Orhan Pamuk’s Library

Sa？etak In his literary criticism the Turkish Nobel-prize winner Orhan Pamuk states on multiple occasions the importance of library and reading of other books for his own work as a writer. The best insight into his library and his reading is gained by the essays collected in his two non-fiction books, ？teki renkler: Se？me Yaz？lar ve Bir Hikaye (Other Colors: Selected Essays and One Story, 1999) and Manzaradan Par？alar: Hayat, Sokak, Edebiyat (Fragments of the Landscape: Life, Street, Literature, 2010). The collections assemble thematically and generically very diverse texts in which the writer deploys critical, and often very personal, observations and assessments concerning individual authors and works of Turkish and world literature. Analyzing Pamuk’s meditations on reading and books, the essay aims at reconstructing the writer’s principal reading and examining the effects of reception of the books of others on the writer’s consciousness, indicating how they have changed his notions of the earlier works, directed his literary and intellectual interests and, directly and indirectly, informed his own poetics of writing