PenelopeRead about the other characters on the list.
My favourite character in the Odyssey. As Odysseus takes the long way home, encountering Circe and sirens and cylops and such, Penelope waits and weaves and unpicks her weaving. She was the only one who seemed even faintly responsible or grown up in the story.
Read about the other novels on the list.Master and Commander is the first of O’Brian’s famous Aubrey/Maturin 20-novel series. This book, published in 1962, establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship’s surgeon and an intelligence agent.
O’Brian is widely applauded for his detailed and historically accurate portrayal of life aboard an early 19th century man-of-war, including weapons, food, conversation and ambience.
For the Wall Street Journal, Sittenfeld named "five beach reads that are devour-able without being dismissible," including:The Yacoubian BuildingRead about the other books on the list.
Alaa Al Aswany (2006)
More than a dozen characters living in the same Cairo building fight, fall in love, sleep together and betray one another in this soap-operatic saga. A major cultural phenomenon and a controversy in the author's home country, this was the best-selling Arabic language book of 2002 and 2003.
Philip Pullman's latest book is Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version.The Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Christopher RicksRead about the other entries on Pullman's list.
This is the big one, the one where you expect to find everything you half-remember as well as a great deal you don't know. Everything is here, from "Sumer is icumen in" to Seamus Heaney.
One of her six favorite books, as told to the Daily Express:Regeneration by Pat BarkerRead about the other books on the list.
Her vivid portrayal of life in the war was so harrowing it moved me to tears.
What fascinated me was the psychology of what those men went through, their response to the trauma and their treatment when they came back from war having seen what they’d seen. Compelling and brilliant.
Read about the other entries on the list.To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
In the form of the imperious philosopher Mr. Ramsay, Virginia Woolf delivers an electrifying, disturbing portrait of her unconventional father, in this story of a family's loss and the birth of a young woman's artistic vision. A winding, skillful introspection on the complexities of family dynamics, To the Lighthouse is Woolf's modernist masterpiece.
One of his top ten father memoirs, as told to the Guardian:Father and Son by Edmund GosseRead about the other books on the list.
The first of all father memoirs, this is still one of the best. Interestingly, Gosse's first attempt to write about his father took the form of an official biography. Written shortly after his father's death on 23 August 1888, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse was admired by Henry James as "a singularly clever, skilful, vivid, well-done biography of his father, the fanatic and naturalist – very happy in proportion, tact and talent". Luckily, at least two other readers – John Addington Symonds and George Moore – suggestedthat Gosse should be more autobiographical and explore the father-son relationship.
Almost 20 years later, Gosse unburdened himself of Father and Son. Though the book was an immediate success and the reviews were largely enthusiastic, the reviewer of the Academy had reservations about the "close anatomisation by a son of a father", and the Times Literary Supplement raised the question of "how far in the interests of popular edification or amusement it is legitimate to expose the weaknesses and inconsistencies of a good man who is also one's father". Perhaps not always fortunately, subsequent writers, far more frank and confessional, showed far fewer qualms in writing about their fathers.
Matt Rees is an award-winning crime novelist. His series about Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef won a CWA Dagger. His latest novels are Mozart's Last Aria, a historical thriller about the composer's death, and A Name in Blood, a portrayal of Italian artist Caravaggio and his mysterious disappearance.The Silence. J. Sydney JonesRead about the other books on the list.
In this marvelous novel the real mayor of Vienna at the onset of the twentieth century, Karl Lueger, is at the heart of a conspiracy to raisebig money from the sale of the Vienna Woods and at the same time to gain political capital by blaming Jewish property developers for the destruction of the city’s beloved green belt. It’s a measure of Jones’s skill as a writer that, while his hero is a lawyer-turned-investigator of Jewish origin, the novel’s Jews are not really better or worse than the society around them. They aren’t portrayed as poor saintly victims. They’re simply part of Jones’s Vienna, as they were part of historical Vienna. There’s also a youthful role for little Ludwig Wittgenstein. For lovers of Sherlock Holmes, you can’t go wrong with Jones.
shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, featured on bestseller lists, and adapted for the cinema. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and the Paris Review, and his essays in the Guardian, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books. Born in 1971, he has lived about half his life, on and off, in Lahore. He also spent part of his early childhood in California, attended Princeton and Harvard, and worked for a decade as a management consultant in New York and London, mostly part-time.Dune by Frank HerbertRead about the other books on Hamid's list.
This 1965 space saga set on a desert planet is a racy read and one of the best-selling sci-fi novels of all time. But for me it was the Middle Eastern, indeed quasi-Muslim, inspirations that Herbert layered into his book that introduced me to the idea of literary hybridity. It's sadly hard to imagine, post-9/11, this novel being written today.
At io9 Katharine Trendacosta and Charlie Jane Anders came up with a list of ten sources that inspired Game of Thrones' dark storytelling, including:J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the RingsRead about the other entries on the list.
You probably won't be surprised to hear that Martin borrowed a lot from Tolkien for his epic fantasy series. Both the idea of a "secondary world," in which certain things (like the seasons) are very different, but also the initial structure. Tolkien was "my great model" for the handling of the characters in Song of Ice and Fire, Martin has said. Lord of the Rings "begins with a tight focus, and all the characters are together. Then by end of the first book the Fellowship splits up, and they have different adventures." Apart from Daenerys, all of Martin's characters are together in his first book, and they all split into groups, which eventually split up as well. Adds Martin: "The intent was to fan out, then curve and come back together. Finding the point where that turn begins has been one of the issues I’vewrestled with." Another major influence from Tolkien: the restrained use of magic. You don't see Gandalf casting a lot of spells or throwing fireballs in the Lord of the Rings saga. When there's danger, Gandalf mostly pulls out his sword.
University. He is legal affairs editor of The New Republic, and co-editor (with Benjamin Wittes) of Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change.THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET AND HOW TO STOP IT by Jonathan Zittrain (2008).Read about the other books on Rosen's list at the Washington Post.
In addition to illuminating how the Internet works, Zittrain explores the transition from what he calls Privacy 1.0, where threats to privacy came mostly from data stored in government and corporate databases, to Privacy 2.0, where the data is generated, recorded and shared by individuals. Zittrain helps illuminate why the government and the private sector can share information so easily, and why the law seems to make that easier, not harder.
the resident dog, Lucky (who was adopted from Sakhalin, Russia) in Anchorage, Alaska. The four of them ski, hike, dive, bike, and camp as often as time and their varying abilities allow.The Devil's HighwayRead about the other books on Streever's list.
by Luis Alberto Urrea (2004)
'In the desert,' writes Luis Alberto Urrea, "we are all illegal aliens." The desert he describes is the Sonoran, in southern Arizona, and the real-life story he tells, set in 2001, is of a group of people desperate enough for jobs to cross the desert on foot and withoutimmigration papers. Walking at night to avoid the sun, they went west and south when they should have gone north. They ran out of water. Fourteen of them perished. From a survivor: "I do not know who was dying or how many because I too was dying." Of the 26 men who began the journey, only 12 lived. Interviews with survivors and others, captured in Urrea's brilliant writing, mix accounts of the heat's toll with observations on politics and human decency. Urrea's chronicle shimmers like an image seen through the heat haze of a desert afternoon, becoming clearer and more tragic with the passing of every word.
Posts
