Tom Mccarthy's Reading List

"I was really disappointed when I read 'Slaughterhouse-Five,'" says Tom McCarthy, the author of "The Making of Incarnation" and other novels. "But then I read his 'Mother Night,' and thought it was brilliant."

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By the Book: Tom Mccarthy (2022)

NYT By the Book column (2022-01-20).

Source: www.nytimes.com

The Passive Vampire

Ghérasim Luca · Buy on Amazon

"The last 'minor' book I read? Maybe "The Passive Vampire," by Ghérasim Luca."

The Recognitions

William Gaddis · Buy on Amazon

"I found that Gaddis had indeed grappled with all the same questions … 50 years earlier, and in an encyclopedic way. It's a magnificent book."

Three

Ann Quin · Buy on Amazon

"It's an allegory for British postwar culture — but also a philosophical study of spectacle and death, and a detective story."

Oresteia

Anne Carson · Buy on Amazon

"Her "Oresteia" is a miracle, in that it both gets the essence of the Greek and seems totally contemporary."

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley · Buy on Amazon

"Mary Shelley, whose "Frankenstein" marks a kind of Year Zero for industrialized modernity's impact on literature."

Ulysses

James Joyce · 1922 · Buy on Amazon

"The novelist who has most profoundly reflected on technology's penetration — saturation — of human experience is Joyce."

Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut · Buy on Amazon

"I read his "Mother Night," and thought it was brilliant: dark and morally vertiginous and (as its title suggests) deeply Faustian."

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