Post Comment
Andy Dunham
Reader
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Andy Dunham
Is this the most perfectly written novel of all time? Possibly. It is not as great as War and Peace or as revolutionary as Moby Dick, but it is a perfectly polished gem, without a word out of place.
See All Comments (24)
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
Gone Girl is the story of a marriage’s unraveling and the suspicion that falls on the husband in the wake of his wife’s disappearance. But it is author Gillian Flynn’s knowing exploitation of the intimate pact between writer and reader, her head-turning violation of it, that tightens the story's gri...show more
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Vivid, unpredictable, insinuating, uncomfortably intimate, the voice that tells Invisible Man is one of the most supple and powerful instruments ever fashioned in American prose. His skin is black, his soul is blue, his mind is lit with both desperation and deep thought. Naturalistic and surreal, fa...show more
Dubliners
James Joyce
Dubliners is one of the most admired collections of short stories in world literature. Published in 1914, it was Joyce’s first book of prose. Although the fifteen stories follow different characters through disparate situations, the collection’s overarching unity of theme and imagery shapes an exper...show more
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle
Troubled, feisty, and, as we shall discover, remarkably resourceful, thirteen-year-old Meg is one of the most unforgettable heroines in twentieth-century young adult fiction. Her family is rather memorable, too. There are her sympathetic parents, both of whom are scientists and one of whom, her fath...show more
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
The title of Joseph Heller’s first novel has become—aptly enough—a catchphrase, common parlance for the kind of double bind that bureaucracies breed with astonishing fecundity. Captain John Yossarian, the protagonist of Heller’s pioneering and influential satire, is “moved very deeply by the absolut...show more
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas R. Hofstadter
“I still remember,” wrote George Johnson in Scientific American more than a quarter century after the publication of this book, “standing in the aisle of a bookstore in Washington, D.C., where I had just finished graduate school, devouring the pages. GEB, as the author calls it, is not so much a ‘re...show more
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Men of action require a field to work, and few fields have proven as fertile in this regard—in life and in the imagination—as the
American West. Larry McMurtry’s 1985 epic, Lonesome Dove, may be its richest literary harvest. Set in the late 1870s, it tells the story of a cattle drive from the Rio Gr...show more
Longitude
Dava Sobel
On the night of October 22, 1707, Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s fleet, returning home from Gibraltar, was wrecked on the Scilly Isles, only twenty miles off the southwest tip of England. The souls of these two thousand lost sailors, as Dava Sobel elegantly puts it, precipitated (with all the spee...show more
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
Perhaps it was the scale of Moby-Dick—the most ambitious novel ever written in America to that point, a rollicking ocean of maritime adventure, Christian allegory, metaphysical disquisition, natural history, literary escapade, and social criticism—that scared off readers of the time, because no mode...show more
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel so strange, so rich, so perfect in its singularity and timeless in its tenor, one can scarcely believe it was written as recently as 1967. At its start we are treated to an inkling of the author’s narrative conjuring: “Many years later, as he faced the firing...show more
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
Dashiell Hammett may have invented the hardboiled detective story, but nobody wrote it better than Raymond Chandler. With his stylized prose and flair for similes, he gave his detective Philip Marlowe a voice that would become the hallmark of the genre. Marlowe is the protagonist in all of Chandler’...show more
The Boys of Summer
Roger Kahn
“You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat,” Roger Kahn observes, reflecting on his own passionate attachment to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Kahn covered “dem Bums” as a sportswriter for the New York Herald Tribune during the summers of 1952 and 1953, in the middle of ...show more
The Call of the Wild
Jack London
Like Buck, the big dog that is this book’s protagonist, the reader of The Call of the Wild is swiftly and irrevocably swept from the “sun-kissed” world of its opening pages into a realm of elemental and unsparing experience. A favorite of his owner, Buck has known a placid, even pampered life in Cal...show more
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett is largely credited with the invention of the modern hard-boiled detective novel, wherein a crime is a crime, rather than a peripheral plot device, and a private detective is a tough-talking guy who solves it for cash. The Maltese Falcon is Hammett’s best work, not least because its...show more
Ulysses
James Joyce
Ulysses is perhaps the most famously difficult of all modern novels. Its difficulty, however, doesn’t lie in the story it tells, which, in its essentials, is quite simple: The book recounts certain events, most of them not in the least extraordinary, that occur in Dublin on June 16, 1904. What does ...show more
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is near the top of the list of most-beloved American novels. Set in Depression-era Alabama, it is the story of six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, better known as Scout; her older brother, Jeremy, nicknamed Jem; and their father, Atticus Finch, a middle-aged lawyer who...show more
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
Published five years after its author’s death, The Prince advanced a revolutionary theory of statecraft. The traditional view of governance held that a ruler earned the respect and obedience of his subjects by ruling virtuously. But the principle at the heart of The Prince is that virtue as such has...show more
A Game of Thrones
George R. R. Martin
The plot of A Game of Thrones revolves around a dynastic war among several families, but every step of the way the intricate story lines are personal and visceral. What’s most compelling is that the reader’s understanding of unfolding events is continually transformed by shifting narrative perspecti...show more