Around the World in 80 Books
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Narrated by:
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David Damrosch
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By:
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David Damrosch
About this listen
A transporting and illuminating voyage around the globe, through classic and modern literary works that are in conversation with one another and with the world around them
Featured in the Chicago Tribune's Great 2021 Fall Book Preview * One of Smithsonian Magazine's Ten Best Books About Travel of 2021
Inspired by Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard University’s department of comparative literature and founder of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic’s restrictions on travel by exploring 80 exceptional books from around the globe. Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran, and points beyond, and via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel Prize winners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways in which the world bleeds into literature.
To chart the expansive landscape of world literature today, Damrosch explores how writers live in two very different worlds: the world of their personal experience and the world of books that have enabled great writers to give shape and meaning to their lives. In his literary cartography, Damrosch includes compelling contemporary works as well as perennial classics, hard-bitten crime fiction as well as haunting works of fantasy, and the formative tales that introduce us as children to the world we’re entering. Taken together, these 80 titles offer us fresh perspective on enduring problems, from the social consequences of epidemics to the rising inequality that Thomas More designed Utopia to combat, as well as the patriarchal structures within and against which many of these books’ heroines have to struggle - from the work of Murasaki Shikibu a millennium ago to Margaret Atwood today.
Around the World in 80 Books is a global invitation to look beyond ourselves and our surroundings, and to see our world and its literature in new ways.
©2021 David Damrosch (P)2021 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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The Loom of Time
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The Greater Middle East—the vast region between the Mediterranean and China, encompassing much of the Arab world, parts of northern Africa, and Asia—existed for millennia as the crossroads of empire. But with the dissolution of empires in the twentieth century, postcolonial states have endeavored to maintain stability. Robert D. Kaplan explores Greater Middle East through reporting and travel writing to reveal deeper truths about the impacts of history on the present and how the requirements of stability over anarchy are often in conflict with the ideals of democratic governance.
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detailed primer on the greater 'Middle East'
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A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no other. A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else. Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of. But it doesn't tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant.
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Critic reviews
“It is always a pleasure to talk about books with David Damrosch, who has read all of them, and he is so eloquent about them all.” (Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize-winning novelist)
“An insightful journey into the books that have long captivated us. Profound, boundless, and diverse.” (Jokha Alharthi, author of the Man Booker International Prize-winning Celestial Bodies)
“Pleasurable and full of insights, Around the World in 80 Books is such a joyful journey through the places, times and people who have made our world literature. Every time I finished a chapter I felt an urge to discover or re-read the books whose stories Damrosch is telling so vividly - but that meant putting down his own book and I wasn't able do that.” (Dror Mishani, author of The Missing File and Three)
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J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Making of a Legend
- By: Colin Duriez
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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J.R.R. Tolkien's creations, imagination, and characters captured the attention of millions of readers. But who was the man who dreamt up the intricate languages and perfectly crafted world of Middle-earth? Tolkien had a difficult life, for many years: orphaned and poor, his guardian forbade him to communicate with the woman he had fallen in love with, and he went through the horrors of the First World War. An intensely private and brilliant scholar, he spent over 50 years working on the languages, history, peoples, and geography of Middle-earth,
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Very insightful
- By Luke B. on 10-27-20
By: Colin Duriez
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Origins of The Wheel of Time
- The Legends and Mythologies That Inspired Robert Jordan
- By: Michael Livingston, Harriet McDougal - contributor, Robert Jordan
- Narrated by: Harriet McDougal, Kate Reading, Michael Kramer, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Take a deep dive into the real-world history and mythology that inspired the world of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time®. This companion to the internationally bestselling series will delve into the creation of Jordan’s masterpiece, drawing from interviews and an unprecedented examination of his unpublished notes. Michael Livingston tells the behind-the-scenes story of who Jordan was, how he worked, and why he holds such an important place in modern literature. Origins of The Wheel of Time will provide exciting knowledge and insights to both new and longtime fans.
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Agenda driven ideological bend.
- By Maxwell on 06-19-23
By: Michael Livingston, and others
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Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies
- How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature
- By: Elizabeth Winkler
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.” In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo.
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Excellent!
- By Virgil Tracy on 06-03-23
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The Man Who Invented Fiction
- How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.
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Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
- By LCorSMT on 06-21-23
By: William Egginton
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Nazi Literature in the Americas
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Eerie and fascinating
- By Jikai Zenshin on 03-19-21
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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The Fellowship
- The Literary LIves of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
- By: Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 26 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J. R. R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis' Oxford rooms and a nearby pub. They read aloud from works in progress, argued about anything that caught their fancy, and gave one another invaluable companionship, inspiration, and criticism.
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If You Love Literature...
- By Ray M on 07-14-16
By: Philip Zaleski, and others
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Figuring
- By: Maria Popova
- Narrated by: Natascha McElhone
- Length: 21 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries - beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement.
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Stunning
- By Laura on 03-12-19
By: Maria Popova
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C.S. Lewis
- A Biography of Friendship
- By: Colin Duriez
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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An Oxford student of C.S. Lewis' said he found his new tutor interesting and was told by J.R.R. Tolkien, "Interesting? Yes, he's certainly that. You'll never get to the bottom of him." You can learn a great deal about people by their friends and nowhere is this more true than in the case of C.S. Lewis, the remarkable academic, author, popularizer of faith - and creator of Narnia. He lost his mother early in life and became estranged from his father, much to his regret.
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It's a Great Concept
- By James on 08-13-20
By: Colin Duriez
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Botticelli's Secret
- The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance
- By: Joseph Luzzi
- Narrated by: Keith Szarabajka
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Some 500 years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created work of unearthly beauty. An intimate associate of Florence’s unofficial rulers, the Medici, he was commissioned by a member of their family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all 100 cantos of The Divine Comedy by the city’s greatest poet, Dante Alighieri. A powerful encounter between poet and artist, sacred and secular, earthly and evanescent, these drawings produced a wealth of stunning images but were never finished.
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Great story
- By Chris M on 12-09-22
By: Joseph Luzzi
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Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
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Keats
- A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph
- By: Lucasta Miller
- Narrated by: Sally Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment.
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A Romantic Life
- By David on 05-03-22
By: Lucasta Miller
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The Western Canon
- The Books and School of the Ages
- By: Harold Bloom
- Narrated by: James Armstrong
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon.....
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A personal and opinionated book on the Canon
- By Steffen on 07-23-12
By: Harold Bloom
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What listeners say about Around the World in 80 Books
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lucky
- 04-07-24
I REALLY wanted to like this book,
I mean what's not to like? Right? I think for me, the distraction was the reader. It's been said before,,, why do authors read their books when there are so many excellent narrators out there? Sadly, I was disappointed. This should have been 5 stars across the board.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Sarah
- 01-21-23
What a fantastic book!
I love this book. Thank you, Rick Steves for turning me onto this author. It is so interesting and I have so many new books to read and old favorites to revisit. I recommend this to every book lover.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Lena Denham Smith
- 03-16-22
Enjoyed revisiting some of my favorite books and being introduced
Enjoyed revisiting many of my favorite books
And being introduced to many titles new to me.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Xander Holden
- 01-21-24
Ruined by writer narrating
Author should have skipped narrating. Couldn’t get through it due to terrible narration. Could have been great.
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4 people found this helpful