Please leave your choices for books worth reading in comments below by title or number
#1 The
Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler 352 pages $ 3
in Library 3.89
Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts when he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who up-ends Macon’s insular world–and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life.
Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts when he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who up-ends Macon’s insular world–and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life.
#2 Arch
of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country by Erich Maria
Remarque 464 pages $$ 1
in Library 4.39
It
is 1939. Despite a law banning him from performing surgery, Ravic—a
German doctor and refugee living in Paris—has been treating some of
the city’s most elite citizens for two years on the behalf of two
less-than-skillful French physicians.
Forbidden to return to his own country, and dodging the everyday dangers of jail and deportation, Ravic manages to hang on—all the while searching for the Nazi who tortured him back in Germany. And though he’s given up on the possibility of love, life has a curious way of taking a turn for the romantic, even during the worst of times.
Forbidden to return to his own country, and dodging the everyday dangers of jail and deportation, Ravic manages to hang on—all the while searching for the Nazi who tortured him back in Germany. And though he’s given up on the possibility of love, life has a curious way of taking a turn for the romantic, even during the worst of times.
Winner
of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and a finalist
for the National Book Award!
From
the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of the critically acclaimed
short story collection, Brief
Encounters with Che Guevara,
comes Billy
Lynn's Long Halftime Walk ("TheCatch-22 of
the Iraq War" —Karl Marlantes).
A
razor-sharp satire set in Texas during America's war in Iraq, it
explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and
the war abroad.
Ben
Fountain’s remarkable debut novel follows the surviving members of
the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their
media-intensive "Victory Tour" at Texas Stadium, football
mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders.
The
most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels,Brideshead
Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World
War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the
Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they
inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed
Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles
comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance
from them.
This
touching, uplifting novel spans decades of loyalty, anger, regret,
and love in the lives of the Chance family. A father whose dreams of
glory on a baseball field are shattered by a mill accident. A mother
who clings obsessively to religion as a ward against the darkest hour
of her past. Four brothers who come of age during the seismic
upheavals of the sixties and who each choose their own way to deal
with what the world has become. By turns uproariously funny and
deeply moving, and beautifully written throughout, The
Brothers K is
one of the finest chronicles of our lives in many years.
With
A Dead Man in Deptford, Burgess concluded his literary career to
overwhelming acclaim for his re-creation of the Elizabethan poet
Christopher Marlowe. In lavish, pitch-perfect, and supple, readable
prose, Burgess matches his splendid Shakespeare novel, Nothing Like
the Sun. The whole world of Elizabethan England—from the intrigues
of the courtroom, through the violent streets of London, to the glory
of the theater—comes alive in this joyous celebration of the life
of Christopher Marlowe, murdered in suspicious circumstances in a
tavern brawl in Deptford more than four hundred years ago.serve him
concocting his impossible-to-describe, unique combination of the
topical with the archaic, like an ancient oracle. Scorsese was able
to access previously unseen footage from the Dylan archives,
including performances, press conferences, and recording sessions. He
also uses interviews with Dylan's friends, ex-friends, and fellow
artists, and, intriguingly, with the notoriously reclusive Dylan
himself (who looks back to provide glosses on the early years),
fusing what could have turned into a tiresome series of digressions
and tangents into a powerful whole as enlightening, eccentric,
contradictory, and ultimately irreducible as its subject.
This
gripping collection begins with “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank
Redemption,” in which an unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a
strange and startling revenge—the basis for the Best Picture
Academy Award-nominee The
Shawshank Redemption.
Next is “Apt Pupil,” the inspiration for the film of the same
name about top high school student Todd Bowden and his obsession with
the dark and deadly past of an older man in town. In “The Body,”
four rambunctious young boys plunge through the façade of a small
town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their
own mortality. This novella became the movie Stand
By Me.
Finally, a disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death in
“The Breathing Method.”
The
year is 1934 and Edward Devlin, recently widowed and a disillusioned
veteran of Ireland's struggle for independence, leaves his small
daughter, Maura, behind in Ireland and heads for America with not
much more than his memories and a lingering desire for his beautiful
dead wife. His one tenuous connection is to a man named Fitzgibbon,
owner of a silk-dyeing mill in Paterson, New Jersey. Fitz greets his
fellow Irishman with hospitality, inviting Edward into his home and,
ultimately, setting up a chain of events that will cause Fitz to lose
everything and Edward to gain all he dared not hope for.
Moving from a small town in the north of Ireland to Depression-era Paterson to the New Jersey Shore, The Houseguest is an eloquent and morally complex novel that perfectly captures the rhythms of grief, hope, and humor that are indelible parts of the Irish-American experience.
Moving from a small town in the north of Ireland to Depression-era Paterson to the New Jersey Shore, The Houseguest is an eloquent and morally complex novel that perfectly captures the rhythms of grief, hope, and humor that are indelible parts of the Irish-American experience.
Helen
DeWitt's extraordinary debut, The
Last Samurai,
centers on the relationship between Sibylla, a single mother of
precocious and rigorous intelligence, and her son, who, owing to his
mother's singular attitude to education, develops into a prodigy of
learning. Ludo reads Homer in the original Greek at 4 before moving
on to Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse, and Inuit; studying advanced
mathematical techniques (Fourier analysis and Laplace
transformations); and, as the title hints, endlessly watching and
analyzing Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, The
Seven Samurai.
But the one question that eludes an answer is that of the name of his
father: Sibylla believes the film obliquely provides the male role
models that Ludo's genetic father cannot, and refuses to be drawn on
the question of paternal identity. The child thinks differently,
however, and eventually sets out on a search, one that leads him
beyond the certainties of acquired knowledge into the complex and
messy world of adults
Eugene
O'Neill's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night is
regarded as his finest work. First published by Yale University Press
in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more
than one million copies. This edition includes a new foreword by
Harold Bloom.
The action covers a fateful, heart-rending day from around 8:30 am to midnight, in August 1912 at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyrones - the semi-autobiographical representations of O'Neill himself, his older brother, and their parents at their home, Monte Cristo Cottage.
Sir
Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a
lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth
(FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his
final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet
through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and
emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living
in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the
regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained
him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever
mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid,
lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own
history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away.
From
the moment of its publication in 1961, Revolutionary
Road was
hailed as a masterpiece of realistic fiction and as the most
evocative portrayal of the opulent desolation of the American
suburbs. It's the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright,
beautiful, and talented couple who have lived on the assumption that
greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking
compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and
April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each
other, but their best selves.
#13 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard 126 pages $ 1 in Library 4.06
#13 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard 126 pages $ 1 in Library 4.06
The
play concerns the misadventures and musings of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, two minor characters from William
Shakespeare's Hamlet who are childhood friends of the
prince, focusing on their actions with the events of Hamlet as
background. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is
structured as the inverse of Hamlet; the title characters are
the leads, not supporting players, and Hamlet himself has only a
small part. The duo appears on stage here when they are off-stage in
Shakespeare's play, with the exception of a few short scenes in which
the dramatic events of both plays coincide. In Hamlet,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are used by the King in an attempt to
discover Hamlet's motives and to plot against him. Hamlet, however,
mocks them derisively and outwits them, so that they, rather than he,
are executed in the end. Thus, from Rosencrantz's and Guildenstern's
perspective, the action in Hamlet is largely nonsensical
and comical.
When
members of the National Book Critics Circle were polled to see which
book they would most like to see republished, they
chose Speedboat—“by far.” This story of a young female
newspaper reporter coming of age in New York City was originally
published serially in the New Yorker; it is made out of seemingly
unrelated vignettes—tart observations distilled through relentless
intellect—which add up to an analysis of our brittle, urban
existence. It remains as fresh as when it was first published.
William
Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor
Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study
agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and
embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble
existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters
a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family
estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and
daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new
love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself,
Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts
an essential solitude.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
In The
Summer Book Tove
Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and
storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel
tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to
existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as
they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of
Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little
cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her
grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over
coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark,
create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They
discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the
nature of God and of love. “On an island,” thinks the
grandmother, “everything is complete.” In The
Summer Book,
Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and
sorrows of life.
What is fine and valiant in Mr.
Kundera is the enormous struggle not to be characterized as a writer
by his exile and by his nation's disenfranchisement, even though they
are the conditions his nose is rubbed in by Czechoslovak history. He
works with cunning and wit and elegiac sadness to express ''the trap
the world has become,'' and this means he wants to reconceive not
only narrative but the language and history of politicized life if he
is to accord his experience the dimensions of its tragedy. This is in
direct contrast to the problem of the American writer who must
remember not to write of life as if it had no political content
whatsoever. We can hope, with Milan
Kundera, not to enact
one of his elegant paradoxes in our separate choices and discover
that either one leads to the same exhausted end.
