Read The Elegance of the Hedgehog

One is not born but becomes a woman; de Beauvoir's 1949 foundation of feminism.

Roquentin in a Normandy town discovers that existence is absurd, starting with a chestnut root.

Julien Sorel climbs through Restoration France by seduction; Stendhal's ambition novel.

The madeleine and the first volume of In Search of Lost Time; start here.

Expatriates drink through Paris and Pamplona; Hemingway's lost generation.

Bardamu through the war, colonial Africa, Detroit and the Paris suburbs; Celine's furious slang.

Three brothers, a murdered father and the Grand Inquisitor; Dostoevsky's last novel.

Seven years in a Davos sanatorium arguing about Europe before 1914.