Post Comment
Roy Shaw
Reader
All Creatures Great and Small
James Herriot
James Mustich
All Creatures Great and Small is a semiautobiographical account of a Yorkshire veterinarian of the animals he treated, and, most tellingly of all, the farmers, families, and neighbors of the town of Darrowby and the surrounding countryside. Herriot’s professional attention to the calves, horses, dog...show more
See All Comments (5)
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities may have the most famous opening of any novel ever written, the frequent application of its words outside the novel’s specific context giving it an edge over the nearest competition, Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice. Echoing the dichotomies invoked in its opening sentences,...show more
This House of Sky
Ivan Doig
This House of Sky is one of the most beautiful books you will ever read. It is the story of three survivors (Ivan, his father, and his maternal grandmother), and of the environment—the hardscrabble world of Montana sheep ranching—that shaped them all, and which they each outlasted. Doig was blessed ...show more
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
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
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
When it comes to page-turners, The Count of Monte Cristo is the great granddaddy of them all. Despite the novel’s gargantuan dimensions—it runs to more than twelve hundred pages in most editions—each of its chapters is like an exhibit in a compendium of narrative suspense; it’s hard to imagine any t...show more
Stoner
John Williams
A summary of what happens in Stoner might well prompt even the most devoted book lover to consider a movie instead. A young farm boy named William Stoner goes off to an agricultural college where he develops a passion for poetry. He embarks on an undistinguished career as an assistant professor of E...show more
Angle of Repose
Wallace Stegner
Though not all of his more than thirty books are concerned with the American West, Wallace Stegner is often referred to as “the dean of Western writers,” and the best of his books illustrate how much he merits the title. Best of the best is the 1971 novel Angle of Repose. A human drama in which two ...show more
Blue Highways
William Least Heat-Moon
One wintry day in 1978, thirty-eight-year-old English professor William Least Heat-Moon learned that neither his employer nor his wife would be needing him anymore. Lying awake that night, he was struck by an idea, and a quintessentially American idea it was: “A man who couldn’t make things go right...show more
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
The title of Joseph Heller’s first novel has become—aptly enough—a catchphrase, common parlance for the kind of double bind that bureaucracies breed with astonishing fecundity. Captain John Yossarian, the protagonist of Heller’s pioneering and influential satire, is “moved very deeply by the absolut...show more
Andersonville
MacKinlay Kantor
By making a prison the focal point of his mammoth Civil War novel, MacKinlay Kantor sets his compassionate but unflinching appraisal of a bloody historical burden not in fields of glory, but in a morass of suffering that envelops soldiers of North and South alike. Andersonville festers with physical...show more
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
Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mary Shelley’s novel is the work of a thinker, and not just the cheap thrill that countless sequels, spin-offs, and spoofs might lead one to expect. The philosophical, psychological, and ethical complexities in which she has tangled her tale deepen its strangeness and wonder. Strange and wonderful i...show more
Germinal
Emile Zola
You don’t write a cycle of twenty novels unless you’re an uncommonly ambitious writer. And Émile Zola, the engineer of literary naturalism in nineteenth-century France, was nothing if not ambitious. He wanted to capture in prose the entirety of French society—rich and poor, urban and rural—under the...show more
Hunger
Knut Hamsun
Oslo, the Norwegian capital, is situated on the edge of a fjord and is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. But you wouldn’t know that from Hunger, Knut Hamsun’s intense, groundbreaking, partly autobiographical short novel about a struggling young writer trying to maintain his dignity in an u...show more
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Men of action require a field to work, and few fields have proven as fertile in this regard—in life and in the imagination—as the
American West. Larry McMurtry’s 1985 epic, Lonesome Dove, may be its richest literary harvest. Set in the late 1870s, it tells the story of a cattle drive from the Rio Gr...show more
Longitude
Dava Sobel
On the night of October 22, 1707, Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s fleet, returning home from Gibraltar, was wrecked on the Scilly Isles, only twenty miles off the southwest tip of England. The souls of these two thousand lost sailors, as Dava Sobel elegantly puts it, precipitated (with all the spee...show more
Master and Commander
Patrick O'Brian
Master and Commander, which introduces readers to Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, ship’s surgeon and intelligence officer Stephen Maturin, is the thrilling first volume in an unparalleled series of novels that British-born Patrick O’Brian wrote about the Royal Navy—or “Nelson’s Navy,” as it’s al...show more
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
Perhaps it was the scale of Moby-Dick—the most ambitious novel ever written in America to that point, a rollicking ocean of maritime adventure, Christian allegory, metaphysical disquisition, natural history, literary escapade, and social criticism—that scared off readers of the time, because no mode...show more
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A crucial book of the twentieth century, Solzhenitsyn’s first novel chronicles a single day in the life of an inmate in a Soviet labor camp, beginning as “the hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ” at five o’clock on an inhumanly cold January morning—“too cold for the warder to go on ha...show more