100 books like Confessions

Aristotle is an obligatory milestone in the history of the main idea of my book: all desire the good or the apparent good.

The Nicomachean Ethics also provides a gallery of interesting and puzzling characters: the akratic, who wants the good but, being weak, goes for what they know to be worse; or the outright vicious, who wholeheartedly chooses the bad, but still under the guise of the good, being misled by pleasant associations with the wrong things.

This is the book that shaped philosophical thinking about action since the past half-century, though I didn’t really understand this the first time I read it.

Among other things, Anscombe single-handedly resuscitates the old idea that all we want, we want under the guise of some good from the relative obscurity it had fallen into, handing it over to new generations of philosophers. She vehemently rejects the idea that people can actually behave like Poe’s characters.

This book personally helped me focus on and get interested in the concept of acting for reasons.

We all do things for reasons (good or bad), e.g. we take an umbrella because outside it’s raining, but what this exactly means is a philosophical puzzle. Dancy is probably the most powerful in arguing that we don’t normally find those reasons in ourselves, but in how things objectively are or might be.

Even when all we can say is “I do it because it’s my desire”, there has to be something attractive in what we desire beyond the fact that we desire it, which is one way to bring us back to the old idea of the guise of the good.

Flash forward a few centuries, one finds not just a doubt, but a powerful statement of the reality of perverse inclinations in human nature: in Poe’s tales, such as The Black Cat or The Imp of the Perverse, one finds characters doing the most horrible things out of a self-confessed desire to do evil, with no apparent gain, and embracing the moral destruction they bring upon themselves.

Clearly the times were ripe for a radical revision of the guise of the good dogma. It was exciting for me to discover in Poe’s fiction a clear expression of philosophical ideas central to my project. 

For most of us, the greatest enemy isn’t from without, but from within. This is true today and was just as true nearly two millennia ago when Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote his Confessions, the first autobiography. His struggles with sin and vice should be relatable to us all, especially his difficulty in abandoning his worldly desires. Would most of us be so brave as to abandon our wants for something far greater?

James McDougall’s History of Algeria gives an excellent overview of Algerian history, focusing on the lived experiences of the Algerian people over the last 500 years.

He does this with an easily readable style, offering acute insights and drawing on the personal experiences of those who lived through world-changing movements. He covers the War of Independence and the revolutionary transformations which ensued in Algeria, and across the continent, by that long and heroic struggle.

Isabelle Eberhardt was born in 1877. She was “a crossdresser and sensualist, an experienced drug taker and a transgressor of boundaries”. Born in Switzerland, she crossed the Sahara Desert on horseback dressed as a male marabout, driven by a hunger for nomadic adventures, and for love. Isabelle’s evocative diaries are intense, beautifully written, self-centred and dramatic, occasionally very funny. She fell madly in love with the Sahara, was accused of being a spy, married a young Algerian soldier, and drowned in a desert flash flood at the age of 27. This book is about a short life that burned radiantly and the desiccated landscape that mirrored her intensity.

Latefa Guemar’s powerful research on the Algerian Diaspora from a woman’s perspective shows to the world the terrible experiences of violence against women in the Algerian Black Decade of the 1990s.

This harrowing conflict forced women into exile via a broken European asylum system that failed, and still fails, women in so many ways.  Her work on diasporic networks of women’s groups and associations, inspired work we recently did together during Covid on Algeria diaspora activism.

The book’s beautiful and mesmerizing front cover, designed by one of our students, Ikram, was part of our arts-based training on Imagining the Future. I still get shivers when I see this.

This is not only a beautifully written book, it is an important one. Why? Because it poses challenging questions about the promise of post-independence freedom for Algerian women through a collection of short stories written between 1959 and 1978. First published in French in 1980, the writing style is at once innovative, lyrical, and unsettling as Assia Djebar explores the condition of Algerian women across the pre-colonial, colonial and immediate post-colonial periods. The inspiration for the book is Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 painting of women in an Algerian harem because, as Djebar explains in the post-face, this picture leads her straight to the conundrum of 1970s Algeria: “What would Delacroix see if he entered into contemporary Algerian apartments?” And for her the depressing conclusion is that he would still find women locked up and shut away just as in the 1830s. One of the most significant voices to emerge from Algeria,… show more.

In this book, Werenfels explains how elite dynamics and tactics work in the Algerian political system and how they have led to the lack of significant political change since the country returned to the democratic process in 1995. Werenfels analyses the coping mechanisms of the highly opaque authoritarian elite in a shifting local and global environment building on evidence from extensive research. This book planted the seed of an idea for what the topic of my own book would be and how I wanted to structure it.