Top Books First Read in 2020

[baby doll]

Novels:

• Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847-48)
• The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins, 1859-60)
• The Golden Bowl (Henry James, 1904)
• Sons and Lovers (D.H. Lawrence, 1913)

Poetry:

• The Iliad (Homer, c. 8th century BCE)

Non-Fiction:

• Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (V.F. Perkins, 1972)
• Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Meir Sternberg, 1978)
• Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism—Revised Edition (Benedict Anderson, 1983-2006)
• Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (George M. Wilson, 1986)
• The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, 1985)
• Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Arjun Appardurai, 1996)
• Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 1996)
• The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Eric Cazdyn, 2002)
• The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years' War, 1931-1945 (Peter B. High, 2003)
• Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925 (Aaron Gerow, 2010)

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• The Poetics of Prose (Tzvetan Todorov, 1971)
• Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Seymour Chatman, 1978)
• Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema (David Desser, 1988)
• Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, 1956-1978 (Oshima Nagisa, 1992)
• The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (Maureen Turim, 1998)
• History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (Harry Harootunian, 2000)
• Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (Joanne Bernardi, 2001)
• Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film After World War I (Kristin Thompson, 2005)
• Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and the Postwar Japanese Documentary (Abé Mark Nornes, 2007)
• The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity (Catherine Russell, 2008)
• Film Narratology (Peter Verstraten, 2009)
• Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s (Isolde Standish, 2011)

]

[baby doll]

Novels:

• Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol, 1842/55)
• Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847-48)
• The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins, 1859-60)
• The Golden Bowl (Henry James, 1904)
• Sons and Lovers (D.H. Lawrence, 1913)
• Underworld (Don DeLillo, 1997)

Poetry:

• The Iliad (Homer, c. 8th century BCE)

Non-Fiction:

• The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (William James, 1902)
• Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (V.F. Perkins, 1972)
• Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Meir Sternberg, 1978)
• Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism—Revised Edition (Benedict Anderson, 1983-2006)
• Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (George M. Wilson, 1986)
• The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, 1985)
• Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 1996)
• The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Eric Cazdyn, 2002)
• The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years' War, 1931-1945 (Peter B. High, 2003)
• Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925 (Aaron Gerow, 2010)

[

Show Spoiler

• The Poetics of Prose (Tzvetan Todorov, 1971)
• Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Seymour Chatman, 1978)
• Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema (David Desser, 1988)
• Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, 1956-1978 (Oshima Nagisa, 1992)
• Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Arjun Appardurai, 1996)
• The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (Maureen Turim, 1998)
• History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (Harry Harootunian, 2000)
• Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (Joanne Bernardi, 2001)
• Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film After World War I (Kristin Thompson, 2005)
• Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and the Postwar Japanese Documentary (Abé Mark Nornes, 2007)
• The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity (Catherine Russell, 2008)
• Film Narratology (Peter Verstraten, 2009)
• Politics, Porn and Protest: Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s (Isolde Standish, 2011)

]