Perhaps you’d be honored — thrilled! — to have New York magazine declare you one of the “100 Smartest New Yorkers.” Or you could feel the way playwright David Ives did when he won that accolade a decade ago: “The best thing you can do is be hit by a car that day, so it’s the last thing anyone remembers about you,” he says. “It’s a curse, especially since I don’t know anything about anything except how to write a play now and then.” Ives is too modest: He happens to write wonderful plays — the racy “Venus in Fur” among them, as well as an evening of satirical one-acts, “All in the Timing,” that’s just been revived off-Broadway. Adept at adapting other writer’s plays, he’s also a key part of City Center’s Encores! series. Here’s what’s in his library.
The Patrick Melrose novels
by Edward St. Aubyn
The Patrick Melrose novels, of which there are five, are a kind of tonic to the splendid kitsch of “Downton Abbey”: It’s about a young man who grows up with the rich in England, and all their cruelty, pettiness and sadism. The books are set in the 1970s, and St. Aubyn writes like an angel. As far as I’m concerned, his books are better than Evelyn Waugh’s.
Bring Up the Bodies
by Hilary Mantel
This is a thrilling read, an extraordinary evocation of Henry VIII’s right-hand thug/counselor, Thomas Cromwell, and his prosecution of Anne Boleyn, from the moment Henry decides to get rid of her. The book is absolute poetry and the sense of the past is so strong, you feel intimate with life in 1530.
Bloodlands
by Timothy Snyder
One of the greatest history books I’ve ever read. It’s an exploration of what happened in central Europe between 1933 and 1945, when 14 million people were murdered by the political and economic policies of Hitler and Stalin. Snyder makes you rethink everything you thought you knew about WWII.
On Politics: Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present
by Alan Ryan
If you like to dip your toe into ideas, this is a vast rushing river! It shows how great thinkers from the early Greeks on wrestled with the ideas of justice and law, and how best to govern ourselves — questions that have become absolutely vital and gripping. I’ve been glued to this book, as my wife can tell you!