Recommendations for Building a Personal Library in Communist Romania in 1975
212 Recommended Authors and Titles
Both before ’89 and in the years immediately after the Revolution, foreigners we met were often genuinely surprised to discover that we had read American and British literature—even though some American and British authors leaned to the left politically. And if they happened to visit our home and make it to the library, their surprise would turn into outright shock: “Oh, you have Walt Whitman! And Jack London! Oh, and Shakespeare! Oh, and…!”
Of course, our library grew steadily over the years, but even before ’89 it was larger than average, holding a serious selection of both fiction and non-fiction, dictionaries, and specialized technical books.
I remember how a few of my mother’s English coworkers began reading all of Jane Austen after hearing her stories about the impact the books had on her. Yes, it happens to them too—just like it happens to us with compulsory school reading. Some authors simply don’t seem “cool” enough at a certain age, and you end up discovering them later, usually thanks to someone else’s enthusiasm, wondering why on earth you were so foolish not to have read them sooner.
What also amazed our foreign friends was discovering that in many Romanian homes they visited, the books on the shelves had actually been read—not just arranged for decoration. This trend that has hit Romania in recent years—the repudiation of home libraries—had already been underway in the West for some time.
And when I say “libraries,” I don’t mean those rooms with a few shelves holding coffee table books and decorative objects, which now often serve as combined dining and living rooms. I mean a room specifically arranged to store books, preferably in a precise order, for reading. A deeply personal space, because most personal libraries also have deeply personal stories.
Some personal libraries in communist Romania hid their stories behind the back rows of the shelves or behind closed doors—usually old books from the royal period and titles not recommended for display. Others, as in my mother’s case, lived on in a corner of memory, where the destroyed library of her grandparents—lost during the war—was constantly being rebuilt in one form or another. These stories about books fascinated our foreign friends. Alongside discussions about particular volumes or authors, they were intrigued by how we had formed our image of another country through its literature. Many books carried with them the memory of standing in line to get a copy, of workplace book trades, or of the propaganda books you were obliged to buy in order to get the volume you actually wanted. There were also books bought “on the tab”—to be paid for on payday—or in installments. In many state enterprises, there were trusted people with connections at bookstores. They kept lists of newly published, in-demand titles, as well as records of who had ordered and who had paid. They knew your tastes and would tip you off in advance when a certain volume was due to appear. It was a kind of ordering system, quite similar to the one promoted by Reader’s Digest years ago, for those who remember. And then there were the closed reading circles—built entirely on trust, the kind of trust on which a person’s freedom could depend. These were usually made up of doctors, teachers, lawyers, people under house arrest, former officers in the Royal Army, former members of the local bourgeoisie, and descendants of old families. Within them, there were discreet under-the-table sales of books published mainly during the interwar period—sales that sometimes ensured a family’s financial survival—as well as lending and trading according to genre preferences, with special interest in certain translators. My maternal grandmother was part of such a closed circle. Through book trades, she obtained the history volumes she wanted—often in exchange for romance novels. Meetings took place at different members’ homes; my mother remembers her serving coffee and wild strawberry preserves. It was also through under-the-table book sales that my grandmother managed to buy my mother a piano, which today has been transformed into a bookcase. The piano served my mother well; during the time we lived in the United States, she managed to earn some extra income giving piano lessons. Today, the piano houses part of my great-grandmother’s collection—books she had read in the original German, Hungarian, Romanian, and Russian. There was also a certain discipline to reading—sometimes tied to a particular period, sometimes to a particular author.
In any case, for many of our Western friends, these stories were probably an opportunity to reconsider the value of the books they had such easy access to. A value we, too, might do well to remind our own elected officials about—those who now seem determined to undermine the activity of the last remaining public libraries (many founded during the much-reviled communist period) and the ever-dwindling number of independent bookstores that have somehow survived the endless “transition” to a supposedly free and open society.
As always, when I tidy up my personal library, I can never resist the temptation to leaf through both my favorite books and the ones I haven’t read yet but keep within easy reach, because you never know when you might need a piece of advice from them. In that second category is Enciclopedia căminului (The Home Encyclopedia), published in Bucharest by Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică (Scientific and Encyclopedic Publishing House) in 1975 (easy enough to find in Romania in second-hand bookshops), in the brighter, more open years of the communist regime. Alongside all sorts of quick, practical tips on family medicine, nutrition, cosmetics, household management, and so on, by far the most interesting section is titled The Development of Human Personality in the Family. Sure, today it sounds like the title of a self-help book, but the entire chapter has more substance than most of the pamphlets published in the genre today. And within this section, the final chapter, The Optimal Use of Leisure Time, written under the guidance of Mircea Malița, is a true magnet; I find myself leafing through it every time I dust the volume. Alongside a fine essay by Malița on the importance of books, reading, and general culture, there is also, in this section, a contribution from Dumitru Trancă, former director of the Romanian Encyclopedic Publishing House. Inspired by Raymond Queneau’s 1956 work Pour une bibliothèque idéale, he offers a selection of titles from 212 authors which, in his view, should not be missing from a predominantly humanistic library. Naturally, we won’t be surprised to find Marx, Engels, or Lenin on the list! After all, for all the traumas communism left us with as a society, these are still recommended reading, especially for those with intellectual pretensions. But there are still plenty of titles in this list that, even for those more open years of communism, are a surprise—sometimes a pleasant one, sometimes tinged with irony.
I’ll reproduce the entire list below, so each reader can weigh it according to their own taste and critical judgment. In my view, it’s a balanced selection that takes you through the great literatures of the world (I was happy to find Hungarian writers included, names rarely seen in today’s lists, despite their relevance to our geographical and cultural space). But first, here’s the introduction to the list:
“The modern home can no longer be imagined without a library, and we do not believe that there are any families in our country today without books…”
Oh, the bitter irony! How barbaric we have become!
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Homer: Iliad, Odyssey
Hesiod: Works and Days
Lucretius: The Nature of Things
Virgil: Aeneid, Odes, Epodes
Ovid: Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto
Aesop: Fables
Aeschylus: Plays (Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound)
Sophocles: Plays (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone)
Euripides: Plays (The Bacchae, Alcestis, Medea)
Herodotus: Histories
Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
Xenophon: Anabasis
Polybius: Histories
Aristophanes: Comedies (The Clouds, The Frogs, The Assemblywomen)
Plato: Dialogues
Aristotle: Organon, Poetics
Cicero: Philippics
Caesar: De Bello Gallico
Titus Livius: History of Rome from its Foundation
Tacitus: Works (Annals)
Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars
Horace: Satires and Epistles
Petronius: Satyricon
Apuleius, Lucius: The Golden Ass
Juvenal: Satires
Longus: Daphnis and Chloe
Kālidāsa: Shakuntala
Li Tai-Pe (Li Bo): Poems
*** Bhagavad-Gita
*** Saga of Njál
*** Nibelungenlied
*** The Song of Igor’s Campaign
*** Tristan and Isolde
*** The Song of Roland
*** The Song of the Cid
*** From Persian Lyrics
*** Miorița (old Romanian pastoral ballad)
Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy
Petrarch, Francesco: Poems
Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury Tales
*** One Thousand and One Nights
Villon, François: Ballads
Erasmus of Rotterdam: The Praise of Folly
Machiavelli, Niccolò: The Prince
Castiglione, Baldassarre: The Courtier
Thomas More: Utopia
Campanella, Tommaso: The City of the Sun
Rabelais, François: Gargantua and Pantagruel
Cellini, Benvenuto: The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Written by Himself
Vasari, Giorgio: Lives of the Architects, Painters, and Sculptors
Camões, Luís Vaz de: The Lusiads
Montaigne, Michel: Essays
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote
Lope de Vega: Plays (The Girl with the Pitcher, The Gardener’s Dog, The Peasant from Getafe)
Shakespeare, William: Plays (Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, King Lear, As You Like It), Sonnets
Descartes: Discourse on Method
Calderón de la Barca: Plays (The Phantom Lady, Love is Not a Game)
Corneille, Pierre: Play (The Cid)
Racine, Jean-Baptiste: Plays (Phèdre, Andromache)
La Fontaine: Fables
Romanian Chroniclers (Grigore Ureche, Miron Costin, Ion Neculce): Selected Texts
Molière: The Miser, Tartuffe, The School for Wives
Pascal, Blaise: Selected Writings
Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels
Milescu, Nicolae: Travel Journal to China
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
Cantemir, Dimitrie: Selected Works (Hieroglyphic History, Description of Moldavia)
Lesage, Alain-René: The Devil upon Two Sticks, Gil Blas
Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet: Selected Works (Candide or Optimism)
Goldoni, Carlo: Play (The Boors)
Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Pure Reason
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Confessions, The Social Contract
Andersen, Hans Christian: Fairy Tales for Children (Thumbelina, The Emperor’s New Clothes)
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Works (2 volumes)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: Play (Faust), Poems
Schiller, Friedrich: Play (The Robbers), Poems
Krylov, Ivan Andreevich: Fables
Novalis: Hymns to the Night
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Science of Logic
Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma, The Red and the Black
Byron, George Gordon: Poems
Heine, Heinrich: Poems
Leopardi, Giacomo: Poems
Balzac, Honoré de: Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Cousin Bette, Splendor and Misery of Courtesans
Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich: Eugene Onegin
Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables, Notre-Dame de Paris
Dumas, Alexandre: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers
Feuerbach, Ludwig: The Essence of Christianity
Darwin, Charles: The Origin of Species
Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich: Dead Souls, The Inspector General, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka
Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair
Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers
Lermontov, Mikhail Yuryevich: The Demon, A Hero of Our Time
Kogălniceanu, Mihail: Selected Writings
Bălcescu, Nicolae: History of the Romanians under Michael the Brave
Poe, Edgar Allan: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The Fall of the House of Usher, Selected Poems
Verne, Jules: Captain at Fifteen, The Children of Captain Grant, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Five Weeks in a Balloon
Grimm, Brothers: Fairy Tales
Burckhardt, Jacob: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
Marx, Karl: Selected Works
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich: First Love, A Nest of the Gentry
Botev, Hristo: Poems
Vasile Alecsandri: Plays, Poems
Whitman, Walt: Poems
Engels, Friedrich: Selected Works
Baudelaire, Charles: Les Fleurs du mal
Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary, Salammbô
Fabre, Jean Henri: The Life of Insects
Petőfi, Sándor: Selected Poems
Madách, Imre: The Tragedy of Man
Ostrovsky, Alexander Nikolaevich: Plays (The Forest, The Storm, Wolves and Sheep)
Ibsen, Henrik: Plays (Peer Gynt, The Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, Nora, The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea)
Tolstoy, Leo Nikolaevich: War and Peace, Resurrection, Anna Karenina
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Gavrilovich: What is to be Done?
Ispirescu, Petre: Fairy Tales
De Coster, Charles: Eulenspiegel
Odobescu, Alexandru: Pseudocynegeticos
Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur
Creangă, Ion: Childhood Memories, Stories
Hasdeu, Bogdan Petriceicu: Selected Pages
Zola, Émile: The Fortune of the Rougons, Germinal
Mallarmé, Stéphane: Poems
Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur: Poems
Maiorescu, Titu: Criticism
France, Anatole: The Queen Pedauque, The Red Lily
Xenopol, Alexandru D.: Selected Writings
Sienkiewicz, Henryk: Quo Vadis, The Teutonic Knights
Slavici, Ioan: Mara, Novellas
Hernández, José: Martín Fierro
Eminescu, Mihai: Poems
Caragiale, Ion Luca: Plays (A Lost Letter, A Stormy Night)
Andrić, Ivo: The Bridge on the Drina
Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Macedonski, Alexandru: Poems
Shaw, George Bernard: Plays (Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, The Devil’s Disciple)
Conrad, Joseph: Typhoon, Lord Jim
Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Constantin: Criticism
Lagerlöf, Selma: Gösta Berling
Bergson, Henri: Laughter
Delavrancea, Barbu Ștefănescu: Plays
Hamsun, Knut: Hunger, Pan, Victoria
Caragiale, Matei: Rakes of the Old Court
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich: Plays (Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard)
Nansen, Fridtjof: In Night and Fog
Tagore, Rabindranath: Poems
Unamuno, Miguel de: Three Exemplary Novellas
Nušić, Branislav: Comedies
Croce, Benedetto: Aesthetics
Rolland, Romain: Colas Breugnon, Jean-Christophe, The Enchanted Heart
Darío, Rubén: Selected Verses
Kipling, Rudyard: The Jungle Books
Galsworthy, John: Forsyte Saga
Pirandello, Luigi: Plays (Six Characters in Search of an Author, Liola, Henry IV)
Reymont, Władysław Stanisław: The Peasants
Gorky, Maxim: Mother, Plays, The Life of Klim Samgin
Gide, André: The Vatican Cellars, The Fruits of the Earth, The School for Wives
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich: Selected Works
Iorga, Nicolae: Historical Writings, Literary Studies, History of the Romanian Army, History of Stephen the Great
Proust, Marcel: In Search of Lost Time
Valéry, Paul: Poems
Russell, Bertrand: Autobiography
Huizinga, Johan: The Autumn of the Middle Ages
Robert Frost: Poems
Rainer Maria Rilke: Poems
Machado de Assis: Poems
London, Jack: Martin Eden, White Fang
Endre Ady: Poems
Densusianu, Ovidiu: History of the Romanian Language
Titulescu, Nicolae: Speeches
Arghezi, Tudor: Poems
Apollinaire, Guillaume de: Poems
Sadoveanu, Mihai: The Jderi Brothers, The Hatchet, Under the Sign of the Crab
Lovinescu, Eugen: Writings
Lu Xun: The Bronze Wall
Papini, Giovanni: A Man Finished
Bacovia, George: Poems
Facillon, Henri: The Life of Forms
Martin du Gard, Roger: The Thibault Family
Pârvan, Vasile: Dacia
Joyce, James: Dubliners
Hašek, Jaroslav: The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War
Kafka, Franz: The Trial, The Castle
Istarti, Panait: Kyra Kyralina, The Thistles of the Bărăgan
Romulo Gallegos: Doña Bárbara
Rebreanu, Liviu: Ion, The Revolt, The Forest of the Hanged
Goga, Octavian: Poems
Voiculescu, Vasile: Poems, Stories
Fournier, Alain: The Lost Path
Saint-John Perse: Poems
O’Neill, Eugene: Theatre (Electra, Desire Under the Elms)
Ungaretti, Giacomo: Poems
Čapek, Karel: War with the Salamanders, Krakatit
Gramsci, Antonio: Letters from Prison
Petrescu, Camil: The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War, Procust’s Bed; Theatre
Remarque, Erich Maria: All Quiet on the Western Front
Huxley, Aldous Leonard: Point Counter Point, The Smile of Mona Lisa
Mayakovsky, Vladimir: Poems
Yesenin, Sergei: Poems
Gusti, Dimitrie: Selected Pages
Barbu, Ion: Poems
Blaga, Lucian: Poems, The Trilogy of Culture
Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe: The Leopard
Faulkner, William: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion
Vianu, Tudor: The Art of Romanian Prose Writers, Aesthetics
Brecht, Bertolt: The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage
Hemingway, Ernest: The Old Man and the Sea, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms
Lorca, Federico Garcia: Poems, Theatre
Călinescu, George: History of Romanian Literature, Enigma of Otilia, Poor Ioanide, Impressions on Spanish Literature, The Life of M. Eminescu
Exupéry, Antoine de Saint: The Little Prince, Night Flight
Camus, Albert: The Stranger, The Plague, Theatre (Caligula)
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This is the English translation of an article published in my native Romanian language on my blog on Aug. 17, 2025 - Recomandări pentru fundația unei biblioteci personale din România comunistă a anului 1975. 212 autori recomandați și titluri - Din mansardă, and on cristoiublog.ro on Aug. 09, 2025