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Bill Vamvas
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The Valleys of the Assassins
Freya Stark
Bill Vamvas
Fascinating personal bravery & journey to a vastly different world
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Flatland
Edwin A. Abbott
A novel of mathematical whimsy, Flatland is set in the peculiar world that provides the book’s name and is home to its putative author, A. Square, a two-dimensional being in a world inhabited by lines, triangles, circles, and polygons. Ingeniously composed as a kind of dystopian memoir, Flatland is ...show more
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
More nuanced and darker in mood than David Copperfield, Great Expectations is its author’s deepest working of the terrain of childhood and the fears and fates that spring from it. Anchored in a Kentish village, around which the years and events of the complicated plot will revolve, the book returns ...show more
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
While the success of the Sherlock Holmes tales can properly be seen as a catalyst for the boom in crime and detective literature that began in the early twentieth century and seems to grow larger every year, the pleasure of Arthur Conan Doyle’s narratives rests only in part on the cleverly contrived...show more
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
In April 1947, Nabokov wrote to a friend that he was at work on “a short novel about a man who liked little girls.” Eight years later, after several American publishers had turned it down, that no-longer-short novel was published in Paris to international acclaim—and outrage. For Lolita isn’t about ...show more
The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Book 1
Robert A. Caro
Embarking upon the reading of four long volumes about Lyndon Baines Johnson might not sound like a good idea, especially when you know the effort will only take you through the first seven weeks of his presidency, the rest of which will be treated in Caro’s final volume, still a work in progress. Bu...show more
Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Book 2
Robert A. Caro
While popular culture was quick to relegate LBJ to caricature in the wake of his fatal obtuseness with regard to our military debacle in Vietnam, Caro tells the tale of a larger-than-life force whose political genius was as formidable as his flaws, taking us from his childhood in the Texas Hill Coun...show more
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Book 3
Robert A. Caro
Each book in the sequence has its own story to tell, with many digressions that illuminate political moments and contemporary issues and personalities; all are constructed in digestible episodes crafted to allow readers to dip easily back into these big books after days, weeks, or even months away. ...show more
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Book 4
Robert A. Caro
If you still need convincing that all four volumes of Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson are worth reading, start with the fourth volume, The Passage of Power (2012), which encompasses in its swift narrative the 1960 presidential election; LBJ’s unsatisfying, often humiliating stint as John F. Kenne...show more
The Hunt for Red October
Tom Clancy
Published by the US Naval Institute Press in 1984, The Hunt for Red October became an unexpected but modest hit for the generally under-the-radar publisher, whose mission is to promote an understanding of sea power and other issues of national defense. But soon, abetted in no small part by President...show more
A Drinking Life
Pete Hamill