reading i enjoyed dec 2008-july 2009
Explore my favorite books from December 2008 to July 2009—a curated list of top reads I enjoyed during this period. Discover great titles for your next literary adventure!
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The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
“The Adventures of Augie March is the great American Novel. Search no further.” –Martin Amis A Penguin Classic As soon as it first appeared in 1953, this novel by the great Saul Bellow was hailed as an American classic. Augie, the exuberant narrator-hero is a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Deptression. A “born recruit,” Augie makes himself available for a series of occupations, then proudly rejects each one as unworthy. His own oddity is reflected in the companions he encounters—plungers, schemers, risk-takers, and “hole-and corner” operators like the would-be tycoon Einhorn or the would-be siren Thea, who travels with an eagle trained to hunt small creatures. This Penguin Classics edition, with an introduction by celebrated writer and critic Christopher Hitchens, makes a literary masterpiece available to a new generation of readers. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Home
by Marilynne Robinson
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Gilead" pens a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations.
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Howards End
by E. M. Forster
A strong-willed and intelligent woman refuses to allow the pretensions of her husband's smug English family to ruin her life.
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The Transit of Venus
by Shirley Hazzard
"The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century." - The Paris Review Finalist for the National Book Award Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard's most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women--seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal--becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard's novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the eighties; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life.
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Bouvard and Pecuchet
by Gustave Flaubert
Bouvard and Pécuchet are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritance, they decide to give up their jobs and explore the world of ideas. In this, his last novel, unfinished on his death in 1880, Flaubert attempted to encompass his lifelong preoccupation with bourgeois stupidity and his disgust at the banalities of intellectual life in France. Into it he poured all his love of detail, his delight in the life of the mind, his despair of human nature, and his pleasure in passionate friendship. The result is “a kind of encyclopedia made into farce,” wholly grotesque and wholly original, in the spirit of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote or Ulysses.
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Mercier and Camier
by Samuel Beckett
"Two seedy stumblebums named Mercier and Camier, forerunners of Estragon and Vladimir of Waiting for Godot, set out on a mysterious journey through vaguely Irish scenery. They are unwilling clowns in a performance they do not understand ... "--From back cover, paperback edition.
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War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
From Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the best-selling, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, comes a brilliant, engaging, and eminently readable translation of Leo Tolstoy’s master epic. • Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read War and Peace centers broadly on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the best-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves behind his family to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman, who intrigues both men. As Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy vividly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature. Pevear and Volokhonsky have brought us this classic novel in a translation remarkable for its fidelity to Tolstoy’s style and cadence and for its energetic, accessible prose.
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Petersburg
by Andrey Bely
Taking place over a short, turbulent period in 1905, Petersburg is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital - a kaleidoscope of images and impressions, an eastern window on the west, a symbol of the ambiguities and paradoxes of the Russian character. History, culture and politics are blended and juxtaposed; weather reports, current news, fashions and psychology jostle together with people from Petersburg society in an exhilarating search for the identity of a city and, ultimately, Russia itself.
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The Counterfeiters
by Andre Gide
A young artist pursues a search for knowledge through the treatment of homosexuality and the collapse of morality in middle class France.
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Stories
by Katherine Mansfield
Although Katherine Mansfield was closely associated with D.H. Lawrence and something of a rival of Virginia Woolf, her stories suggest someone writing in a different era and in a vastly different English. Her language is as transparent as clean glass, yet hovers on the edge of poetry. Her characters are passionate men and women swaddled in English reserve -- and sometimes briefly breaking through. And her genius is to pinpoint those unacknowledged and almost imperceptible moments in which those people's relationships -- with one another and themselves -- change forever. This collection includes such masterpieces as "Prelude," "At the Bay" "Bliss," "The Man Without a Temperament" and "The Garden Party" and has a new introduction by Jeffrey Meyers.
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Dance of the Happy Shades
by Alice Munro
A young girl gets an unexpected glimpse into her father's past. A married woman tries to release her homebound sister after the death of their mother. The audience at a piano recital receives a transforming surprise. These early stories conjure ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which writer Alice Munro is celebrated. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
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The Piano Teacher
by Elfriede Jelinek
38-year-old Erika Kohut, a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, still lives with her domineering mother. Erika has a weakness for buying clothing that she will never actually wear, secretly visits Turkish peep shows and watches sadomasochistic films. When a handsome, self-absorbed 17-year-old student attempts to seduce Erika, she resists, but the relationship between teacher and pupil spirals rapidly out of control, and Erika becomes consumed by the ecstasy of self-destruction.
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The Rhetoric of Fiction
by Wayne C. Booth
A standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts. Its concepts and terms have become standard critical lexicon.
