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Michael Farr's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Michael Farr recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Michael Farr's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

The Human Comedy

Selected Stories (New York Review Books Classics)

An NYRB Classics Original

Characters from every corner of society and all walks of life—lords and ladies, businessmen and military men, poor clerks,  unforgiving moneylenders, aspiring politicians, artists, actresses, swindlers, misers, parasites, sexual adventurers, crackpots,  and more—move through the pages of The Human Comedy, Balzac’s multivolume magnum opus, an interlinked chronicle of modernity in all its splendor and squalor. The Human Comedy includes the great roomy novels that have exercised such a sway over Balzac’s many literary inheritors, from...
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Recommended by Michael Farr, and 1 others.

Michael FarrHergé was not a huge literary man. He liked books but he didn’t spend his time reading. Cinema and art were more his things. But he did love Balzac. He read a book in the fifties which was an academic analysis of the use of characters in Balzac’s novels, and how recurring characters gave a structure to the sequence of Balzac’s books which was part of its appeal. This made a deep impression on... (Source)

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2
Picking up where he left off in the Egyptian adventure Cigars of the Pharaoh, Tintin travels to China in The Blue Lotus, a tale which is generally considered Herge's first masterpiece. It's also Tintin's only foray into actual history, specifically the Sino-Japanese conflicts of the early 1930s. The political tensions combined with the chilling threats of drugs give the story an especially high and realistic sense of danger. Herge's interest in China was spurred by a friendship with a young Chinese student named Chang Chong-chen, a relationship that Tintin mirrors with a Chinese... more
Recommended by Michael Farr, and 1 others.

Michael FarrI think one can safely say that The Blue Lotus is the most important Tintin adventure. Tintin first moves East with The Cigars of the Pharaoh. The Blue Lotus, written in 1934, continues the adventure in China. When he started it, Hergé got a letter from a priest at Leuven University [near Brussels] saying: “I gather you’re sending Tintin to China. Be sure that you mug up on things Chinese and... (Source)

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3
Recommended by Michael Farr, and 1 others.

Michael FarrThis came out in 1975. Numa Sadoul was a young student in the south of France who also asked to interview Hergé. He went along with his tape recorder and the interview just went on and on. He took 14 hours of material. Hergé, for the first time, came out and talked about his life, which as I said he had always been reluctant to do. So for anyone interested in Hergé this is a basic background... (Source)

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4

The Thirty-Nine Steps (Richard Hannay, #1)

A gripping tale of adventure that has enthralled readers since it was first published, John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps is edited with an introduction and notes by Sir John Keegan in Penguin Classics.

Adventurer Richard Hannay has just returned from South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his London life - until a spy is murdered in his flat, just days after having warned Hannay of an assassination plot that could plunge Britain into a war with Germany. An obvious suspect for the police and an easy target for the killers, Hannay picks up the trail left by the assassins,...
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Frank Cottrell BoyceIt’s quite a good book, but it’s got one great idea, and Hitchcock ran with it. When adapting a book it’s much better to take the thing that’s brilliant about it and polish it. (Source)

Michael FarrHitchcock said of The Thirty-Nine Steps that it was a wonderful book to film because you didn’t need to do a storyboard, it was all there already. (Source)

Sam BourneIt is extraordinarily fast paced. A huge part of any good thriller is the chase, and this is very good on that. (Source)

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5
The classic graphic novel. Tintin meets Professor Alembick, an expert with a very rare royal seal in his collection-the seal of King Ottokar the IV of Syldavia. Tintin joins the professor on his trip to this foreign land, but can the Professor be trusted? less
Recommended by Martin Conway, Michael Farr, and 2 others.

Martin ConwayIt can be a bit of a cliché to refer to Hergé when talking about Belgium, but it’s difficult to resist him because of the power and wit of some of his early books. I think he becomes less effective by the 1950s. Hergé was a product of a very particular right-wing Catholic journalistic milieu in the 1920s and it is slightly accidental that he is known now for the Tintin books. He was somebody who... (Source)

Michael FarrYes, this is a wonderful example. The villain, Müsstler, is a combination of Mussolini and Hitler. King Ottokar’s Sceptre, dating from 1938-39, mirrors the Anschluss of Austria by Hitler. Here we have a small Balkan state, Syldavia, facing the threat of a fascist takeover. Hergé was thinking very much in terms of Romania, which had a king being pressured by a right-wing political group, and also... (Source)

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