SUGGESTED READING

The citations in chapter 7 are from:

The Odyssey, Book 14

Violette Leduc, L’Affamée

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Arthur Rimbaud, “L’Éternité

Marie NDiaye, Three Strong Women

Sandrine Collette, Nothing But Dust

On the Y.S.’s first trip, Juliette travels with:

The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas

Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame

The Wonderful Adventure of Nils Holgersson by Selma Lagerlöf

My Brother and His Brother by Håkan Lindquist

Sula by Toni Morrison

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse

Mudwoman by Joyce Carol Oates

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Break of Day by Colette

Seedtime by Philippe Jaccottet

La voix sombre by Ryoko Sekiguchi

The Human Race by Robert Antelme

The Ratcatcher: A Lyrical Satire by Marina Tsvetaeva

Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Last Things by Umberto Saba

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges

The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon

Nedjma by Kateb Yacine

Vowels of the Sea: Amers by Saint-John Perse

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

In the Mothers’ Land by Elisabeth Vonarburg

A Suspicious River by Laura Kasischke

Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar

The Day Before Happiness by Erri De Luca

Un petit cheval et une voiture by Anne Perry-Bouquet

The Lion by Joseph Kessel

The Torment of Others by Val McDermid

Ice by Anna Kavan

Les Pierres sauvages by Fernand Pouillon

Gare du Nord by Abdelkader Djemaï

Milena by Margarete Buber-Neumann

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Beggars of Life by Jim Tully

Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

Ask the Dust by John Fante

Dalva by Jim Harrison

Journal by Mireille Havet

The Suns of Independence by Ahmadou Kourouma

This list, although extremely incomplete—it wasn’t possible to mention all the books on board the Y.S.—is given haphazardly, as it was compiled. That is the charm of many libraries. You can add your own favorites, your discoveries, all the books you’d recommend to a friend—or to your worst enemy, so they will no longer be so, if the magic works. Or even to the person sitting next to you on the train.