COVER TO COVER

TWELVE BOOKS FOR THE LONG WAY AROUND

NIRAD A. ANANDA

July 15, 2026

Shortly before his death, the Anglo-Indian writer and critic Nirad A. Ananda compiled a list of twelve books he believed would outlast their own time. Originally published in “The Observer” in 2001 and long forgotten, his list is reproduced here for the first time in twenty-five years.

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Every summer brings another list of books one is expected to read before September. The books change. The formula does not. They promise to explain the present, predict the future, improve productivity, or summarize the latest crisis. By autumn, they have usually disappeared, replaced by another list making the same promises.

The twelve books collected here have little interest in explaining the present. Most were written decades ago, some more than a century ago. Several are novels in which almost nothing happens. Others are impossible to classify. None offers advice. Yet each quietly alters the way one sees the world. They approach questions that have become increasingly urgent—technology, memory, history, nature, identity, civilization—not directly but obliquely. They remind us that the shortest distance between two ideas is not always a straight line.

First edition of The Invention of Morel, published by Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 1940. Dust jacket designed by Norah Borges.

The Invention of Morel (1940)

Adolfo Bioy Casares

At first glance, The Invention of Morel appears to belong to the tradition of the desert-island adventure. A fugitive arrives on an isolated island, discovers a mysterious group of visitors, and slowly realizes that something is profoundly wrong. By the final pages, the novel has quietly transformed into one of the strangest meditations ever written on memory, images, technology, and love.

Long before virtual reality, or digital avatars entered everyday language, Adolfo Bioy Casares imagined a machine capable of preserving human existence through perfect reproduction. The result is less science fiction than philosophy disguised as suspense. Jorge Luis Borges considered it a flawless novel. Sixty years later, it feels less like a fantasy than a description of the century we have accidentally built.

First American edition of The Makioka Sisters, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1957.

The Makioka Sisters (1943–48)

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

There are novels about historical turning points, and there are novels that notice the almost-invisible moments before everything changes. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters belongs to the second category. Set in Osaka in the late 1930s, it follows four sisters from a once-prominent merchant family as they navigate marriage, etiquette, family obligations, and the quiet erosion of a world that still believes it has time.

Nothing dramatic appears to happen. Seasons change, conversations unfold, cherry blossoms return, and suitable husbands are discussed with endless patience. Yet beneath this exquisite surface, modernity advances with silent determination. Tanizaki understood that civilizations rarely disappear in a single dramatic event. More often they fade through thousands of small adjustments until one day their values feel strangely foreign even to those who inherited them.

The novel is neither nostalgic nor critical. It simply observes with extraordinary precision how ways of living, speaking, and remembering gradually become historical. In an age fascinated by disruption, The Makioka Sisters reminds us that the deepest transformations often arrive so quietly that they are almost impossible to hear while they are happening. 

Dust jacket of the first edition of A Month in the Country, published by Harvester Press, London, 1980.

A Month in the Country (1980)

J. L. Carr

A medieval wall painting lies hidden beneath centuries of whitewash in the small parish church where Tom Birkin arrives one summer after World War I. His task is simply to uncover it. As the image slowly emerges, so too do memories he has tried to bury: the trenches, a failed marriage, the strange uncertainty of returning to ordinary life after history has intervened.

Few novels are as gentle as A Month in the Country, and fewer still are as profound. J. L. Carr understood that restoration is never merely an act of recovering the past. Every attempt to uncover what has been lost also changes the person doing the looking. Archaeology, memory, and grief become different names for the same human impulse.

Written with remarkable economy, the novel quietly argues that history does not disappear. It settles into landscapes, buildings, objects, and people, waiting for someone patient enough to notice. The greatest discoveries, Carr suggests, are rarely spectacular. They occur when attention itself becomes a form of care.

First English edition of The Tanners, published by Hesperus Press, London, 2009, with an introduction by W. G. Sebald. Remarkably, the novel waited 102 years to appear in English.

The Tanners (1907)

Robert Walser

Before ambition became a virtue and productivity a moral obligation, Robert Walser imagined a different kind of hero. Simon Tanner is intelligent, charming, and almost entirely uninterested in building a career. He drifts from one occupation to another, leaves jobs without regret, walks endlessly, and refuses to measure his life by success. To modern readers, he can seem irresponsible. Walser presents him instead as unusually free.

The Tanners is often described as a novel of wandering, but its real subject is independence. Simon resists not through grand political gestures but through an almost instinctive refusal to let institutions define his worth. He possesses little, plans less, and remains curiously immune to the demands of respectability.

Written decades before the language of self-improvement, performance, and optimization entered everyday life, the novel feels unexpectedly contemporary. Walser asks a question that has only grown more pressing: What if a meaningful life cannot be measured by achievement at all? Reading him today is less an escape from the present than an invitation to imagine that another rhythm of living has always been possible.

First edition of The Idea of a University, published in 1852 by James Duffy, Dublin, under the original title Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education: Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin.

The Idea of a University (1852)

John Henry Newman

Universities are frequently asked to justify themselves. They must produce innovation, drive economic growth, prepare students for employment, solve social problems, and compete in global rankings. Reading John Henry Newman today is therefore a curious experience, because he proposes almost none of these things. For Newman, the university existed for a simpler and more radical purpose: to cultivate the life of the mind.

His famous lectures are not nostalgic for a lost golden age, nor are they hostile to science or professional education. They argue instead that knowledge acquires its deepest meaning only when it enters into conversation with other forms of knowledge. Education, in this view, is less about specialization than about judgment—the ability to recognize relationships between ideas that at first seem unrelated.

Whether one agrees with Newman is almost beside the point. The book belongs to a moment before education became a marketplace and before learning was expected to justify itself through measurable outcomes. It reminds us that some institutions are valuable not because they produce efficient citizens, but because they preserve the possibility of intellectual freedom itself.

First edition of The Living Mountain, published by Aberdeen University Press, 1977.

The Living Mountain (1977)

Nan Shepherd

For more than forty years, Nan Shepherd walked the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland without feeling the need to conquer them. She was uninterested in summits, records, or heroic ascents. Instead she returned again and again to the same landscape, learning its streams, stones, mosses, weather, and shifting light with the patience of someone who understood that familiarity is a form of discovery.

The Living Mountain is often described as a nature book, but that hardly captures its achievement. Shepherd does not write about scenery; she writes about attention. The mountain is not a backdrop for human experience but a world that exists entirely on its own terms. To enter it requires not mastery but humility.

Published at a time when wilderness was increasingly becoming either a tourist destination or an environmental statistic, the book offers another possibility. Nature is neither a resource nor a refuge. It is a reality that quietly resists our desire to possess, explain, or improve it. Few books teach the art of looking with greater grace.

First edition of The Hill of Summer, published by Harper & Row, New York, 1969.

The Hill of Summer (1969)

J. A. Baker

J. A. Baker is best known for The Peregrine (1967), one of the most extraordinary books ever written about the natural world. The Hill of Summer is quieter, but no less remarkable. It follows the rhythms of the English countryside through fields, woods, marshes, and changing seasons, recording plants, birds, weather, and light with a precision that borders on devotion.

Baker’s gift was not simply observation but concentration. He looked long enough for the familiar to become strange again. Reading him is to discover that attention is cumulative: Every walk, every return, every repeated encounter deepens rather than exhausts the world. Landscape ceases to be scenery and becomes a form of knowledge.

There is something almost radical about such patience today. Baker asks nothing of nature except that it be allowed to exist, and nothing of the reader except that they slow down. His prose reminds us that the rarest experience is not novelty but sustained attention—the willingness to remain with something long enough for it to reveal itself.

First English-language edition of Mimesis, published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1953.

Mimesis (1946)

Erich Auerbach

Erich Auerbach wrote Mimesis in exile in Istanbul after fleeing Nazi Germany. Cut off from the great European libraries, he relied largely on memory and what books he could find. The result is one of the most ambitious works of literary criticism ever written: a history of how Western literature learned to represent ordinary life with increasing depth, complexity, and psychological realism.

Beginning with Homer and the Hebrew Bible and ending with Virginia Woolf, Auerbach traces not simply the evolution of style but a changing understanding of what deserves to be described. His subject is ultimately democracy in literature. Kings gradually give way to merchants, servants, workers, and anonymous individuals whose inner lives become worthy of serious attention.

Mimesis is often praised for its scholarship, but its deeper achievement lies elsewhere. It reminds us that every civilization tells stories about itself, and that the way it chooses to portray reality reveals what it believes to be important. Few books demonstrate more elegantly that literature is not merely a reflection of history—it is one of the ways history learns to see itself.

First edition of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), published by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan, 1958.

The Leopard (1958)

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Few novels have been quoted as often and understood as poorly as The Leopard. Its most famous line—“If we want everything to stay as it is, everything will have to change”—has become shorthand for political cynicism. In the novel itself, however, it expresses something far more unsettling: the realization that history rarely abolishes the old order. It absorbs it.

Set during the unification of Italy, the book follows Prince Fabrizio of Salina as he watches his aristocratic world slowly recede. Lampedusa does not mourn its passing, nor does he celebrate the future that replaces it. His interest lies in the strange continuity that survives every revolution. Institutions collapse, fortunes shift, governments change, but human ambition, vanity, and compromise remain remarkably constant.

Written by the last prince of an ancient Sicilian family, The Leopard possesses an authority that cannot be imitated. It is a novel not about the end of a civilization so much as about the illusion that history ever truly begins again. Every new age, Lampedusa suggests, carries more of the old one than it cares to admit.

First edition of Le Rivage des Syrtes (The Opposing Shore), published by José Corti, Paris, 1951. 

The Opposing Shore (1951)

Julien Gracq

For hundreds of pages, almost nothing happens. A young aristocrat is posted to a remote frontier where two ancient states face one another across a narrow stretch of water. They have technically been at war for centuries, yet no battle has been fought for generations. Diplomacy has become ritual, vigilance a habit, and peace a condition that no one entirely trusts. Everyone senses that history is about to return. No one knows when.

Julien Gracq transforms this suspended moment into one of the great political novels of the twentieth century. The real subject is not war but anticipation: the peculiar psychology of societies that can no longer distinguish between stability and stagnation. The longer nothing changes, the more irresistible change becomes, whatever form it takes.

Written in the aftermath of World War II, The Opposing Shore has often been read as an allegory of Europe, but it is more universal than that. Every civilization eventually reaches moments when it begins waiting for an event it cannot name. Gracq understood that history is often experienced not as action but as atmosphere—a pressure in the air before the storm finally breaks.

First edition of Autobiography of Red, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1998.

Autobiography of Red (1998)

Anne Carson

Some books resist classification so completely that every attempt to describe them diminishes them. Autobiography of Red is a novel written in verse, a modern retelling of an ancient Greek myth, a philosophical meditation, and an intimate love story. Carson takes the fragmentary legend of Geryon—the red-winged monster slain by Heracles—and transforms it into the life of a shy, contemporary young man trying to understand desire, loneliness, and the strange instability of identity.

The miracle of the book lies in the ease with which it moves between worlds. Myth is never treated as an escape from reality but as another way of describing it. Carson reminds us that the oldest stories survive not because they offer timeless morals, but because they continue to reveal emotional truths that ordinary language struggles to express.

At a moment when originality is often confused with novelty, Autobiography of Red demonstrates that literature renews itself by returning to its oldest materials. The past is not a burden to be overcome but a conversation that remains unfinished. Carson’s extraordinary achievement is to make a myth more contemporary by allowing it to remain ancient.

German edition of Der Waldgang, published by Klett-Cotta, 2014.

The Forest Passage (1951)

Ernst Jünger

Written in the shadow of Europe’s totalitarian catastrophes, The Forest Passage is one of the twentieth century’s strangest political books. It is neither a manifesto nor a program. Instead, Ernst Jünger introduces the figure of the “forest rebel”: an individual who preserves an inner independence even when every external institution demands conformity. The forest is not a place on a map but a state of mind—a retreat into moral and intellectual autonomy.

Jünger was too complex, and too controversial, to fit comfortably into any ideological tradition. That complexity is precisely what makes the book worth reading. He refuses both naive optimism and revolutionary certainty, arguing instead that freedom begins long before it becomes visible in politics. It begins with the refusal to surrender one’s judgment.

The Forest Passage offers no practical solutions, and that is its strength. It asks a more enduring question: What remains of liberty when every system, however benevolent, seeks to organize not only our actions but our imaginations? Jünger’s answer is deceptively simple: Before institutions can be renewed, the individual must first recover the difficult art of standing alone.

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Looking back, it is tempting to search for a common thread running through these twelve books. There is one, although none of the authors would have described it in the same way. Each is less interested in events than in the conditions that make events possible. They explore the slow transformations that usually escape notice: the erosion of traditions, the changing meaning of work, the relationship between memory and place, the quiet persistence of myth, the discipline of attention, and the possibility of remaining intellectually free.

None of these books promises to explain the present. That may be why they illuminate it so well. They remind us that the questions that matter most are rarely new. Every generation believes it is living through unprecedented change. Every generation eventually discovers that others have stood at similar thresholds, confronting uncertainty with different vocabularies but recognizably human concerns.

Summer has always been associated with escape. These books offer something more valuable. They do not take us away from the world. They return us to it—a little more attentive, a little less certain, and perhaps a little better equipped to recognize that the deepest changes are often the ones that occur almost imperceptibly, long before history gives them a name.

Nirad A. Ananda (1931–2000) was born in Calcutta and educated at Presidency College before reading English literature at Oxford. During the 1950s and 1960s he wrote literary criticism for “The Statesman,” “The Spectator,” and “The Times Literary Supplement.” His essays ranged in topic from Sanskrit poetry to French symbolism, Russian novels, and English modernism. He believed that criticism should never tell readers what to think, only what else to read.

Cover image: Nirad A. Ananda (1931–2000). Read everything. Recommended twelve books. Ignored every bestseller.