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Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey
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Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book 1
Dante Alighieri
From the dark wood of its beginning, down through the nine circles of hell, across the seven terraces of purgatory, and into the ten heavens of paradise, Dante’s medieval tour de force gives us, in T. S. Eliot’s estimation, the greatest altitude and the greatest depth of human passion any writer has...show more
Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya
Dr. Elizabeth Renee Fajardo was runner-up in our virtual Battle with Denver Public Library on January 16, 2021 with her advocacy of Rudolfo Anaya's novel Bless Me, Ultima. Anaya was a self-taught writer who lived and breathed the culture, history, and landscape of the southwest. "Godfather of Chican...show more
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
Suzanne Nelson brought an unorthodox approach to her presentation of The Handmaid's Tale, employing actors in costume and handheld signs underscoring the hypocrisy of the patriarchal society at the center of Atwood's novel at the Ridgefield Battle of 11/14/19.
Flaubert's Parrot
Julian Barnes
Sophisticated literary inventions are seldom as charming as this one, an intricately composed but inviting exploration of the nature of desire. The intricacy of the composition comes from Julian Barnes’s playful orchestration of a variety of styles, combining fiction with literary criticism, biograp...show more
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett’s first performed play, written in French and then translated by the author into English. It is one of the signal accomplishments in twentieth-century theater and one of the touchstones of modern literature. It is also, as one contemporary critic said of its two ...show more
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
John Berendt
When Esquire columnist John Berendt began dividing his time between Manhattan and Savannah in the early 1980s, it wasn’t with the idea of writing a book, much less breaking publishing records or singlehandedly reinvigorating the tourist industry of the southern city. Savannah was simply an interesti...show more
The Bible
In the first chapter of the Book of Genesis—in just thirty-one short verses—the world is given form, light is summoned into being, Day and Night are named, Heaven hatched, the stars invoked, and Earth fashioned into land and sea, seeded with plants and populated with creatures. All in less than eigh...show more
Friday Night Lights
H. G. Bissinger
Even readers with no interest in football are likely to be fascinated by the surprising world that Bissinger describes so well—a world in which a lot of adults have a big stake in whether teenage football players win or lose. Those players, in turn, enjoy the indulgence of teachers and the adulation...show more
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman. But, in the dystopian future of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic, a fireman’s duty is not to put out fires, but to start them. His job, in fact, is to burn books, a task that requires the temperature of 451° Fahrenheit. It’s natural to see Fahrenheit 451 as an allegory about cens...show more
Goodnight Moon
Margaret Wise Brown, pictures by Clement Hurd
As the pages are turned and the simplest of poems unfolds in casually rhymed lines, pictures of the cow jumping over the moon and of the three little bears are given their due, as are kittens and mittens and toyhouse and mouse, and the quiet old lady in the rocking chair whispering “hush.” The conte...show more
Ham on Rye
Charles Bukowski
It's not so much that I love this book - though I do - it's that Bukowski was left out of the first 1000 books, and that's a shame. His writing is so brutally honest, funny, and beautiful in its own unique way, that I think he's essential reading before you die.
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
When Herbert William Clutter and his family were bound, gagged, and murdered on the night of November 15, 1959, there was little evidence of who’d done it, or why. The story of their gruesome end made the New York Times, where it was read by literary light Truman Capote, who determined almost immedi...show more
Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
The Wiggin children are unusual, even for the unusual world in which Ender’s Game unfolds. There’s the oldest, Peter, a power-mad sociopath; Valentine, the sister who turns her eloquence to Peter’s service; and then there’s Ender, their little brother, who is singled out by the authorities as the mi...show more
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
The story is simple enough: Edna Pontellier, wife of a New Orleans businessman and mother of two, is aimlessly dissatisfied with her role as society wife. On a holiday on Grand Isle, something in her is swayed by the music of a pianist and the company of a young man. Experiencing a modicum of indepe...show more
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
Because, who doesn't want to be reminded of the feelings of our heart calling.
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
In the course of roughly a hundred pages, Heart of Darkness will journey, with a strangely leisurely intensity, into realms of depravity best encoded in the dying cry of Kurtz, the delusional, despicable character at its enigmatic core: “The horror! The horror!” Although this extraordinarily concent...show more
The Red Badge of Courage
Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage is an American classic and a landmark in the literature of war. Yet it is a book that is very easy to understand too quickly. Although it is subtitled An Episode of the American Civil War, the novel offers little detail specific to the War Between the States other than the b...show more