Joshua Rubenstein

is Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA and most recently author of .

"Books I would read even if no one asked me to"

• by Leo Tolstoy
  For my money, the greatest novel ever written. I studied Russian in order to read books like this in the original. While the story of Anna and Vronsky is what is generally known to most people, I find myself drawn to the romance between Levin and Kitty - half the book that the Greta Garbo movie left out.

• by Jane Austen
  When I was assigned this book in high school, it was late in my senior year and I was already accepted into Columbia. So I tried to avoid reading the book. No doubt I thought of it as a "girl's book," beneath my manly (or more precisely adolescent) attention. Relying on a "trot," I failed three small quizzes about the book in a row and then decided to read it in one night before the main exam. Wouldn't you know it but I fell in love with the book and regretted my prejudice. I have been an Austen fan ever since.

• by Marcel Proust
  For the past three summers, I have read thousands of pages of this novel, always mesmerized and fascinated.

• by William Gaddis
  The single most astonishing novel I have ever read by an American author. A work of outlandish genius.

• by Mark Twain
  If you have not read this book at least once in every decade of your life, you should be ashamed of yourself. Reading it is a way of gauging your literary and moral growth.

• by Philip Roth
  I don't know of another American author who pushes and challenges our sensibility the way Roth does. The main characters here seem perverse, impossible to tolerate knowing let alone reading about. But the story and the writing carry an unforseen emotional payoff that makes reading the entire book worthwhile.

• by Amos Oz
  My favorite book for reading aloud in Hebrew. Oz captures the diverse voices of Israel that continue to goad each other.

• by Yevgeny Zamyatin
  The first anti-utopian novel. Written in 1921, We was banned by the Bolsheviks. The novel directly inspired 1984 and remains a forgotten classic of this century.

• My Testimony by Anatoly Marchenko (out of print)
  A wrenching account of Soviet labor camps under Nikita Krushchev. Marchenko was one of the priciple dissident figures in Moscow. His death in a labor camp in December 1986 compelled Mikhail Gorbachev to declare his campaign of glasnost and promise to free all political prisoners in the Soviet Union. My Testimony was orginally translated into 18 languages after it first came out in 1969. Sadly, it is now out of print.

• Adventures of Julio Jurenito & His Disciples by Ilya Ehrenburg (out of print)
  Written in 28 days in 1921, this was Ehrenburg's first and best novel. A thoroughly prophetic work of satire and bitter irony. Ehrenburg fortells the Holocaust, the convergence of fascist and communist ideology, even that the Japanese will be attacked by a weapon of mass destruction. Out of print, but you can find it in good libraries.

Mr. Rubenstein maintains his own home page.

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