Books Recommended by Christopher Hitchens
Tortilla Flat
John Steinbeck
Source: "[The main character] manages to lay so many women that, afterward, even the females who didn’t receive his attentions prefer to claim, rather than appear to have been overlooked, that they were included, too." - Christopher Hitchens
The Collected Works of P. G. Wodehouse
PG Wodehouse
Source: "How can I forget the moment when [I] learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language—always the language—was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry?" - Christopher Hitchens
The Captive Mind
Czeslaw Milosz
Source: "I was very struck by the courtesy and grace of this famous polemic and by the way that [the author] combined firmness on his own part with an understanding of the position of others." - Christopher Hitchens
The Gulag Archipelago (3 books)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Source: "Once [the author] succeeded in getting [this series printed], it became obvious that something terminal had happened to the edifice of Soviet power." - Christopher Hitchens
The Fall of Berlin 1945
Antony Beevor
Source: "[The author's] heart-freezing account [...] of the rape and murder and humiliation that fell on Germans in the territory taken by the Soviet army in 1945." - Christopher Hitchens
Diaries
George Orwell
Source: "Can greatly enrich our understanding of how [the author] transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics." - Christopher Hitchens
This Was the Old Chief's Country
Collected African Stories
Doris Lessing
Source: "[Combines] the sad indistinctness of a melancholy memoir with the very exact realization that a huge injustice had been done to the 'native' inhabitants of the land." - Christopher Hitchens
Regeneration (3 books)
Pat Barker
Source: "Magnificent." - Christopher Hitchens
The Grass Is Singing
A Novel
Doris Lessing
Source: "[Combines] the sad indistinctness of a melancholy memoir with the very exact realization that a huge injustice had been done to the 'native' inhabitants of the land." - Christopher Hitchens
Persuasion
Jane Austen
Source: "Captain Frederick Wentworth in [this book], is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy." - Christopher Hitchens
The Raj Quartet
The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion
Paul Scott
Source: "Had spoken to my depths because it understood that the treason at midnight in 1947, and the monstrous birth of a spoiled theocracy in Pakistan, was a tragedy for the English too." - Christopher Hitchens
Covering Islam
How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World
Edward W. Said
Source: "It was with [the author's] much lesser effort, [this book], that I began to realize that there was an apparently narrow but very deep difference between us." - Christopher Hitchens
Snow
Orhan Pamuk
Source: "From reading [this book] one might easily conclude that all the Armenians of Anatolia had decided for some reason to pick up and depart en masse." - Christopher Hitchens
Hitler
1889-1936 Hubris
Ian Kershaw
Source: "Since [Hitler's] suicide, no one has fully explained how a talentless crank was able to turn Europe into a charnel house. [This book] supplies a piece of the puzzle." - Christopher Hitchens
The Sword of Honour Trilogy
Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen & Unconditional Surrender
Evelyn Waugh
Source: "When you read [this trilogy], you will straightaway notice that the veterans of the first world war are the instructors of the novices of the second world war." - Christopher Hitchens
Doctor Faustus
The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend
Thomas Mann
Source: "The narrator of [this book] is relating his story against the clock, as the German homeland finds itself pulverized and encircled in the spring of 1945." - Christopher Hitchens
A Dance to the Music of Time
Third Movement
Anthony Powell
Source: "When you read [this book], you will straightaway notice that the veterans of the first world war are the instructors of the novices of the second world war." - Christopher Hitchens
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Source: "[The author] found he'd taken on all the great American themes, from the original 'dream' itself to the corresponding loss of innocence." - Christopher Hitchens
A Struggle for Power
The American Revolution
Theodore Draper
Source: "A very good history of the general events without which the American Revolution couldn't have taken place or would have taken a different form." - Christopher Hitchens
The Enigma of Arrival
V. S. Naipaul
Source: "While recently rereading [this book], I was struck all over again by the breathtakingly observant operations of [the author's] eye and brain." - Christopher Hitchens
FAQ
Did Christopher Hitchens recommend all these books?
Not necessarily. This book list has Christopher Hitchens must-read recommendations, but it also has a mix of mentions and suggestions.
How do you know Christopher Hitchens mentioned these books?
Every suggestion made by Christopher Hitchens is validated by our editors. You can find the sources to the recommendations linked next to the books.
Did Christopher Hitchens actually create this list?
No. This reading list was curated by our editors based on confirmed mentions from Christopher Hitchens, the sources are made available under each recommendation.
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