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Andrea
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Tell Me a Riddle
Tillie Olsen
James Mustich
Of all the griefs the world can hold, regret can be the most corrosive. The heart’s inventiveness in turning such anguish inward, allowing it to infiltrate conscience as well as consciousness, seems limitless, even though words are seldom a match for its true character. A slim collection of four sto...show more
The Cost of Discipleship
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer a pastor, psychologist and philosopher died a martyr in a Nazi extermination camp. His treatise argues that the gospels call on Christians to pay a cost by standing up against injustice and evil. It is especiallly pertinent today .
Crossing to Safety
Wallace Stegner
This is my favorite book of all time. I know you chose Angle of Repose, but Wallace Stegner wrote this towards the end of his life and it is truly autobiographical. A wonderful read. Like a warm cup of tea on a cold winter day.
I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54
Robert Graves
Brilliantly written and riveting tale about palace intrigue during the Roman Empire.
A Place for Us
Fatima Farheen Mirza
Cyndi Gaffney shared her reasons why this book, about family, identity, and belonging, should be on the list of the next 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die at the December 13, 2019 Battle at Byrd's Books in Bethel, CT.
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Nicholas Carr
Kevin Peraino made the case for adding Carr's book to the list of Books to Read Before You Die (or maybe we should say, Books to Read Before You Log In) at the December 5, 2019 Battle at Barrett Bookstore in Darien, CT.
Everyone Brave is Forgiven
Chris Cleave
This beautifully written and plotted story takes place in wartime London and besieged Malta. There were many novels written about WWII in the first two decades of the 21st c but this one is truly extraordinary and will stay with you!
A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles
Count Alexander Rostov is a convicted aristocrat, but because of some revolutionary poetry he wrote as a student (or did he?), he is sentenced not to death, but to spend the rest of his life in the Metropol hotel. This book teems with interesting characters, with insights into Russian history and t...show more
The Birthday Boys
Beryl Bainbridge
Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated 1912 Antarctic expedition is one of the great adventure stories of all time, and the mythic resonance of its misfortunes seems to deepen with each passing decade. In her novel The Birthday Boys, Beryl Bainbridge envisions the unfolding tragedy through the eyes...show more
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
As light as a cloud and just as beautiful, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities floats across the mind’s sky and seduces our vision. Purporting to be a record of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which the inveterate traveler describes the many extraordinary cities he has encountered ...show more
Memorial
Ferdinando Camon
Only 120 pages long, Memorial is a small book about a small life. Yet the reader who opens it will discover a story that is unforgettably moving in its sympathy, dignity, and desire to articulate the deepest human needs. Written by one of the most notable of Italy’s post-World War II writers, this e...show more
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank
Thad Carhart
Every morning, as he walked his children to school through his Paris neighborhood, American transplant Thad Carhart passed a modest storefront that intrigued him. “Desforges Pianos: outillage, fournitures” announced its stenciled sign, and the tools and components of piano repair displayed in its wi...show more
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
Inspired by the real-life experience of Alexander Selkirk (1676–1721), a Scottish sailor who was marooned for more than four years on a South Pacific island, Robinson Crusoe gave enduring form to fundamental themes of the Western imagination. With his parrot and parasol, the castaway Crusoe is an e...show more
Diary of a Provincial Lady
E. M. Delafield
E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady first appeared in 1930. Her first Diary would be followed by three more in the course of the next decade. These charming volumes proved immediately and enduringly popular, and Delafield’s creation is today seen, in her deceptively casual chronicling of her domestic ...show more
Clear Light of Day
Anita Desai
The success of the Indian independence movement, which ended British rule in 1947, has always been tempered by a painful legacy: the partition of the British raj into two sovereign states, divided by religion. The creation of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan bred years of violence a...show more
Middlemarch
George Eliot
At the center of George Eliot’s vast portrait of the provincial city of Middlemarch, its society and inhabitants, is the story of Dorothea Brooke, a “home epic” of a bright, brave young woman learning how to live and what to live for. Most memorable of Middlemarch’s characters, however, is no charac...show more
Four Quartets
T. S. Eliot
Written in the years before and during World War II, the Quartets consist of four long poems, each cohering around a season, one of the four natural elements (earth, air, water, fire), and a place: “Burnt Norton,” an English manor house and garden; “East Coker,” a village in Somerset, home to Eliot’...show more
A Time of Gifts
Patrick Leigh Fermor
With a borrowed knapsack and a small weekly allowance (a single British pound), Patrick Leigh Fermor set out from London in 1933 on a journey that might today seem unthinkable. After arriving by boat in Holland, the eighteen-year-old walked—walked!—from Amsterdam all the way across Central Europe to...show more
My Brilliant Friend: The Neapolitan Novels, Book 1
Elena Ferrante
“We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.” So Elena Greco, called Lenù by those who know her, describes the adventure that cements her friendship with Raffaella Cerullo, known familiarly as Lina or Lila, a friendship t...show more