer, with Further Reading notes by Michael Taylor.)
- William Thackeray – Vanity Fair
- Charles Dickens – Nicholas Nickleby
- Ernst Jünger – Storm of Steel (The recent translation by Michael Hoffman. Hoffman has rendered us a great service. See juenger.org for an introduction to Ernst Jünger.)
- Michael Long – The Unnatural Scene: a study in Shakespearean tragedy
- Tom Bower – Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football
- Robert Harris – Fatherland
- Stephen Fry – Making History
- William Shakespeare – Love’s Labour’s Lost (Honorificabilitudinitatibus.)
- J. G. Ballard – Running Wild
- Colin Shindler – Manchester United Ruined My Life
- Ben Macintyre – A Foreign Field
- Harvey C. Mansfield – Machiavelli’s Virtue
- Osamu Dazai – The Setting Sun
- Julius Cicatrix & Martin Rowson – Imperial Exits (“Being an account of the varied an violent deaths of the Roman emperors.” A cheerful bit of bedtime reading!)
- Osamu Dazai – No Longer Human
- P. G. Wodehouse – Psmith in the City (Just the thing for a 13 hour flight.)
- Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence – Bacon is Shakespeare (Honorificabilitudinitatibus again.)
Poetry 2004
- Brian Patten – Love Poems
Audiobooks 2004
- Charles Dickens – Bleak House (Penguin’s 4-cassette abridged version. Narrated by Beaty Edney and Ronald Pickup – worth getting just to hear Pickup in full flow.)
- Amy Tan – The Bonesetter’s Daughter (6 CDs. Read by Amy Tan and Joan Chen.)
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – The Lost World (An excellent 2 cassette live dramatization directed by Leonard Nemoy.)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter (This dramatic presentation, underscored with sound effects and music, builds up over the course of four audio-cassettes. The drama is interspersed with some occasional commentary on the historical background of the story.)
- H. G. Wells – The Time Machine (Narrated by Ben Kingsley.)
- Orson Welles – Interpretations of Literature (Welles reads excerpts from The Happy Prince; The Secret Sharer; Wakefield; The Tell-Tale Heart and other pieces.)
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