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Erik Morris
Reader
Flatland
Edwin A. Abbott
Erik Morris
I thought I was going to read a whimsical story that teased out a way to envision dimensions greater than three. What I got was far more interesting in the world as I thought I knew it.
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The Man Who Was Thursday
G. K. Chesterton
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
To say that Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a book that captured the zeitgeist of the late 1970s and the 1980s is an understatement. Beginning as a BBC comedy radio series, it would mutate into versions in print, on stage, in comics, and on screens small and big, becoming an ...show more
The Oresteia
Aeschylus
If you seek between covers an education in the trials and tribulations, the hopes and fears, the terrors and triumphs of the human spirit, the majestic tragedies of the ancient Greeks are the place to begin, and perhaps the place to end as well. In their beautiful, haunting, unsparing plays, Aeschyl...show more
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee and Walker Evans
I knew I was not terribly worldly when I entered college, but I entered a world I never imagined when I opened the pages of this book my freshman year.
The Clouds
Aristophanes
He wrote as many as fifty plays; nobody is sure exactly how many, and only eleven survive today. But Aristophanes established some principles of comedy (and even, if truth be told, some jokes) that have survived for more than two-and-a-half millennia. Though the distance of time and topic is of cour...show more
The Bible
It’s all here: the good, the bad, and the ugly. And in the end, we can all be forgiven.
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
To read a book is to escape. That is what 451 speaks to me. Books are freedom.
Goodnight Moon
Margaret Wise Brown, pictures by Clement Hurd
The first time I read it to my daughter, I thought, is this it? But I was thinking like an adult. It is so simple and sweet and reassuring that it is a perfect end to a day of discovery.
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
I discovered I was discovering a world of imagination too late. I need to reread this without trying to put all of the pieces together.
Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
I never considered myself a big sci-fi fan, but some stories, like Dune, drag you into their world. While the world of Enders Game is not nearly so vast as that of Dune, the fact that it kept expanding until suddenly he was fighting for the world was what pulled me along so insistently.
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
The story certainly tugs on the heart like a coming of age story, but it never truly caught me. I guess I’m not that adventurous. I kept thinking, what do you think you are doing?
The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
As story and as media phenomenon, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games is at the top of the pile of wildly popular dystopian teen fiction that has dominated twenty-first-century bestseller lists (in no small part by appealing to readers well beyond their teen years). In the nation of Panem, power and ...show more
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
I don’t know why I would care about the place, the characters, the motivations; but this story pulls you in.