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Don MacKinnon
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The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
James Mustich
Set in the seventeenth-century reign of Louis XIII and peopled with historical personages such as Cardinal Richelieu and the Duke of Buckingham, The Three Musketeers recounts the swashbuckling adventures of an impetuous young swordsman named d’Artagnan and the trio of soldiers in the king’s service ...show more
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Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
This book changed my understand of what books could be. Funny, existential, caring, sad, historical, fantastical.
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63
Taylor Branch
No matter what you think you know about the civil rights movement, and the people who made it happen... this book immerses you so deeply in the personalities and events you almost forget how it ends.
Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey
Written in the middle of the 1960s, yet composed largely from journals kept a decade earlier during the author’s summers as a backcountry ranger at the Arches National Monument (“among,” as he puts it, “the hoodoo rocks and voodoo silence of the Utah wilderness”), Desert Solitaire evokes the paradox...show more
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat
Ryszard Kapuscinski
While this is technically a work of non-fiction - Kapuscinski was a journalist who interviewed the servants of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia - it reads like a Kafka fever dream, complete with the spare unblinking beauty of Franz's language. It's an allegory of power, ever more widely applicable.
The Cricket in Times Square
George Selden
One of my absolutely all-time favorite children's books. I first encountered it when our kids were small. Great choice for a family read-aloud.
The Overstory
Richard Powers
The first half of this book - individual chapters each introducing a new character and their direct or vague relation with trees - is simply one of the best things I've ever read. The second half, then tells a story that brings these characters together, around the trees themselves. It's truly stunn...show more
The Ambassadors
Henry James
Just fall under the spell of his prose. Almost a perfect book.
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Composed in English and published in 1958, two years before Nigeria declared independence, Things Fall Apart was the first African novel to attain a wide international readership. It is a short, sparely told tale that nevertheless embraces themes of enormous import: fate and will, the determining i...show more
Diana of the Crossways: A Novel
George Meredith
One of the first prototype-feminist novels that also deals w the corruption of and by the media.
2666
Roberto Bolaño
There’s no point trying to summarize the plot of 2666, the enigmatic, apocalyptic, gloriously messy final novel by the madly brilliant Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. It’s five books in one, really, and each of those contains multitudes in itself. 2666, his last and greatest book, is too slippery t...show more
Collected Essays
James Baldwin
It can be a little too easy to pin labels on James Baldwin: black, gay, expatriate, aesthete. But every label sells him short, diminishing the singularity of his work. That he wrote specifically of his time and place—America in the middle of the twentieth century—and engaged its most dangerous theme...show more
The 9/11 Commission Report
“Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies,” asserts the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
Upon the United States late in its report, noting the failure of vision that had prevented America from foreseeing the threat that precipitated the horrible events of September 11,...show more
1876
Gore Vidal
Here's what I wrote about this entertaining novel in the November 3, 2020 entry for the 1,000 Books Page-A-Day calendar:
"If you’re uneasy about the security of our elective processes as you cast your vote today, escape into the corridors of the past, where things were—well, to be honest, just as ...show more