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Wolfgang Laun
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The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Wolfgang Laun
There is the fundamental pattern of the detective and his sidekick, the portrayal of London's and England's Victorian society and a set of crisp narratives of suspense with baffling (if romantic) mysteries. Pure entertainment.
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The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
Because, who doesn't want to be reminded of the feelings of our heart calling.
Dangerous Liaisons
Choderlos de Laclos
Witty, wealthy, vengeful, and bored, the glamorous antiheroes of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel, Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons Dangereuses), are connoisseurs of sex as pastime, game, and weapon. The sinisterly charming Vicomte de Valmont has his eye on a beautiful but married visitor, Ma...show more
Independent People
Halldór Laxness
A tale that invades your mind, to stay there. Splendid narrative, I've read more tedious thrillers.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel so strange, so rich, so perfect in its singularity and timeless in its tenor, one can scarcely believe it was written as recently as 1967. At its start we are treated to an inkling of the author’s narrative conjuring: “Many years later, as he faced the firing...show more
Leo Africanus
Amin Maalouf
This transporting novel, a fictional autobiography of the celebrated geographer, adventurer, and scholar al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzān al-Zayyātī, magically leads readers across the borders of their own parochialism—whether physical, historical, or imaginative. Born in Moorish Granada in 1488, Has...show more
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
The “Pi” of the title is Piscine Molitor Patel, an Indian boy named after a swimming pool. As we learn in the first of the novel’s three parts, he passes his early youth in Pondicherry, where his father runs a zoo. The young Pi exhibits a penchant for spiritual exploration, and undergoes a religious...show more
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
The Road starts simply enough: A father and son, waking after a night camping in the wilderness, prepare to journey onward. But we’re soon aware that the simplicity belongs to no pastoral idyll—the sky is endlessly gray, the rivers are the color of oil, and ash drips from above. Nearly all plants an...show more
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
Cormac McCarthy
I've read this book 3 times. The character Judge Holden is the greatest mephastophlian character ever written.
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
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
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
Born and raised in Bombay but a longtime resident of Canada, a Parsi rather than a Hindu, a realist in an age of magic realists, Rohinton Mistry has never neatly fit expectations. The tightly focused artistry of his first two works of fiction, Tales from Firozsha Baag and Such a Long Journey, gave n...show more
A Year in Provence
Peter Mayle
This charming narrative, in which former advertising executive Peter Mayle chronicles his inaugural year as a British expatriate in Provence, offers a refreshing respite from one’s own routine. In pursuit of a long-savored dream of the sweet life in the South of France, Mayle and his wife purchased ...show more
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Ovid is the most magical of the Latin poets; his Metamorphoses is a pagan holy book in which Jove and his fellow divinities consort with natural elements to inspire, confuse, and intoxicate human beings with the ever-changing forms of spirit. Echo and Narcissus, Pentheus and Bacchus, Pyramus and Thi...show more
1984
George Orwell
Even now, six decades after it was written and more than a quarter century after its titular year has come and gone, 1984 continues to haunt us with its aura of pernicious possibility. Orwell’s warning of a spiritless, totalitarian time to come has lost none of its relevance. It would be hard to nam...show more