On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwanRead about all ten marital rows on Mullan's list.
The best thing about this novel is the final bitter argument between husband and wife on the disastrous first night of their honeymoon. McEwan lets you see how each had the chance to relent, but resentment keeps making the cruellest jibe the most tempting thing to say.
Ulysses by James JoyceRead about all ten vegetables on Mullan's list.
The most significant yet mysterious vegetable in literature is surely Leopold Bloom's potato. "Potato I have", he thinks as he checks his pockets on first leaving his house; he carries it everywhere. A prostitute takes it, but he retrieves it, explaining: "It is nothing, but still, a relic of poor mama". Later, we hear phantom voices chanting, "Potato Preservative Against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us".
Read the complete interview.The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch
The Rebels by Sándor Márai (or Embers by him, if you prefer)
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (Not the Hapsburgs, admittedly, but you get the idea.)
One title on his list:The Journals of Lewis and ClarkRead about all five books on Bascomb's list.
1803-05
There are hundreds of books on the Lewis and Clark expedition— scholarly treatises, narratives, biographies, collections of maps. Engrossing reading, sure, but why choose them when the original journals by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark exist? Even if the prose is rough, the journals are an American treasure, a first-hand account of the discovery of a nation. There is a hypnotic, galvanizing power in the daily descriptions of rivers forged, buffaloes seen, Indians met, meals eaten, illnesses suffered, plants examined, rainstorms weathered and dangers overcome. No matter the hardship experienced over the more than two years they spent in the wilds, the two explorers always managed to update their journals, as Lewis did one winter day: “The ink f[r]iezes in my pen,” he complained, before continuing with his account. When Clark writes on Nov. 7, 1805, “Ocian in view! O! the joy,” your heart, too, will leap.
Lisa See's most recent book is Shanghai Girls.Women Writing in Modern China: An Anthology of Literature by Chinese Women from the Early 20th Century edited byRead about more books on See's list.Amy D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torgeson: Often in the West, we are told that in the past there were no women writers. But of course there were! Only so much of what they wrote has been lost, forgotten, or deliberately covered up. China has a different tradition. There were a lot of women writers who have remained in print not only in China but also in this country. There are several anthologies of Chinese women writers. The Red Brush is probably the most comprehensive, and covers over 2,000 years of women writing in China. (Try to beat that, Western canon!) I also like The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, but my favorite is Women Writing in Modern China, which covers the early 20th century. These women write about the same things women write about today — love, children, family, heartbreak, war, the economy, and all the things that bind us together as human beings.
In the 1970s, everything Martian hovered on the brink of major change. The Mariner satellites had photographed the surface, Carl Sagan and others began talking about the possibility of terraforming Mars, and then the Viking missions changed our image of Mars forever. At this moment, Frederik Pohl used the Mariner findings to portray a very realistic Mars and ask the question, How far would we go to adapt ourselves to the place, rather than the place to us? The chilling answers found in Man Plus (1976) make it one of Pohl’s best novels.Read about all ten books on Robinson's list.
For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of literary ménages à trois.A Home at the End of the World by Michael CunninghamRead about all ten ménages à trois on the list.
A touching and honest depiction of an enduring love triangle between a gay man, a self-proclaimed fag-hag and their at times bisexual lover, set in New York during the Aids epidemic. A book filled with love, pain and compassionate humour from the author of The Hours, it was also made into a film starring Colin Farrell and Robin Wright Penn.
Read about all 20 titles. [h/t to escapegrace]Lord of the Flies William Golding
(1954)
Can there really be anyone who hasn’t read this novel? A group of schoolboys are marooned by a plane crash on a desert island and their attempts to remain civilised (and nice toward the fat kid) fail very badly. School teachers love this novel because it poses so many questions about morality, power and what holds together society. Consider checking out The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne from 1857, Lord of the Flies was written as a reposte to this novel.
Anna Karenina by Leo TolstoyRead about all ten births on Mullan's list.
Anna is haunted by a prophecy that she will die in childbirth. We are in the waiting room with the men, as Anna's lover, Vronsky, and her husband are told of the birth of a baby daughter (Vronsky's). The mother, however, has puerperal fever and will certainly die. The men are reconciled – and Anna lives.
Elliott Gorn, who teaches history and American Civilization at Brown University, is the author of Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year That Made America’s Public Enemy Number One. For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books about criminals.Jesse JamesRead about all five books on Gorn's list.
by T.J. Stiles
Knopf, 2002In “Jesse James,” T.J. Stiles dims the glow of the Old West, avoids the biographers’ fetish of piling fact upon useless fact, and gives us both the life and its rich historical context. Turns out the raging guerrilla warfare of the post-Civil War Missouri borderlands was crucial to understanding Jesse James. Stiles moves us away from thinking of James as a bandit and toward thinking of him as a terrorist—a fitting word to describe Confederate veterans who won by violence and subversion what they had lost on the battlefield. James’s legend became part of the larger Southern myth of the “lost cause,” a myth whose believers helped undermine Reconstruction, justify rigid racial segregation and introduce the rule of lynch law.
Goblin Market and Other Poems - Christina RossettiRead about all ten books on Palmer's list.
"Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices/Squeezed from goblin fruits for you". A new bite-sized selection, focussing on Rossetti's Victorian fairyland fruit fantasy, in all its barmy sensuous excess. Goblins proffering plump unpecked cherries tempt two blushing girls.
One book on the list:William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land: A Love Tale (1912). Hodgson, a British sailor, strongman, and visionary, paints a macabre, fascinating portrait of a frozen future Earth whose few remaining human inhabitants live in a vast underground space created by earthquakes, lit by the glare of lava bubbling up from below, and inhabited by dinosaurs. Worse, at some point in the distant past, overreaching scientists breached "the Barrier of Life" that separated our dimension from one populated by "monstrosities and Forces" - Watching Things, Silent Ones, Hounds, Giants, "Ab-humans," Brutes, enormous slugs and spiders - collectively known as the Slayers. (At least one of them, as far as I can tell from the 1972 Ballantine paperback cover shown here, resembles Pac-Man.) The unnamed narrator, along with apparently every other surviving human, lives trapped in the Last Redoubt, a eight-mile-high metal pyramid-city constructed by their ancestors using now-forgotten technologies. The pyramid is protected from the Slayers, who surround and observe it constantly, by mysterious Powers of Goodness, and also by a massive force-field powered by the "Earth Current" - a Tesla-esque force drawn from the planet itself. Our hero is telepathic, and one day he receives a distress signal that appears to issue from a woman living in a long-forgotten community of humans sequestered in a distant Lesser Pyramid whose power supply is running out. Arming himself with a lightsaber-meets-brushcutter gizmo called a Diskos, and eating nothing but protein pills and powdered water, he sets forth on a mission impossible - into the Night Land.Read about all ten books on Glenn's list.
Posts
All Comments
