100 books like The Radetzky March

I first read this book while I was conducting anthropological fieldwork in the mines of Guanajuato, Mexico. Even though the conditions in the mines I visited were somewhat better, and even though I was in silver and gold mines and not coal mines, I was amazed by the continuity in mining practices and the kinds of conflicts that emerge, such as the danger caused when miners are paid by the amount produced since they don’t want to take the time needed to support the tunnels with wooden timbering.

I also love that it includes descriptions of women and girls as mineworkers, which very few books about mining do.  

I think this is a better book than MME Bovary. It's quite in the tradition of Marivaudage but Flaubert has such a light though ruthless touch that at times you just don't know where your sympathies lie. If Flaubert has been a surgeon he's have been an expert with the smallest, finest scalpels! His technique stands in great contrast to the work of Hugo and Zola, and he certainly outmanoeuvres Balzac! I often wish he'd written more, but what he's left us is pure gold. You might like to compare this book with Fontane's Effi Briest – another stunning novel–of–manners. I was hard put to it to make a choice between these two novels for my 4th choice.

I was on an extended trip to Eastern Europe, back when Eastern Europe was not such a dandy place to visit, and I found myself with nothing to read. In a used bookstore in Prague, I found a tattered paperback, translated into English, of this next pick. It was falling apart, the pages stained by coffee and God knows what else. I bought it anyway.

And over the next few weeks, I was, for the third time, blown away by words on a page, by an author’s imagination. It’s been said that Don Quixote, written around 1600, was the first novel ever written. It may also be the greatest novel ever written. Adventure. Humor. Pathos. Crazy amounts of imagination. The Whole Damn Human Condition.

Make sure to find a first-class translation!

Norman Lewis was what is usually called a travel writer. Today’s travel writers, however, pale beside him.

I read this book when it first came out in 1984. It describes the three summers in the late 1940s when Lewis lived and worked in a very remote fishing village on what is now called the Costa Brava. He records with utmost sympathy and acuteness of observation the last days of the old world of Mediterranean Spain before it became completely obliterated by mass tourism.

The book touched me deeply, for I had seen the last vestiges of other parts of Spain only a decade or so after Lewis. The book is a kind of monument for all parts of the world submerged by mass tourism.

This is French peasant life in its last days, a life rendered from the outside by one who became an insider.

Berger went to live and work among the peasants of the French south in 1962. This world, like that of Spain at much the same time, saw the death of the old peasantry. It is not a work of observation like Norman Lewis’s book but a series of fictional stories. It treats peasants as human beings, on an equal standing with all others in society. They have depth and gravity. Just like us all.

How awful most writing about peasants is. This stands out proudly from that awfulness. 

I treasure this book as I treasure the memory of my long-dead father, for this transcendently sad and beautiful book takes me into a world close in spirit to that of his own life. His own experience was the experience of the immigrant worker, the Irish rural one.

With the astonishing new economic prosperity of Ireland, the London of the book is no longer there. The prose of O’Grady and the photos of Pike constantly play one across the other to shattering effect. The book was made into a fine film.

Readers will note a certain interplay across my choices of books: John Berger wrote a beautiful foreword to the first edition. The beautifully produced 2023 edition is much better than the 1997 one. The epigraph of the book is from Seferis: “I whispered: memory hurts wherever you touch it.”

I love the writing of Patrick Modiano.

Here, the lost world that is encountered is within the lives and beings of the characters of the three novellas that make up this book, lives and beings that are on one level from Modiano’s own biography but which, in his spare and beautiful prose become of universal moment.

The world in the book is that of the dark years of the Nazi occupation of Paris. That which is fleeting, easily lost, mysterious, and obscure haunts the pages of the book, reminding us of how evanescent and uncertain memory is but also how much our lives are bound by it.

We all know the title. It’s become a record-breaking musical phenomenon. The book is a phenomenon in itself. It was a voyage I took for a few spellbound weeks, and I read it in a stone house in a small village in the South of France. It is a book of great sympathy and grace. 

Victor Hugo’s heart is large—at least measured by this story of an escaped prisoner who tries to do good with his life but is pursued relentlessly by a police officer, Javert. I found with this book, as the great writers always show me, that character is all. Hugo drew me into the struggles and losses of his people so ably and memorably that I still think of them years later. 

After 1918, many German and Austrian Habsburg officers blamed their defeat on being ‘stabbed in the back’ by civilian ‘shirkers’, leftists, and (in the Habsburg case) fractious nationalists.

Both states indeed failed to manage their home fronts but, as Alexander Watson shows in his compelling account of this titanic conflict, there were far more complex reasons for the war’s outcome, not least the willingness of the high command in both states to embark on a conflict they had no realistic chance of winning.

For those who are interested in Central European history – Hungary then engulfed what is today Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, a part of Romania, and a chunk of Serbia – in the formative period of the modern world.

The collection of essays discusses US foreign policy, nuclear politics, and the Cold War. My favorite is Trachtenberg’s critical reassessment of the origins of the First World War, a destructive conflict no one wanted to happen but still walked into. 

It is about the clash of empires, Christian and Islamic, of civilizations, and of course, war machines. Author has single-handedly rewritten the history of this battleground between the Habsburgs, Hungarians, and Turks on the basis of primary sources from many archives in the region.

His book is a fascinating synthesis of international, economic, and cultural history for the reader who time to immerse in history.