Kazuo Ishiguro's Reading List
The author, most recently, of “The Buried Giant” was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes as a child. “I’d go to school and say things like: ‘Pray, be seated’ or ‘That is most singular.’ People at the time just put this down to my being Japanese.”
Open in WellRead Daily app →By the Book: Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)
NYT By the Book column (2015-03-08).
Source: www.nytimes.com
Homer · Buy on Amazon
"These versions are uncluttered, less lyrical than the great Fagles translations, but the big emotions loom powerfully in understatement."
Homer · Buy on Amazon
"These versions are uncluttered, less lyrical than the great Fagles translations, but the big emotions loom powerfully in understatement."
Malka Marom · Buy on Amazon
"Curiously, I find I admire Mitchell more and more as I get older... I'm hoping this book will be full of quiet revelations."
Charlotte Brontë · 1847 · Buy on Amazon
"I owe my career, and a lot else besides, to Jane Eyre and Villette."
Charlotte Brontë · Buy on Amazon
"I owe my career, and a lot else besides, to Jane Eyre and Villette."
Haruki Murakami · Buy on Amazon
"Something like Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun seems to embody the jazz spirit; reading it comes close to listening to a sad late-night jazz ballad."
Nancy Mitford · 1949 · Buy on Amazon
"Funny indeed, but also surprisingly dark."
David Peace · Buy on Amazon
"The novel is barking mad, but quite brilliant, and is a monument to a kind of magnificent decency once at the core of British life."
Arthur Conan Doyle · Buy on Amazon
"The Hound of the Baskervilles was, and remains, my favorite Holmes story. It was scary and gave me sleepless nights."
Favorite books (2021)
Favorite books recommended by Kazuo Ishiguro's Best-Loved Books, as compiled by radicalreads.com. Source article: https://radicalreads.com/kazuo-ishiguro-favorite-books/.
Source: radicalreads.com
Charlotte Bronté · Buy on Amazon
"Almost everything I know about first-person narration comes from this novel. Its plot lacks the clean lines of Jane Eyre, but this is the richer, more daring achievement. What looks at first like laughably flowery language steadily builds into one of the most extraordinary narrative voices in literature. Lucy Snowe is a lonely young Englishwoman teaching in a provincial Belgian boarding school. What she relates has almost the texture of a diary in its patient attention to the everyday, but se..."
P. G. Wodehouse · Buy on Amazon
"The best Jeeves novel, and as such a masterpiece of comic escapism. The plot is standard Wodehouse: a country-house farce in which Bertie Wooster attempts to help his pathetic geek friend, Gussie, find the courage to propose to his true love. It’s hard to say why this is great literature. There’s no attempt to engage with the complexities of life. But the book does several things supremely well: There’s Bertie’s first-person voice, a pitch-perfect mix of posh English and American Jazz Age sla..."
Cormac McCarthy (also rec’d by Bruce Springsteen , Kazuo Ishiguro , Nick Cave & Stephen King ) · Buy on Amazon
"When I arrived in England as a small boy from Japan, I promptly became obsessed with cowboys. I never fell out of love with Westerns, and became a huge fan of the great films of Ford, Hawks, Leone, Eastwood, and Peckinpah. But where were their literary equivalents? To an outsider, this is a gaping hole in American letters. But I found one magnificent novel, a work of unambiguously high ambition that takes on the myths of the frontier. The reach of McCarthy’s book is such that it goes way beyo..."
David Mitchell · Buy on Amazon
"I went well into my 40s under the delusion that I was still a “young” writer. The publication of this book ten years ago made me acknowledge both my decrepitude and the emergence of a brilliant younger generation. Arguably Mitchell has since gone on to even greater heights, but as unignorable announcements of arrival go, this multistory novel stands comparison with the first Dylan album or Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The ten discrete, compulsively engaging episodes;with settings such as Okina..."
Haruki Murakami · Buy on Amazon
"I have a thing for the minor works of major writers. (And of the living ones, Murakami is one of the most major we have.) Of course, the works have to be gems;and this short novel, like Chronicle of a Death Foretold or The Turn of the Screw, is certainly that. It’s a love story of sorts, set in a materially comfortable but spiritually lonely modern Japan of glassy offices, wearying commuter trains, and smoky bars. With the possible exception of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, I’ve never..."
Homer (also rec’d by Jay-Z ) · Buy on Amazon
"A magical experience, this 2,700-year-old poem reads to a surprising extent like a modern novel. It has a sophisticated structure, with alluring subplots and flashbacks supporting the central story of Odysseus, the exhausted, traumatized veteran of the Trojan War, and his decadelong struggle to get back home across a wonderfully evoked world of strange islands and dangerous seas. It’s about the memory of home and the fear that it may no longer correspond to reality, the sadness of losing comr..."