Every Book Recommendation in Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman

Have you ever met someone you identified with so much, and were so enthralled by, that you had complete confidence in their taste in books? For me, that person is Aaliya Saleh, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s magnificent novel An Unnecessary Woman. The book is brimming with references to other writing, and from the first few pages, I found myself wanting to write them down.

As the novel continues, she includes essays, poems, artworks, and even pieces of music, as well as work she despises. It’s tempting to go into how books within a book, people and works she found in things she read and is passing on to the reader — how these references buried within references — play into the books’ themes, with Aaliya’s Beirut layered onto the Beiruts of a million other people and a million other pasts, but I’ll spare you any more of that.

Instead, here’s a list of recommendations from Aaliya/Alameddine, in order, with their favorites highlighted.

(I hope you don’t mind that I included affiliate links; this took a while to put together.)

• The Keeper of Sheep by Fernando Pessoa

• Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan

• “If I were Sixteen Today” (Essay) by Marianne Moore

• Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings by Franz Kafka

• Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (Sebald comes up a lot)

• Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 110 in A-flat Major

• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

• The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

• The Suspended Odes by Muallaqat

• The Science of Right by Immanuel Kant

• A Heart So White by Javier Marías

• Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías

• Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías

• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

• The Cinnamon Shops by Bruno Schulz

• Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (“[I] devoured the racist Fear of Flying” — at best, a mixed review)

• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Play) by Edward Albee

• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

• The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

• The Ashley Book of Knots by Clifford W. Ashley (Free Here)

• The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

• The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago

• “Death of a Traveling Salesman” (Story) by Eudora Welty (Free Here)

• Liszt’s Études, played by Sviatoslav Richter

• “Tithonus” (Poem) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Free Here)

• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

• Corydon by André Gide

• Sepharad by Antonio Muñoz Molina

• Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante

• Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

• Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, sung by Kathleen Ferrier

• Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, played by Artur Rubinstein

• Bach's Goldberg Variations, played by Glenn Gould

• Bach’s English Suite No. 2, Bourrée

• Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonatas

• Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas No. 9, the Kreutzer Sonata

• Sviatoslav Richer’s album The Sofia Recital

• Martha Argerich’s album Début Recital

• The Waste Land (Poem) by T.S. Eliot (Free Here)

• Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

• The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

• Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész

• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• The Waves by Virginia Woolf

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

• The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

• The Fall by Albert Camus

• The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

• Microcosms by Claudio Magris

• Danube by Claudio Magris

• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

• Dubliners by James Joyce

• Herzog by Saul Bellow

• Bruckner’s Symphony No. 3, conducted by Günter Wand

• The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš

• A Short History of Decay by Emil Cioran

• Hugo Wolf’s Serenade in G Major (the Italian Serenade)

• Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

• Ransom by David Malouf

• This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski

• Fateless by Imre Kertész

• How I Came to Know Fish by Ota Pavel

• The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal

• Ethics by Baruch Spinoza

• Chopin’s Waltz No. 2 in C-Sharp Minor played by Artur Rubinstein

• Strauss’ Four Last Songs, sung by Karita Mattila

• Beirut by Samir Kassir

• Hunger by Knut Hamsun

• A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas

• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

• A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

• A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

• Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

• Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee

There are also a number of authors mentioned without reference to a particular book:

• Bilge Karasu

• Czesław Miłosz

• Novalis

• Marguerite Duras

• Alice Munro

• William Faulkner

• Primo Levi

• Sławomir Mrożek

• C. P. Cavafy

• Cesare Pavese

• Edna O'Brien

• Colm Tóibín

• Anne Enright

• Junot Díaz

• Aleksandar Hemon

• Nadine Gordimer

• Nuruddin Farah

• Patrick White

• David Malouf

• Milan Kundera

• Ismail Kadare (I personally recommend The Pyramid)

• Nikolay Gogol

• Julio Cortázar

• Sadegh Hedayat

• Jorge Luis Borges

• Cees Nooteboom

---

niches are overrated. Subscribe to be surprised by infrequent content with no consistent theme.