5. For Whom the Bell Tolls

Published in 1940 Hemingway set his story among the Spanish Civil War as this is one of the times in his life when he had become more politically oriented than he had been previously. Maybe it was age, maybe he just made peace with his demons, but Bell is one of his best – and I say that even as someone who doesn’t share most of Hemingway’s politics. The protagonist Robert Jordan is a volunteer guerrilla dynamite man sent to blow a bridge. Jordan’s relationship with Maria, the young woman who lost her family to and was raped by one of Franco’s units shows us a Hemingway we don’t often see, mature and capable of dealing with death, trauma, and loss the way he did not in his previous (and in my opinion better) novels.

4. A Moveable Feast

This is the story of Hemingway’s life in Paris in the 1920s as a struggling apprentice writer. It also delves into his relationship with his first wife Hadley Richardson. I’m including it here because it’s a pretty good read but more so because it speaks to something we at Uprising have tried to hammer into novice writers (not that we’re old pros, but hey there is something to be said for authoring three books). You need to find your own voice. That means you’ll need to struggle against the better and worse aspects of your nature. You’ll need to “find your tribe” of people you would live and die for. You need to make sure you are writing books only you can write. Feast is great in that it’s probably the best advice on the writing life anyone can get, even nearly one hundred years later.

3. The Old Man and the Sea

A short and to the point novel. To some it is actually a novella. The Old Man and the Sea gave Hemingway the critical recognition he had earned decades before. It’s not his best, but it’s Hemingway through to the core. This is the story of a Cuban fisherman struggling against his catch as it drags him to sea and nearly costs him his life. It speaks to the soul of men, not the soul of man. This is a book for everyone but it should be in the hands of every young boy who says he doesn’t like reading.

2. The Sun Also Rises

This is a novel who because of the Jewish nature of one of the main characters being portrayed as negative (a self-hating Jew), couldn’t be published and probably not even written today. Sun is a novel of another time. In generations to come it will be looked at not only as a piece of great American literature, but as a primary source itself, especially among psychologists. This is the story of a man and woman, Jake and Brett, who’ve lost what it means to be a man and a woman, though it is never explicitly spelled out in the story we know neither can function as they were intended, and thus can never truly be together in the traditional sense of the word. The closing still haunts me

Brett tells Jake as the car drives away, and as we the reader come to understand why they cannot be together, “We could have had such a damn good time together.” To which he responds “Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?”

1. A Farewell to Arms

This is, in my opinion, the quintessential World War I novel, at least on the American side. All Quite on the Western Front and Storm of Steel have it locked down from the German point of view, but in A Farewell to Arms Hemingway gave the world a glimpse into the heart of a soldier who lost the thing he loved most in the world, his innocence. To me this book reads like a love letter to Agnes von Kurowsky, the woman I believe he loved so deeply and completely that he never recovered from that love. His life was a string of broken hearts simply because he could not find anyone he loved as deeply as Agnes.

In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway shows the world what he went through both in body and soul. This is the story of a man struggling to admit that each day of the war strips a little more of his humanity, until he meets a young nurse (based on Agnes von Kurowsky) named Catherine. Henry and Catherine fall in love and attempt to escape Italy into Switzerland. I won’t ruin the plot or ending as it is one of the few times in my life I cried reading a book or watching a movie, but it is so worth making sure you understand the first chapter in all its prophetic beauty. I cannot recommend Arms more strongly to anyone.

is Heinlein’s greatest juvenile novel. It’s written for young men, but it is not written in such a way that an adult would throw it away if they first encountered the book at say age thirty. The story centers on a young man named Kip who wins an old space suit in a contest. He is contacted by two beings calling themselves Peewee and the Mother Thing. They run into conflict with a race of aliens whose planet the society rotates out of 3D space sans mother star and genociding the entire species. It’s really a fun book and worth every dollar if you have a young son who doesn’t enjoy reading. My grandmother got this for me when I was about ten and I’ve been hooked on Heinlein ever since.

has live a very interesting, long life, and at the outset of the book he is willing to end it all. He is bored with life in a way that only Anne Rice’s Lestat could rival. Long agrees to tell several stories of his life to avoid his own death. The stories pull us through a range of human emotions. But the most controversial (and thus most praised by left wing critics) aspect is the debate on incest. This book contains moral reprobation but without becoming morally reprobate itself. It’s one of his best books, but also one you should not read until you understand what real human love it.

If you grew up in the ‘90s chances are you saw the Starship Troopers before you ever heard of the . This isn’t a bad thing to me. The adaptation is a funny campy take on fascism. Maybe we could call it the world’s only existing example of Fashsploitation. In Heinlein’s superior novel of the same name we find one major difference. Philosophy. The film which starred a much younger Neil Patrick Harris and a few other minor stars you might know if you’re from that era, was missing the intellectual depth of Heinlein’s book. In fact the book spends most of its length discussing the philosophy of war, voting rights, equality, and the nature of humanity. The story and its ideas are so deep and interesting that I’d dub the novel, along with the two that follow on this list, as scalziproof. There just isn’t any way to rip off Starship Troopers without looking like a complete moron, and Scalzi is at least smart enough to know not to delve into deep thoughts about things like war. I’d highly recommend the novel to anyone interested in what a great sci-fi war novel could be. To me, it is Ernst Jünger set in space.

This is the book that got my libertarian going well before I ever read  or . In we encounter some of the most fascinating and deep characters Heinlein ever put on paper. The book is a masterpiece in terms of content and style. This is the story of a penal colony on the Moon inhabited by Loonies who seek for themselves independence and liberty. The story introduces us to Mike a supercomputer with mysterious motivations for supporting the rebelling academic, computer technician and professional agitator. In fact Wyoh can be understood (at least to me) as the first in the line of modern female heroines who’ve been stripped of their femininity such as Buffy, Sarah Conner, and pretty much every female in an action movie these days. But this is not Heinlein’s best novel.

Heinlein at his best. In he created one of my favorite characters in literature. This is a story of a man learning to grok what it means to be human though he is human. It’s an outsider look at the world of America in the midst of the Cold War. The novel is set after the Third World War and looks at religion as being an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of the wrong people.

I believe there is a right age to read a novel. For me, Stranger should be read in the early to mid-twenties. I was about fourteen when I first read it and didn’t understand much, but I knew I liked it. Then while in grad school and working at a book store I picked up a copy as my free mass market paperback book of the week and read it over the span of about three days. There was so much Heinlein put into his novel about love, politics, law, philosophy and the search for the meaning of what it means to be human. In fact his definition of human is one that in my opinion runs against his objectively libertarian politics. Smith cannot be fully human because he has no “tribe” he has no people. All he knows is Mars. In a way I would say this may have been the world’s first Identitarian novel. Absolutely worth reading.

5. – Umberto Eco

Eco isn’t one of my favorite authors for his incredible literary style, but rather because you feel like you’re getting a glimpse into the past when reading his works. He is an academic, which in truth helped push me to an academic career, but he is more than just an academic. He is a thinker, which you can’t say of all professors or even PhDs though they would like it to be true. In The Name of the Rose Eco created a medieval mystery so good and so fascinating you feel more intelligent just for having read it. But unlike a TED talk which just makes you feel intelligent for a few hours, Eco’s book actually makes you smarter for having read it. That’s the power of this work. It has inspired me to study history and write interesting versions of the past since I read it ten years ago.

4. – Sir Walter Scott

Ivanhoe made Scott rich enough to buy his own castle. He was the JK Rowling of his day, only I have a feeling no one will read her books two hundred years from now. Ivanhoe is fundamentally a novel about values and becoming who you were meant to be though the cleansing fire of battle and love. This is said to be a historical romance, but by today’s standards that’s not exactly true. There is romance yes but it’s not two pirates fighting over one damsel in distress. This is romance as Scott imagined romance would have taken place in medieval England. Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the protagonist, is tasked with returning honor to his father’s name all while winning the hand of Rowena. The love in this novel is a love earned by being a man, not by virtue of fate.

3. – Cormac McCarthy

Some people will say this doesn’t belong in a list of historical books. I disagree. McCarthy was writing about the past and as such it is both a western and a historical novel. Perhaps that is part of what has created an enduring mythos of the Texas and Western frontiers. They are both historical and geographical. But there is also a cultural aspect to the western and historical novel. That is probably why they are still read, when done well. The line I always return to in Blood Meridian is “it makes no difference what man thinks of war. War endures. Before man there was war, waiting. The ultimate trade awaiting the ultimate practitioner.” This book has shaped my understanding of military history and all conflict since I first read of the Judge and the Kid.

2. – Ernst Jünger

Jünger is one of the most fascinating people in modern German literature. His novel Storm of Steel is his best known work, and probably the easiest to find in English. He was a military man who self-published Storm in 1920 and it slowly grew to make him a famous author. So even nearly one hundred years ago great authors were starting out as self-published. His life politically was also interesting. He was offered a seat in the Reichstag as a member of the National Socialist party, yet he turned it down, despite being a prominent nationalist. Jünger is to me an inspirational figure as a writer and man. He is someone who understood nationalism doesn’t necessarily lead to Nazism. Indeed he was on the periphery of the Stauffenberg bomb plot. Jünger was also admired by Julius Evola, a man whose writing I’ve also been influenced by. As an author he was also influential in the development of magical realism, and the idea of the sovereign individual.

But what of the novel? What make it worth reading? Glad you asked. Storm of Steel is in many ways the novel All Quiet on the Western Front should have and could have been. It lacks any real philosophizing, but still manages to be about an idea. That of what a man would die for. And despite the pomp of dying for national ideals, Jünger makes it clear that soldiers die for and fight for each other. And it is love of the brother that is at the heart of nationalism.

1. – Erich Maria Remarque

Okay, one and two were keeping me up wondering which one goes where. Frankly, I decided Remarque’s work is better as it had a more lasting impression on me, and contributed more to my understanding of the early twentieth century, and to my understanding of World War I than The Storm of Steel did.

The book concerns both the physical and psychological impact of war on the individual. Remarque was in some way reminiscent of Hemingway. Perhaps this novel was his way of reconnecting with a world, that he makes it clear in the novel, is now disconnected from him – and many other soldiers returning home from the trenches. I discovered Quiet through my reading of Hemingway, especially his Nick Adams’ stories. Big Two-Hearted River comes to mind when I think of the feel this novel has for me.