Post Comment
roppenhe
Reader
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum
James Mustich
There’s no greater tribute to the pleasures of L. Frank Baum’s book than to say that the story is so good that it isn’t overwhelmed by the images from the wonderful Judy Garland movie. The story unfolds with a declarative matter-of-factness that puts no barrier between the real and the imagined; bec...show more
See All Comments (15)
The Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Combining bravado with the invocation of a higher-order authenticity, the opening sentences of Rousseau’s Confessions perfectly capture the animating spirit of the protagonist whose bold ideas and volatile personality will fascinate the reader for the several hundred pages that follow. Through the v...show more
No Exit
Jean-Paul Sartre
No Exit is Jean-Paul Sartre’s lean, mean one-act drama about our dire human condition (the French title, Huis clos, is tough to translate; it’s the legal term for a closed hearing). It distills and presents the ideas that Sartre explored at great length in his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, pub...show more
The Killer Angels
Michael Shaara
In the fleet, fierce narrative of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Michael Shaara brilliantly shows “what it was like to be” at Gettysburg by recording the terrible butchery of the three days’ fighting, switching among leaders’ perspectives on both sides, including Confederates General Lee and his ...show more
The Three Golden Keys
Peter Sís
A brilliant book that infected me with a wonderful sense of strangeness as a child and continues to captivate me as an adult.
Antigone
Sophocles
It is easy to see the battle of wills between Antigone and Creon as a struggle between conscience and power, liberty and tyranny, individual courage and the brutality of the state. Many modern readings of the tale (including mid-twentieth-century restagings by Jean Anouilh and Bertolt Brecht) do so....show more
Oedipus the King
Sophocles
Oedipus the King presents Sophocles’s tragic sense of life with a fearsome and visceral clarity. Although fate is everywhere, not a god appears: Oedipus himself is the agent of his own undoing, and it is his fundamental honor that impels him toward his ruin. The faster we run from torment, the faste...show more
Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles
In this austere play, the cursed Oedipus assumes a strange grace, his imminent death promising a blessing, ordained by yet another oracle, on whatever city claims his burial place. Creon and Polynices arrive to escort him back to Thebes, but are cruelly rebuffed. Theseus at last embraces Oedipus and...show more
Memento Mori
Muriel Spark
In this perfectly poised tale, wicked wit, artifice, and no little wisdom collude to produce a singular delight: a novel about mortality that is both unnerving and exuberant. Exhibiting the author’s uncanny ability to infuse human affairs, no matter how petty or mundane, with an otherworldly gravity...show more
The Andromeda Strain
Michael Crichton
Although physician Michael Crichton previously published several pseudonymous novels, The Andromeda Strain was his first bestseller, and the storytelling élan it displayed would inform nearly four decades of inventive, often medically or scientifically minded thrillers. The combination of cutting-ed...show more
Middlemarch
George Eliot
At the center of George Eliot’s vast portrait of the provincial city of Middlemarch, its society and inhabitants, is the story of Dorothea Brooke, a “home epic” of a bright, brave young woman learning how to live and what to live for. Most memorable of Middlemarch’s characters, however, is no charac...show more
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night—the last of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s four completed novels, and the author’s favorite—sprawls among dozens of characters and settings across Western Europe before and after World War I. Although its messy, heartbreaking story of mental illness, alcoholism, and the disintegration of ...show more
The Good Soldier
Ford Maddox Ford
The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams
A wondrously immersive, idiosyncratic look at a fascinating period, through the eyes of a fascinating man. Plus it's immensely quotable!
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
The Red and the Black
Stendhal
In the pages of The Red and the Black we meet one of literature’s most memorable protagonists, Julien Sorel. The son of a sawmill owner, young Julien has Napoleonic dreams; handsome and clever, he has the gifts to pursue them. Recognizing that the path to glory for an ambitious youth in the France o...show more
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
On any list of the best adventure stories ever written, Treasure Island deserves a place at the top. Hewing to a taut narrative line that ripples with ominous vibrations, it pulls the reader headlong into a fantastic realm of pirates and buried treasure. Read the first few pages and see if you can s...show more
Kidnapped
Robert Louis Stevenson
Although the heroics of Kidnapped’s two protagonists, the narrator David Balfour and the dashing fugitive Alan Breck Stewart, are captivating regardless of one’s knowledge of Scottish history, it does help to know that their thrilling exploits are set in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, when...show more
Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
Imagine a Jane Austen heroine stumbling into an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, with the hillbillies portrayed by method actors. That will give you something of the flavor of this giddy tale, which presents a picture of country life that is roaringly bizarre—and hilarious. Flora Poste is a sophi...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