No Exit and Three Other Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre

Of all the books I've read over the years by Sartre, I think "No Exit" is probably the one that I was most engaged by. It's probably his most accessible, and maybe I was intrigued by the "Hell is other people" aspect. Though apparently that line has been misunderstood for years. According to Sartre:

"'Hell is other people' has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because. . . when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, . . . we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. . . . But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us."

The Bald Soprano & Other Plays by Eugene Ionesco

I read this book for a class during my sophomore year of college, and it sparked my brief stint as an absurdist playwright. I can't even remember what "The Bald Soprano" was about in the first place, or what I found so interesting about it, but that year I sought out other works of the same ilk--"Waiting for Godot" and "The Rhinoceros," for instance--and when we were assigned to write a one act play for the same class, I decided to go the absurdist route. I recall that it was about how people will see what they want to see no matter what is really there. (So profound.) It received a positive response from my teacher and classmates, who still brought it up from time to time the following year. But in the end, I really can't imagine that it was particularly good, and I can't find a copy of it to find out. Which is probably a good thing.

The Physicists by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

I read most of this book in the stacks at the Pratt library, while I was supposed to be shelving. Hey, everyone did it--I was still more productive than most student employees.

As for the book, it's a satiric play by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt, in which the world’s greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Möbius, is in a madhouse, surrounded by two other scientists: one who thinks he is Einstein, another who believes he is Newton.