Erasmus School of Philosophy

Reading List

By popular request, here is Awee Prins’ reading list for the First Philosophy series, based on the original Human Conditions course at the Erasmus School of Philosophy.

SOME READING SUGGESTIONS

Dear Readers,


During the lectures, I promised I would send you a list of the books which I read as a young man, and which truly inspired me when I was an ‘apprentice in philosophy’ as you are now. While composing and finalizing the list, I realized I could and perhaps even should have recommended many other authors: Stendhal, Proust, Celine, Woolf, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Borges, Orwell, Huxley etc.; but they just didn’t inspire me. (PS: Don’t hesitate to approach my colleagues for additional suggestions – I assure you they will be quite willing to comply!).


Furthermore, many great books (Sterne’s The Life and Times of Tristam Shandy, Hölderlin’s Friedensfeier (final version), Büchner’s Lenz, Gogol’s Dead Souls, Garshin’s Attalea princeps (do read this however!), Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Casares’ Diary of the War of the Pig) are omitted in the list below, mainly because I hesitate to overwhelm / intimidate you at this early stage of your study. You are still young, so please take my suggestions primarily as an encouragement. I cherish the thought that in the months / years to come you may read at least some of the books listed below; books which – in the words of Franz Kafka – ‘are like axes for the frozen sea within us’.

Sincerely Yours,
Awee, December 2023


- Bible, Book of Ecclesiastes / Gospel of Matthew
- Dante, The Devine Comedy - Inferno
- Cervantes, Don Quixote
- Shakespeare, Hamlet
- Voltaire, Candide
- Goethe, Faust
- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Bouvard and Pécuchet
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Bartleby the scrivener
- F. M. Dostoevski, Poor Folk, Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov
- L. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
- A. Chekhov, Ward No. 6 (and – many – other stories written by Chekhov!)
- Emily Dickinson, Poems (any / all of them!)
- Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters
- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, The Trial
- T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, The Hollow Man
- Albert Camus, The Plague
- Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
- Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities
- Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back
- Simone De Beauvoir, All Men are Mortal
- Primo Levi, If this is a Man
- Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
-Jan Arends, Keefman (not translated)

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