Preamble
Due to various reasons, the writer cannot put the sources for this treatise, which is not an academic work, not even a serious compilation. The purpose is to excite the joy of reading: once you know about the content of a book on a subject of your interest, you would want to find a way to read that book. Then my quoting information without providing the sources would be tolerated.
When the compiler by chance comes across suitable materials, he puts them together without looking for thorough reviews, simply because he does not have adequate time and means. Due to this reason, the description for each book may be a small part related to that book. It’s up to you to find more details on the books of your interest.
In the following sections, opinions of different persons are separate by the mark * * *, the translation titles between the round brackets ( ), and my personal ratings between the square brackets [ ].
55 days: The fall of South Vietnam – Alan Dawson
Goodreads rating: 3.8
The book starts with betrayal and ends with betrayal. 55 days: The fall of South Vietnam chronicles the events that started with the Communist attack on Ban Me Thuot and ends in early May with the occupation of Saigon by the forces of North Vietnam. The opening chapter deals with the fall of Saigon and many of the sad and sometimes unbelievable stories that occurred there. The book then moves on to develop the complex background for the events that unfold over the next 55 days. It details the many battles and events, from the struggle for Hue to the flight from Da Nang, that develop into a complete rout of the forces of South Vietnam.
1984 – George Orwell
Goodreads rating: 4.3
A dystopian novel published in 1949, is set in Airstrip One, formerly Great Britain, a province of the superstate Oceania, whose residents are victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation. Oceania’s political ideology, euphemistically named English Socialism (shortened to “Ingsoc” in Newspeak, the government’s invented language that will replace English or Oldspeak) is enforced by the privileged, elite Inner Party. Via the “Thought Police”, the Inner Party persecutes individualism and independent thinking, which are regarded as “thoughtcrimes”.
A brief history of time – Stephen Hawking
Goodreads rating: 3.9 [4.2]
This modern classic is to help non-scientists understand fundamental questions of physics and our existence: where did the universe come from? How and why did it begin? Will it come to an end, and if so, how?
Hawking attempts to deal with these questions (and where we might look for answers) using a minimum of technical jargon. Among the topics gracefully covered are gravity, black holes, the Big Bang, the nature of time and physicists’ search for a grand unifying theory.
This is deep science; the concepts are so vast (or so tiny) that they cause mental vertigo while reading, and one can’t help but marvel at Hawking’s ability to synthesize this difficult subject for people not used to thinking about things like alternate dimensions. The journey is certainly worth taking for as Hawking says, the reward of understanding the universe may be a glimpse of “the mind of God”.
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“It’s one of a very few books in this category that continues to fascinate despite the fact that much of its contents stretch the reader further than is usually expected in a book of this sort.”
Popular Science
A Christmas carol – Charles Dickens
Goodreads rating: 4.0
A Christmas carol tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an old miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their visits Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.
Dickens wrote A Christmas carol at a time when the British were examining and exploring Christmas traditions from the past, such as carols, as well as new customs such as Christmas trees. He was influenced by experiences from his own past, and from the Christmas stories of other authors, including Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold. Dickens had written three Christmas stories prior to the novella, and was inspired to write the story following a visit to the Field Lane Ragged school, one of several establishments for London’s half-starved, illiterate street children. The treatment of the poor and the ability of a self-interested man redeeming himself by transforming into a more sympathetic character are the key themes of the story. There is discussion among academics as to whether this was a fully secular story, or if it is a Christian allegory.
Most critics reviewed the novella positively. With A Christmas carol, Dickens captured the zeitgeist of the mid-Victorian revival of the Christmas holiday. He has been acknowledged as an influence on the modern Western observance of Christmas and inspired several aspects of Christmas, such as family gatherings, seasonal food and drink, dancing, games and a festive generosity of spirit.
A short history of nearly everything – Bill Bryson
Goodreads rating: 4.2
A popular science book that explains some areas of science, using easily accessible language that appeals more so to the general public than many other books dedicated to the subject. It was one of the bestselling popular science books of 2005 in the United Kingdom, selling over 300,000 copies.
A short history deviates from Bryson’s popular travel book genre, instead describing general sciences such as chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics. In it, he explores time from the Big Bang to the discovery of quantum mechanics, via evolution and geology.
Bill Bryson wrote this book because he was dissatisfied with his scientific knowledge—that was, not much at all. He writes that science was a distant, unexplained subject at school. Textbooks and teachers alike did not ignite the passion for knowledge in him, mainly because they never delved in the whys, hows, and whens.
“It was as if [the textbook writer] wanted to keep the good stuff secret by making all of it soberly unfathomable.”
— Bryson, on the state of science books used within his school.
A tale of two cities – Charles Dickens
Goodreads rating: 3.8
This historical novel is set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris and his release to life in London with his daughter Lucie, whom he had never met; Lucie’s marriage and the collision between her beloved husband and the people who caused her father’s imprisonment; and Monsieur and Madame Defarge, sellers of wine in a poor suburb of Paris. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.
Abhidhamma in daily life – Nina van Gorkom
Goodreads rating: not considered (8 ratings)
This is an exposition of absolute realities in detail. Abhidhamma means higher doctrine, and the book’s purpose is to encourage the right application of Buddhism in order to eradicate wrong view and eventually all defilements. Many terms in PÄli the language of early Buddhism are used and are defined as they are introduced. The book is therefore suitable for beginners as well as practicing Buddhists. It is detailed and precise and an invaluable aid to unlocking the deep meaning of the entire Buddhist canon and applying the theory to our daily lives for the benefit of ourselves and others.
Alf layla wa-layla (One thousand and one nights) – [Anonymous]
Goodreads rating: 3.8
This is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English-language edition (1706), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment.
The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West, Central, and South Asia and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Greek, Indian, Jewish, Persian and Turkish folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Abbasid era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان, lit. A Thousand Tales), which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.
What is common throughout all the editions of The Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryār and his wife Scheherazade and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights, while others include 1,001 or more. The bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is occasionally used for songs and riddles and to express heightened emotion. Most of the poems are single couplets or quatrains, although some are longer.
Some of the stories commonly associated with The Nights, in particular “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor”, were not part of The Nights in its original Arabic versions but were added to the collection by Antoine Galland and other European translators.
An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations – Adam Smith
Goodreads rating: 3.9
Generally referred to by its shortened title The Wealth of Nations, this is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith. First published in 1776, the book offers one of the world’s first collected descriptions of what builds nations’ wealth, and is today a fundamental work in classical economics. By reflecting upon the economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the book touches upon such broad topics as the division of labor, productivity, and free markets.
It is the second most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950, behind Karl Marx’s Capital.
Anne of green gables – L.M. Montgomery
Goodreads rating: 4.2
This is a 1908 novel by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery (published as L. M. Montgomery). Written for all ages, it has been considered a children’s novel since the mid-twentieth century. It recounts the adventures of Anne Shirley, an 11-year-old orphan girl who is mistakenly sent to Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a middle-aged brother and sister who had intended to adopt a boy to help them on their farm in the fictional town of Avonlea on Prince Edward Island. The novel recounts how Anne makes her way with the Cuthberts, in school, and within the town.
Since its publication, the book has sold more than 50 million copies and has been translated into at least 36 languages. Montgomery wrote numerous sequels, and since her death, another sequel has been published, as well as an authorized prequel. The original book is taught to students around the world.
The book has been adapted as films, made-for-television movies, and animated and live-action television series. Musicals and plays have also been created, with productions annually in Canada since 1964 of the first musical production, which has toured in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Japan.
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Everyone’s favorite redhead, the spunky Anne Shirley, begins her adventures at Green Gables, a farm outside Avonlea, Prince Edward Island. When the freckled girl realizes that the elderly Cuthberts wanted to adopt a boy instead, she begins to try to win them and, consequently, the reader, over.
Animal farm – George Orwell
Goodreads rating: 4.3
This allegorical novella reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, an attitude that was critically shaped by his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. The Soviet Union, he believed, had become a brutal dictatorship, built upon a cult of personality and enforced by a reign of terror. In author’s essay Why I write (1946), he wrote that Animal Farm was the first book in which he tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, “to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole”.
Time magazine chose the book as one of the 100 best English-language novels (1923 to 2005); it also featured at number 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels. It won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996, and is included in the Great Books of the Western World selection.
À la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time) – Marcel Proust
Goodreads rating: 4.3
For this complete, authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of À la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).
Bare feet, iron will – James G. Zumwalt
Goodreads rating: 4.4
Ever since the American Revolution, military service has been a proud tradition for the Zumwalt family. Tradition initially led the author to join his father and brother in the Navy, before later transferring to the US Marine Corps. During his 26 years in uniform, the author saw service in three conflicts – Vietnam, Panama and the first Persian Gulf war. It was Vietnam, however, that ultimately would launch him on an unexpected journey – long after the guns of that war had fallen silent – triggered by the loss of a brother who had fought there. This journey was an emotional one – initially of anger towards the Vietnamese and the conflict that claimed his older brother. But it unexpectedly took a change in direction.
In Vietnam almost two decades after Saigon’s fall, the author, in a private talk with a former enemy general officer, came to understand an aspect of the war he never before had. In that talk, they shared personal insights about the war-discovering a common bond. It unlocked a door through which the author passed to start his own healing process. It began a journey where he would meet hundreds of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong veterans-listening to their personal stories of loss, sacrifice and hardship. It opened the author’s eyes to how a technically inferior enemy, beaten down by superior US firepower, was able to get back up-driven by an “iron will” to emerge triumphant. “Bare Feet, Iron Will” takes the reader on a fascinating journey, providing stories-many never before told-as to how enemy ingenuity played a major role in the conflict, causing us not to see things that were there or to see things there that were not! It shares unique insights into the sacrifice and commitment that took place on the other side of Vietnam’s battlefields.
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One book reviewer states that the author occasionally falls into the trap of accepting at face value 100 percent of Vietnamese claims. He does frequently caveat those claims, but too often the book reads as if at every turn the North Vietnamese were invincible and the Americans bumblers. It’s true that the Vietnamese population was at total war, whereas among Americans, it was only total for those deployed to Vietnam and its nearby waters. But individually, American soldiers were hardly bumblers.
The reader is advised to absorb skeptically the stories passed on by Col. Zumwalt. For example, he reports an aircraft carrier strike on the Thanh Hoa Bridge, during which 41 American carrier aircraft were shot down. This is preposterous. Had the U.S. Navy lost 41 aircraft in one day, there would have been banner headlines around the world and the Navy might well have withdrawn from the Tonkin Gulf. It did not withdraw, and 41 aircraft were not downed on one strike.
Another problem is that it is often stated or implied throughout that the Vietnamese bore no grudge toward the American fighting man, treating him well, reasoning that he was merely fighting for his country as the Vietnamese were for theirs. Tell that to a Hanoi Hilton graduate.
In the same context, while, “From the Other Side,” is most interesting, the book would have been much better had there been a modicum of fact-checking. Instead, the author, with only a small caveat here and there, seems to accept everything told to him by the North Vietnamese as gospel.
Shortcomings aside, Bare feet, iron will is a recommended read, especially for anyone who fought in the jungles or skies or on the waters of Vietnam and for their families. It provides hindsight of the first order. Would that the Americans learned the lessons.
Biruma no tategoto (The harp of Burma; The Burmese hảp) – Takeyama Michio
Goodreads rating: 3.6 [4.0]
This is Japan’s haunting answer to Germany’s famous requiem for the First World War, All quiet on the Western Front.
Winner of the prestigious Mainichi Shuppan Bunkasho prize and the subject of an acclaimed film by Ichikawa Kon, Harp of Burma portrays a company of Japanese troops who are losing a desperate campaign against British forces in the tropical jungles of Burma. The young soldiers discover that the trials of war involve more than just opposing the enemy. The alien climate and terrain, the strange behavior of foreigners, the constant struggle to overcome homesickness and nostalgia, and the emotions stirred by the senselessness of war—all of these forces, new and baffling to the soldiers, contribute to their distress and disorientation.
In the midst of these overwhelming challenges, they discover the power of music to make even the most severe situations tolerable—through their commander’s ability to lead them in song. Even though they face the inevitability of defeat, singing the songs of their homeland revives their will to live.
Through the story of these men and of the music that saw them through the war, Takeyama presents thought-provoking questions about political hostilities and the men who unleash them. Harp of Burma is Japan’s classic novel of pathos and compassion in the midst of senseless warfare.
Bridget Jone’s diary – Helen Fielding
Goodreads rating: 3.8
Meet Bridget Jones—a 30-something Singleton who is certain she would have all the answers if she could: a. lose 7 pounds; b. stop smoking; and c. develop Inner Poise.
“123 lbs. (how is it possible to put on 4 pounds in the middle of the night? Could flesh have somehow solidified becoming denser and heavier? Repulsive, horrifying notion), alcohol units 4 (excellent), cigarettes 21 (poor but will give up totally tomorrow), number of correct lottery numbers 2 (better, but nevertheless useless)…”
Bridget Jones’ diary is the devastatingly self-aware, laugh-out-loud daily chronicle of Bridget’s permanent, doomed quest for self-improvement — a year in which she resolves to: reduce the circumference of each thigh by 1.5 inches, visit the gym three times a week not just to buy a sandwich, form a functional relationship with a responsible adult, and learn to program the VCR.
Over the course of the year, Bridget loses a total of 72 pounds but gains a total of 74. She remains, however, optimistic. Through it all, Bridget will have you helpless with laughter, and — like millions of readers the world round — you’ll find yourself shouting, “Bridget Jones is me!”
Brief einer unbekannten (Letter from an unknown woman) – Stefan Zweig
Goodreads rating: 4.2
This novella, published in 1922, tells the story of a famous author who receives a letter on his forty-first birthday. He doesn’t know the sender, but still the letter concerns him intimately. Its story is earnest, even piteous: the story of a young girl lived in service to an unannounced, unnoticed love.
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
Goodreads rating: 4.0
A satirical novel, often cited as one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century,] it uses a distinctive non-chronological third-person omniscient narration, describing events from the points of view of different characters. The separate storylines are out of sequence so the timeline develops along with the plot.
The novel is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944. It mainly follows the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the fictional 256th Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean Sea, west of Italy. The novel looks into the experiences of Yossarian and the other airmen in the camp, who attempt to maintain their sanity while fulfilling their service requirements so that they may return home.
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In 1962, writing in The Observer, Kenneth Tynan saluted Catch-22 as “the most striking debut in American fiction since Catcher in the rye.” Within a year, he had been joined, in a chorus of praise, by writers as various as Harper Lee, Norman Mailer and Graham Greene. More than 50 years later, this brilliant novel still holds an unforgettable comic grip on the reader.
“It was love at first sight,” Heller begins, setting the tone for everything that follows. “The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”
Chicken soup for the soul – Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen
Goodreads rating: 4.0
Two of America’s best-loved inspirational speakers share the very best of their collected stories and favorite tales that have touched the hearts of people everywhere. Canfield and Hansen bring you wit and wisdom, hope and empowerment to buoy you up through life’s dark moments.
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The original series held a spot on the New York Times Best Seller list continuously during 1994-1998.
Cien años de soledad (One hundred years of solitude) – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Goodreads rating: 4.0
A landmark 1967 novel that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, a fictitious town in the country of Colombia.
The magical realist style and thematic substance of One hundred years of solitude established it as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) literary movement.
Since it was first published in May 1967, Cien años de soledad has been translated into 37 languages and has sold more than 30 million copies. The novel, considered García Márquez’s magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works in the Spanish literary canon.
Cosmos – Carl Sagan
Goodreads rating: 4.4
Cosmos is a 1980 popular science book by astronomer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Sagan. Its 13 illustrated chapters, corresponding to the 13 episodes of the Cosmos TV series, which the book was co-developed with and intended to complement, explore the mutual development of science and civilization. One of Sagan’s main purposes for the book and television series was to explain complex scientific ideas to anyone interested in learning.
Cosmos spent 50 weeks on the Publishers Weekly best-sellers list and 70 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list to become the best-selling science book ever published at the time.
In 1981, it received the Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book. The book’s unprecedented success ushered in a dramatic increase in visibility for science-themed literature. The success of the book also jumpstarted Sagan’s literary career.
Cry, the beloved country – Alan Paton
Goodreads rating: 3.9
Cry, the beloved country, the most famous and important novel in South Africa’s history, was an immediate worldwide bestseller in 1948. Alan Paton’s impassioned novel about a black man’s country under white man’s law is a work of searing beauty.
The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, “We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poets, almost all thin. In Alan Paton’s Cry, the beloved country the statesman, the poet and the novelist meet in a unique harmony.”
Cry, the beloved country is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the beloved country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.
Cuore (Heart) – Edmondo de Amicis
Goodreads rating: 3.8
This is a children’s novel by the Italian author Edmondo De Amicis who was a novelist, journalist, short story writer, and poet. The novel is his best known work to this day, having been inspired by his own children Furio and Ugo who had been schoolboys at the time. It is set during the Italian unification, and includes several patriotic themes. It was issued by Treves on October 18, 1886, the first day of school in Italy, and rose to immediate success.
Through its investigation of social issues such as poverty, Heart shows the influence of left-wing ideologies on De Amicis’ work (he was later to join the Italian Socialist Party). Because of this, the book remained influential (and the staple of many textbooks) in countries of the Eastern Bloc. On the other hand, the book’s strong evocation of Italian nationalism and patriotism also made it very welcome in Fascist Italy.
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This is a children’s book in separate episodes. It was a great success, and de Amicis became the most widely read writer in Italy. Cuore, with Pinocchio, the Promessi Sposi, the Bible, the Divina Commedia, were present in most houses. Many translations were made into different languages, among them Heart in English and Herz in Germany.
The novel is structured as a diary of 9-year-old Enrico Bottini, a final year student in an elementary school. Every month there are tales told by the schoolmaster, challenging stories, with children as protagonists.
The setting is Turin after the unification of Italy, between 1878 (coronation of King Umberto I) and 1886 (publication of the book). The author wanted to teach young people civic virtues, that is, love of their country, respect for authority and for parents, the spirit of sacrifice, heroism, charity, piety, obedience and endurance of hardships.
Der process (The trial) – Franz Kafka
Goodreads rating: 4.0
One of Kafka’s best-known works, this novel tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoyevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka’s other novels, The trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter which brings the story to an end.
In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde‘s 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.
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The chapters were organized and the book published by Kafka’s friend and literary executor, Max Brod, despite Kafka’s request that Brod destroy the manuscript. One of Kafka’s major works, and perhaps his most pessimistic, this surreal story of a young man who finds himself caught up in the mindless bureaucracy of the law has become synonymous with modern anxieties and a sense of alienation and with every mans’ struggle against an unreasoning and unreasonable authority. It is often considered to be an imaginative anticipation of totalitarianism.
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Goodreads rating: 3.9
Published in two volumes, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published, such as the Bokklubben World Library collection that cites Don Quixote as the authors’ choice for the “best literary work ever written”.
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Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote’s fancy often leads him astray—he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants—Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together-and together they have haunted readers’ imaginations for nearly four hundred years.
With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel.
Dōngzhōu Lièguó Zhì (Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou kingdoms) – Feng Menglong
Goodreads rating: unavailable
This Chinese historical novel, set in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, starts from the Chinese kingdom beginning to break apart into smaller states and ends with the first unification of the land accomplished by Qin Shi Huang.
The novel is considered to possess high historical value, and also to be a greatly influential historical novel in Chinese literary history.
The novel has been translated into several languages, including Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese.
Đường xưa mây trắng (Old path white clouds) – Thích Nhất Hạnh
Goodreads rating: 4.5
Scholar, poet and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh retells the story of the Buddha in his own.
Inimitably beautiful style. He draws upon Pali, Sanskrit and Chinese sources to trace the Buddha’s life slowly and gently through the course of eighty years. Seen partly through the eyes of the Buddha himself and partly through those of Svasti, the buffalo boy, Old path white clouds brings the Buddha closer to us as we journey with him on his path to enlightenment and nirvana.
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
Goodreads rating: 4.4
Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity; the inexplicability of love; and the murderous consequences of love’s absence.
Einstein: His life and universe – Walter Isaacson
Goodreads rating: 4.2.
How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson’s biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.
Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk—a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn’t get a teaching job or a doctorate—became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom, and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.
These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.
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Einstein was a rebel and nonconformist from boyhood days, and these character traits drove both his life and his science. In this narrative, Walter Isaacson explains how his mind worked and the mysteries of the universe that he discovered.
Exodus – Leon Uris
Goodreads rating: 4.3
Exodus is a historical novel about the founding of the State of Israel. Published in 1958, it begins with a compressed retelling of the voyages of the 1947 immigration ship Exodus.
Exodus became an international publishing phenomenon, the biggest bestseller in the United States since Gone with the wind (1936). The book remained number one on the New York Times bestseller list for eight months after its release, and initiated a new sympathy for the newly established State of Israel.
The story unfolds with the protagonist, Ari Ben Canaan, hatching a plot to transport Jewish refugees from a British detention camp in Cyprus to Palestine. The operation is carried out under the auspices of the Mossad Le’aliyah Bet. The book then goes on to trace the histories of the various main characters and the ties of their personal lives to the birth of the new Jewish state.
Giận (Anger: Wisdom for cooling the flames) – Thích Nhất Hạnh
Goodreads rating: 4.2
It was under the bodhi tree in India twenty-five centuries ago that Buddha achieved the insight that three states of mind were the source of all our unhappiness: wrong knowing, obsessive desire, and anger. All are difficult, but in one instant of anger—one of the most powerful emotions—lives can be ruined, and health and spiritual development can be destroyed. With exquisite simplicity, Buddhist monk and Vietnam refugee Thich Nhat Hanh gives tools and advice for transforming relationships, focusing energy, and rejuvenating those parts of ourselves that have been laid waste by anger. His extraordinary wisdom can transform your life and the lives of the people you love, and in the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, can give each reader the power to “change everything.”
God’s playground: A history of Poland – Norman Davies
Goodreads rating: 4.2
The most comprehensive survey of Polish history available in English, God’s playground demonstrates Poland’s importance in European history from medieval times to the present. Abandoning the traditional nationalist approach to Polish history, Norman Davies instead stresses the country’s rich multinational heritage and places the development of the Jewish German, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian communities firmly within the Polish context.
Davies emphasizes the cultural history of Poland through a presentation of extensive poetical, literary, and documentary texts in English translation. In each volume, chronological chapters of political narrative are interspersed with essays on religious, social, economic, constitutional, philosophical, and diplomatic themes.
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With God’s playground, Davies has proven himself to be one of the greatest historians, historical writers, and historical theorists that the English language has known. Davies combines the narrative and thematic approaches to achieve a historical study that provides a chronology of events as well as an understanding of deeper changes and cultural contexts. How Davies does this? First, he provides a chapter that is written in the traditional narrative style from n-date to x-date. Then he follows that up with several chapters on each facet of Polish life and how that developed from n-date to x-date. Typically, he uses political, military, economic, religious, and cultural (the arts, etc.) as his primary themes. By using this technique Davies is able to impart much more knowledge and much deeper understanding to his readers. Finally, these two volumes also contain some of the best and most useful maps encountered in any history book. The maps alone are worth the price of the book, and anyone teaching a European history course will find them to be invaluable in helping students understand Eastern Europe.
Gone with the wind – Margaret Mitchell
Goodreads rating: 4.3
The story is set in Clayton County, Georgia, and Atlanta during the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of the poverty she finds herself in after Sherman’s March to the Sea. A historical novel, the story is a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, with the title taken from a poem written by Ernest Dowson.
Gone with the wind was popular with American readers from the onset and was the top American fiction bestseller in the year it was published and in 1937. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide.
Great expectations – Charles Dicken
Goodreads rating: 3.8
Considered by many to be Dickens’ finest novel, Great expectations traces the growth of the book’s narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From its famous dramatic opening on the bleak Kentish marshes, the story abounds with some of Dickens’ most memorable characters. Among them are the kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery, the mysterious convict Abel Magwitch, the eccentric Miss Haversham and her beautiful ward Estella, Pip’s good-hearted room-mate Herbert Pocket and the pompous Pumblechook. As Pip unravels the truth behind his own ‘great expectations’ in his quest to become a gentleman, the mysteries of the past and the convolutions of fate through a series of thrilling adventures serve to steer him towards maturity and his most important discovery of all – the truth about himself.
Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies – Jared Diamond
Goodreads rating: 4.2
In this “artful, informative, and delightful” (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California’s Gold Medal.
Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s stone – J.K. Rowling
Goodreads rating: 4.4
This is a fantasy novel, the first in the Harry Potter series and Rowling’s debut novel. The plot follows Harry Potter, a young wizard who discovers his magical heritage as he makes close friends and a few enemies in his first year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. With the help of his friends, Harry faces an attempted comeback by the dark wizard Lord Voldemort, who killed Harry’s parents, but failed to kill Harry when he was just 15 months old.
The novel won most of the British book awards that were judged by children and other awards in the U.S. The book reached the top of The New York Times list of best-selling fiction in August 1999 and stayed near the top of that list for much of 1999 and 2000. It has been translated into at least seventy three other languages, and has six sequels.
Most reviews were very favorable, commenting on Rowling’s imagination, humor, simple, direct style and clever plot construction, although a few complained that the final chapters seemed rushed. The writing has been compared to that of Jane Austen, one of Rowling’s favorite authors, Roald Dahl, whose works dominated children’s stories before the appearance of Harry Potter, and the Ancient Greek story-teller Homer. While some commentators thought the book looked backwards to Victorian and Edwardian boarding school stories, others thought it placed the genre firmly in the modern world by featuring contemporary ethical and social issues.
Harry Potter and the philosopher’s stone, along with the rest of the Harry Potter series, has been attacked by some religious groups and banned in some countries because of accusations that the novels promote witchcraft under the guise of a heroic, moral story. Other religious commentators have written that the book exemplifies important viewpoints, including the power of self-sacrifice and the ways in which people’s decisions shape their personalities. The series has been used as a source of object lessons in educational techniques, sociological analysis and marketing.
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Even if you dislike fantasy books, you should read this first in the Harry Potter series. It’s certain you will like it, because author’s imagination is amazing and her story-telling is fantastic.
Het achterhuis dagboekbrieven 16 Juni – 1 Augustus 1944 (The diary of a young girl) – Anne Frank
Goodreads rating: 4.2
It is 1942 in Holland and the Germans have invaded. All Jewish people are frightened for their lives, so the Frank family hide. Life is dangerous but they hope for the best – until they are finally discovered. Anne Frank was a real person, and this is her diary.
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This a book of the writings from the Dutch language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. The diary was retrieved by Miep Gies, who gave it to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the family’s only known survivor, just after the war was over. The diary has since been published in more than 60 languages.
How not to die – Michael Greger & Gene Stone
Goodreads rating: 4.5
Sub-title: Discover the foods scientifically proven to prevent and reverse disease. From the physician behind the wildly popular website NutritionFacts.org, How not to die reveals the groundbreaking scientific evidence behind the only diet that can prevent and reverse many of the causes of disease-related death.
The vast majority of premature deaths can be prevented through simple changes in diet and lifestyle. In How not to die, Dr. Michael Greger, the internationally-renowned nutrition expert, physician, and founder of NutritionFacts.org, examines the fifteen top causes of premature death in America – heart disease, various cancers, diabetes, Parkinson’s, high blood pressure, and more – and explains how nutritional and lifestyle interventions can sometimes trump prescription pills and other pharmaceutical and surgical approaches, freeing us to live healthier lives.
The simple truth is that most doctors are good at treating acute illnesses but bad at preventing chronic disease. The fifteen leading causes of death claim the lives of 1.6 million Americans annually. This doesn’t have to be the case. By following Dr. Greger’s advice, all of it backed up by strong scientific evidence, you will learn which foods to eat and which lifestyle changes to make to live longer.
History of prostate cancer in your family? Put down that glass of milk and add flaxseed to your diet whenever you can. Have high blood pressure? Hibiscus tea can work better than a leading hypertensive drug-and without the side effects. Fighting off liver disease? Drinking coffee can reduce liver inflammation. Battling breast cancer? Consuming soy is associated with prolonged survival. Worried about heart disease (the number 1 killer in the United States)? Switch to a whole-food, plant-based diet, which has been repeatedly shown not just to prevent the disease but often stop it in its tracks.
In addition to showing what to eat to help treat the top fifteen causes of death, How not to die includes Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen — a checklist of the twelve foods we should consume every day. Full of practical, actionable advice and surprising, cutting edge nutritional science, these doctor’s orders are just what we need to live longer, healthier lives.
How to win friends and influence people – Dale Carnegie
Goodreads rating: 4.7
This is a self-help book first published in 1936. Over 30 million copies have been sold world-wide, making it one of the best-selling books of all time. In 2011, it was number 19 on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential books.
In 1934, Leon Shimkin of the publishing firm Simon & Schuster took one of Carnegie’s 14-week courses; afterward, Shimkin persuaded Carnegie to let a stenographer take notes from the course to be revised for publication. The book sold exceptionally well from the start, going through 17 editions in its first year alone.
In 1981, a revised edition containing updated language and anecdotes was released. The revised edition reduced the number of sections from six to four, eliminating sections on effective business letters and improving marital satisfaction.
In 2011, a third edition was released, How to win friends and influence people in the digital age. Written by Dale Carnegie & Associates, it applies Carnegie’s prescription for relationship and business success to the digital age.
Hónglóu mèng (Dream of the red chamber) – Cao Xueqin
Goodreads rating: 4.1
One of China’s Four Great Classical Novels, it was written sometime in the middle of the 18th century during the Qing Dynasty. Long considered a masterpiece of Chinese literature, the novel is generally acknowledged to be the pinnacle of Chinese fiction. “Redology” is the field of study devoted exclusively to this work.
The title has also been translated as Red chamber dream and A dream of red mansions. The novel circulated in manuscript copies with various titles until its print publication, in 1791. Gao E, who prepared the first and second printed editions with his partner Cheng Weiyuan in 1791–2, added 40 additional chapters to complete the novel.
Red Chamber is believed to be semi-autobiographical, mirroring the rise and decline of author Cao Xueqin’s own family and, by extension, of the Qing Dynasty. As the author details in the first chapter, it is intended to be a memorial to the damsels he knew in his youth: friends, relatives and servants. The novel is remarkable not only for its huge cast of characters and psychological scope, but also for its precise and detailed observation of the life and social structures typical of 18th-century Chinese society.
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Dream of the red chamber is a masterpiece that has been called the ‘book of the millennium’ and it is high time it receives the attention it deserves.
The critic Anthony West called it “one of the great novels of world literature … to the Chinese as Proust is to the French or Karamazov to the Russians”.
The novel is an 18th-century saga, the tale of a noble family that falls from grace. It is full of incredible detail of the social, cultural and spiritual life of the time. Chairman Mao claimed to have read it five times – and thought everyone else should too. Today, everyone in China knows it, partly due to the much-loved 1987 TV version, which had the impact of the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice in the UK.
I, Claudius – Robert Graves
Goodreads rating: 4.3
This novel is written in the form of an autobiography of the Roman Emperor Claudius. Accordingly, it includes the history of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty and the Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC to Caligula’s assassination in 41 AD.
Physically weak and afflicted with stuttering, Claudius is initially despised and dismissed as an idiot. Shunted to the background of imperial affairs by his embarrassed royal family, he becomes a scholar and historian, while palace intrigues and murders surround him. Observing these dramas from beyond the public eye, Claudius escapes the cruelties inflicted on the rest of the royal family by its own members and survives to become emperor of Rome in A.D. 41.
In 1998 the Modern Library ranked I, Claudius fourteenth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by Time as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present
Influence: The psychology of persuasion – Robert Cialdini
Goodreads rating: 4.2
Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say “yes” – and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book.
You’ll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader – and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success.
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Robert Cialdini is the Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and was a visiting professor of marketing, business and psychology at Stanford University, as well as at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Goodreads rating: 4.1
This novel is a first-person narrative, set in the north of England, late in the reign of George III (1760–1820), and provides perspectives on a number of important social issues and ideas, many of which are critical of the status quo. It contains elements of social criticism, with a strong sense of Christian morality at its core, but is nonetheless a novel many consider ahead of its time given the individualistic character of Jane and the novel’s exploration of classism, sexuality, religion, and proto-feminism.
In 2003, the novel was ranked number 10 in the BBC’s survey The Big Read.
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Orphaned as a child, Jane has felt an outcast her whole young life. Her courage is tested once again when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, where she has been hired by the brooding, proud Edward Rochester to care for his ward Adèle. Jane finds herself drawn to his troubled yet kind spirit. She falls in love.
But there is a terrifying secret inside the gloomy, forbidding Thornfield Hall. Is Rochester hiding from Jane? Will Jane be left heartbroken and exiled once again?
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Jane Eyre is one of the most loved English classics of all time.
Jurassic Park – Michael Crichton
Goodreads rating: 4.0 [4.3]
The narrative begins by tying together a series of incidents involving strange animal attacks in Costa Rica and on Isla Nublar, the main setting for the story. Paleontologist Alan Grant and his paleobotanist graduate student Ellie Sattler are abruptly whisked away by millionaire John Hammond (founder and CEO of ‘International Genetic Technologies’, or InGen) for a weekend visit to a “biological preserve” he has established on an island 120 miles west off the coast of Costa Rica.
Recent events have worried Hammond’s considerable investors, so, to placate them, he means for Grant and Sattler to act as fresh consultants. They stand in counterbalance to a well-known mathematician and chaos theorist Ian Malcolm and a lawyer representing the investors, Donald Gennaro. Both are pessimistic, but Malcolm, having been consulted before the park’s creation, is emphatic in his prediction that the park will collapse, as it is an unsustainable simple structure bluntly forced upon a complex system.
Upon arrival the park is revealed to contain living dinosaurs. The creatures were cloned dinosaurs using ancient DNA found in amber-entombed mosquitoes that had sucked ancient paleo fauna blood. Gaps in the genetic code have been filled in with reptilian, avian, or amphibian DNA. Hammond proudly showcases InGen’s advances in genetic engineering and shows his guests through the island’s vast array of automated systems.
Malcolm suggests a flaw in their method of analyzing dinosaur populations, but the park’s controllers are reluctant to admit that the park has long been operating beyond their constraints.
Kane and Abel – Jeffrey Archer
Goodreads rating: 4.3
The book tells the stories of two men born worlds apart. They have nothing in common except the same date of birth (18 April 1906) and a zeal to succeed in life. William Lowell Kane is a wealthy and powerful Boston Brahmin while Abel Rosnovski (originally named Wladek Koskiewicz) is a Pole who was born in a situation of great poverty and eventually migrated to the United States. Their paths destined to cross in their ruthless struggle to build a fortune.
An unputdownable story, spanning sixty years, of two powerful men linked by an all-consuming hatred, brought together by fate to save―and finally destroy―each other.
The book was an international success. It reached No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list. It is among the top 100 list of best-selling books in the world, with a similar number of copies sold as To kill a mockingbird and Gone with the wind.
In 2003, Kane and Abel was listed at number 96 on the BBC’s survey The Big Read.
Kinkajuki (The Temple of the Golden Pavillion) – Yukio Mishima
Goodreads rating: 3.9
This novel was published in 1956 and translated into English by Ivan Morris in 1959.
The novel is loosely based on the burning of the Reliquary (or Golden Pavilion) of Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto by a young Buddhist acolyte in 1950. The pavilion, dating from before 1400, was a national monument that had been spared destruction many times throughout history, and the arson shocked Japan. The story is narrated by Mizoguchi, the disturbed acolyte in question, who is afflicted with a stutter, and who recounts his obsession with beauty and the growth of his urge to destroy it. The novel also includes one of Mishima’s most memorable characters, Mizoguchi’s club-footed, deeply cynical friend Kashiwagi, who gives his own highly individual twist to various Zen parables (koan).
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The Temple of the Golden Pavilion brilliantly portrays the passions and agonies of a young man in postwar Japan, bringing to the subject the erotic imagination and instinct for the dramatic moment that marked Mishima as one of the towering makers of modern fiction.
La joueuse de go (The girl who played go) – Shan Sa
Goodreads rating: 3.8
A 2001 French novel by Shan Sa set during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. It tells the story of a 16-year-old Chinese girl who is exceptionally good at the game of Go, and her games with a young Japanese officer. It was translated into English in 2003 and has been translated into 32 languages in total.
The novel won a number of prizes, including the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens (Prix Goncourt of the High-school students) in 2001 and the Kiriyama Prize for fiction in 2004.
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“This is an extremely even-handed book, which gives a picture too, in the details of the soldier’s letters home, of the Japanese mindset. It is a story that is worth telling, and intriguingly told.”
The Guardian
Lady Chatterley’s lover – D. H. Lawrence
Goodreads rating: 3.5
The story concerns a young married woman, the former Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley), whose upper class husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, has been paralysed from the waist down due to a Great War injury. In addition to Clifford’s physical limitations, his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple. Her emotional frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors.
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Lawrence’s frank portrayal of an extramarital affair and the explicit sexual explorations of the central characters caused this controversial book, now considered a masterpiece, to be banned as pornography until 1960.
Last words of notable people – William B. Brahms
Goodreads rating: 4.5
With the sub-title Final words of more than 3500 noteworthy people throughout history, this book is a comprehensive reference work on “last words,” “dying words” or “famous last words”. A work of unprecedented scope and study… Covering the final utterances of noted people over the span of thousands of years and the entire globe; each person is presented with a relevant biographical treatment. Each entry is meticulously documented, citing best sources available. Connection or relation of cited sources to entries are presented. Accuracy or veracity of reputed “last words” is often questioned. Conflicting variations of reported “last words” for many entries are presented for the purpose of further research. Contains a detailed selected annotated bibliography of significant “last word” sources. Well indexed. The conclusion of more than a dozen years work and consultation of tens of thousands of sources, Last words of notable people is far and away the definitive compilation and treatment of recorded “last words” compiled to date.
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo) – Alexandre Dumas, père
Goodreads rating:
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, père: 4.2
The Count of Monte Cristo, translation by Beatrice Conway: 4.2
The Count of Monte Cristo, translation by Clare West: 4.5
An adventure novel. The story takes place in France, Italy, and islands in the Mediterranean during the historical events of 1815–1839: the era of the Bourbon Restoration through the reign of Louis-Philippe of France. It begins just before the Hundred Days period (when Napoleon returned to power after his exile). The historical setting is a fundamental element of the book, an adventure story primarily concerned with themes of hope, justice, vengeance, mercy, and forgiveness. It centres on a man who is wrongfully imprisoned, escapes from jail, acquires a fortune, and sets about exacting revenge on those responsible for his imprisonment. His plans have devastating consequences for both the innocent and the guilty. The book is a story of romance, loyalty, betrayal, vengeance, selfishness, and justice.
The book is considered a literary classic today. According to Luc Sante, The Count of Monte Cristo has become a fixture of Western civilization’s literature, as inescapable and immediately identifiable as Mickey Mouse, Noah’s flood, and the story of Little Red Riding Hood.”
Le petit prince (The little prince) – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Goodreads rating: 4.3 [4.5]
Le petit prince is a classic tale of equal appeal to children and adults. On one level it is the story of an airman’s discovery, in the desert, of a small boy from another planet – the Little Prince of the title – and his stories of intergalactic travel, while on the other hand it is a thought-provoking allegory of the human condition. First published in 1943, the year before the author’s death in action, this translation contains Saint-Exupery’s delightful illustrations.
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Having crash-landed in the Sahara desert, a pilot comes across a young boy who introduces himself as the “Little Prince” and tells him the story of how he grew up on a tiny asteroid before travelling across the galaxies and coming to Earth. His encounters and discoveries, seen through childlike, innocent eyes, give rise to candid reflections on life and human nature.
First published in 1943 and featuring the author’s own watercolor illustrations, Le petit prince has since become a classic philosophical fable for young and old, as well as a global publishing phenomenon. Today, it has been translated into 300 languages and dialects, and it lands in millions of hands, little and big, each year.
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The writer reads this book many times, and each time he puts the book down, deep feelings still lingered in his mind. Feelings toward love, sacrifice, friendship and philosophy frame in a mystical air. Read from the book:
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
“You – you alone will have the stars as no-one else has them”… In one of those stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night… You – only you – will have stars that can laugh!”
The book deserves a rating of 4.5.
Les misérables (The wretched) – Victor Hugo
Goodreads rating: 4.2
This French historical novel first published in 1862, that is considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. In the English-speaking world, the novel is usually referred to by its original French title. Apart from the translation title, several alternatives have been used, including The miserables, The miserable ones, The poor ones, The wretched poor, The victims and the dispossessed. Beginning in 1815 and culminating in the 1832 June Rebellion in Paris, the novel follows the lives and interactions of several characters, particularly the struggles of ex-convict Jean Valjean and his experience of redemption.
Examining the nature of law and grace, the novel elaborates upon the history of France, the architecture and urban design of Paris, politics, moral philosophy, antimonarchism, justice, religion, and the types and nature of romantic and familial love. Les misérables has been popularized through numerous adaptations for the stage, television, and film, including a musical and a film adaptation of that musical.
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Goodreads rating: 3.9
This is a Canadian fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist is Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry who explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
The novel has sold more than ten million copies worldwide. It was rejected by at least five London publishing houses before being accepted by Knopf Canada, which published it in September 2001. The UK edition won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction the following year. It was also chosen for CBC Radio’s Canada Reads 2003, where it was championed by author Nancy Lee.
The French translation L’histoire de Pi was chosen in the French CBC version of the contest Le combat des livres, where it was championed by Louise Forestier. The novel won the 2003 Boeke Prize, a South African novel award. In 2004, it won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Best Adult Fiction for years 2001–2003.
Little house on the prairie – Laura Ingalls Wilder
Goodreads rating: 4.2
Little House on the Prairie is a series of American children’s novels written by Laura Ingalls Wilder based on her childhood in the northern Midwestern United States during the 1870s and 1880s. Eight were completed by Wilder, and published by Harper & Brothers from 1932 and 1943. The first draft of a ninth novel was published posthumously in 1971 and is commonly included in the Little House series.
Little house on the prairie is also the title of the third-published book in the series.
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From her images of the “great, dark trees of the Big Woods” to the endless grass of the prairies in the west, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s depictions of frontier life for America’s pioneers in her beloved Little House series of children’s books have won her countless fans.
Lolita (Lolita) – Vladimir Nabokov
Goodreads rating: 3.6 [3.9]
Why should everyone read a book about a pedophile’s obsessive and frankly gross relationship with a little girl? Because if you are a reader – a lover of words, puns, witticisms, metaphors, and allusions – Lolita is a literary masterpiece that can’t be passed over in a fit of queasy morality. Humbert Humbert, the novel’s unreliable narrator, knows that he’s a despicable pervert and yet the reader can’t help enjoying him as he surveys post-war America and little Lolita with the droll, cynical eye of a European expat adrift in a tawdry nation, and stuck irrevocably – and irredeemably – in the memory of an adolescent love affair. Please, ignore the critics: Lolita isn’t a morality tale and it isn’t a love story. It’s an unabashed look at a deviant mind written in some of the most deft and beautiful English ever published.
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Goodreads rating: 3.7
This is the debut novel of the French writer, published in 1856. The character lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.
When the novel was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. After Flaubert’s acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller in April 1857 when it was published in two volumes. A seminal work of literary realism, the novel is now considered Flaubert’s masterpiece, and one of the most influential literary works in history.
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Madame Bovary is a study of human stupidity and the “romantic malady,” the despair and unhappiness faced by those who are unwilling or unable to resolve the conflicts between their dreams and idealized aspirations and the real world; in modern terms, one might say it is a study of a neurosis. Furthermore, it examines middle-class conventions and the myth of progress, exposing weaknesses and hypocrisies, and it deals with the inability of the different characters to communicate with each other. In all of these aspects, this novel is as pertinent today as when it was written.
Memoirs of a geisha – Arthur Golden
Goodreads rating: 4.1
This novel, told in first person perspective, tells the story of a fictional geisha working in Kyoto, Japan, before and after World War II.
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A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel presents with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan’s most celebrated geisha.
Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men’s solicitude and the money that goes with it.
In Memoirs of a geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl’s virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction – at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful – and completely unforgettable.
Middlemarch, A study of provincial life – Geogre Eliot
Goodreads rating: 3.9
A novel first published in eight installments (volumes) during 1871–72, the novel is set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch during 1829–32, and it comprises several distinct (though intersecting) stories and a large cast of characters. Significant themes include the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism, self-interest, religion, hypocrisy, political reform, and education.
Although containing comical elements, Middlemarch is a work of realism that refers to many historical events: the 1832 Reform Act, the beginnings of the railways, the death of King George IV, and the succession of his brother, the Duke of Clarence (the future King William IV). In addition, the work incorporates contemporary medical science and examines the deeply reactionary mindset found within a settled community facing the prospect of unwelcome change.
The book is now widely regarded as one of the greatest novels written in English.
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Taking place in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but naive; Rosamond Vincy, beautiful and egoistic: Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar: Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally-flawed physician: the passionate artist Will Ladislaw: and Fred Vincey and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel’s rich comic vein.
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Goodreads rating: 3.9
Ishmael seeks a thrilling adventure, so he joins the crew of a whaling ship. The captain of his ship, Captain Ahab, is crazed with revenge for a white whale called Moby Dick, who ripped off his leg. Join Ishmael and his mates on a rousing journey at sea and discover how one man survives the battle between a determined hunter and high-spirited animal.
This easy to read adaptation of the classic novel is guaranteed to hook beginning readers not yet ready to tackle the original.
Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood) – Murakami Haruki
Goodreads rating: 4.0
Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.
A poignant story of one college student’s romantic coming-of-age, Norwegian Wood takes us to that distant place of a young man’s first, hopeless, and heroic love.
Notre Dame de Paris (Hunchback of Notre Dame) – Victor Hugo
Goodreads rating: 4.0
This extraordinary historical novel, set in Medieval Paris under the twin towers of its greatest structure and supreme symbol, the cathedral of Notre-Dame, is the haunting drama of Quasimodo, the hunchback; Esmeralda, the gypsy dancer; and Claude Frollo, the priest tortured by the specter of his own damnation. Shaped by a profound sense of tragic irony, it is a work that gives full play to Victor Hugo’s brilliant historical imagination and his remarkable powers of description.
O alquimista (The alchemist) – Paulo Coelho de Souza
Goodreads rating: 3.8
This novel by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho was first published in 1988. Originally written in Portuguese, it became an international bestseller translated into some 70 languages as of 2016. An allegorical novel, The alchemist follows a young Andalusian shepherd in his journey to the pyramids of Egypt, after having a recurring dream of finding treasure there.
Over the years there have been film and theatrical adaptations of the work and musical interpretations of it.
Of mice and men – John Steinbeck
Goodreads rating: 3.8
This novella, published in 1937, tells the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in California in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in the United States.
Steinbeck based the novella on his own experiences working alongside migrant farm workers as a teenager in the 1910s (before the arrival of the Okies he would vividly describe in The grapes of wrath). The title is taken from Robert Burns’ poem To a mouse, which reads: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley”. (The best laid schemes of mice and men / Often go awry.)
While it is a book taught in many schools, Of mice and men has been a frequent target of censors for vulgarity and what some consider offensive and racist language; consequently, it appears on the American Library Association’s list of the Most Challenged Books of 21st Century.
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest – Ken Kesey
Goodreads rating: 4.2
From the 1962 Jacket:
Like George Orwell and Philip Wylie, Ken Kesey is concerned with man’s battle to be himself in a world of increasing controls, the battle of joy and freedom against a society which fosters guilt and shame. His first novel, One flew over the cuckoo’s nest, tells the story of a struggle between a man and a woman for the spirits and hearts of a group of people who have been defeated by the world.
The setting for these defeated lives is a mental institution. The teller of the story, a half-Indian and a long-time inmate, has made the most complete retreat from life of all of them; he will not talk, and he has fooled the staff into thinking he is deaf and dumb. But through his self-imposed protective fog he is an acute observer. His vision of the life around him seems to have a truth which is beyond the definitions of sanity or insanity. To him the world is run by an all-powerful “Combine.” The hear of the war, the “Big Nurse,” is the chief instrument of evil. She wields her insidious power over the men to destroy their wills and freeze them into mindless obedience.
Into this gray world comes McMurphy, a brawling, gambling man, full of spirit and a glorious lust for life. He is horrified by the docility with which the other men accept the rule of the Big Nurse and decides to fight her on her own terms. The battle begins, for him, as a lark – a way of winning the bets he has made with the men. And then, as he becomes more aware of the terrible dangers in it, and more committed to the others who have come to count on him for their own survival, his decision to go on is a heroic act of sacrifice and compassion.
Papillon (Papillon) – Henry Charrière
Goodreads rating: 4.2
This is an autobiographical novel written by Henri Charrière, first published in France in 1969. Papillon is Charrière’s nickname, deriving from a butterfly tattoo inscribed on his chest. The novel details Papillon’s incarceration and subsequent escape from the French penal colony of French Guiana, and covers a 14-year period between 1931 and 1945.
The book was an immediate sensation and instant bestseller, achieving widespread fame and critical acclaim, and is considered a modern-day classic. Upon publication it spent 21 weeks as number 1 bestseller in France, with more than 1.5 million copies sold in France alone. 239 editions of the book have since been published worldwide, in 21 different languages.
Although Charrière always maintained, until his death in 1973, that events in the book were truthful and accurate (allowing for minor lapses in memory), since the book’s publication there have been questions raised about its accuracy. However, there are a number of facts which are not in question, which do validate Charrière’s novel.
Papillon is perhaps best regarded as a narrative novel, depicting the adventures of Charrière and several fellow inmates.
Perfect spy – Larry Berman
Goodreads rating: 4.1
During the Vietnam War, Time reporter Pham Xuan An befriended everyone who was anyone in Saigon, including American journalists such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, the CIA’s William Colby, and the legendary Colonel Edward Lansdale – not to mention the most influential members of the South Vietnamese government and army. None of them ever guessed that he was also providing strategic intelligence to Ha Noi, smuggling invisible ink messages into the jungle inside egg rolls. His early reports were so accurate that General Giap joked, “We are now in the U.S. war room.”
In the book, Larry Berman, who An considered his official American biographer, chronicles the extraordinary life of one of the twentieth century’s most fascinating spies.
Peter the Great: His life and world – by Robert K. Massie
Goodreads rating: 4.2 [4.5]
Against the monumental canvas of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and Russia, unfolds the magnificent story of Peter the Great, crowned at the age of 10. A barbarous, volatile feudal tsar with a taste for torture; a progressive and enlightened reformer of government and science; a statesman of vision and colossal significance: Peter the Great embodied the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Russia while being at the very forefront of her development.
Robert K. Massie delves deep into the life of this captivating historical figure, chronicling the pivotal events that shaped a boy into a legend – including his ‘incognito’ travels in Europe, his unquenchable curiosity about Western ways, his obsession with the sea and establishment of the stupendous Russian navy, his creation of an unbeatable army, and his relationships with those he loved most: Catherine, his loving mistress, wife, and successor; and Menshikov, the charming, unscrupulous prince who rose to power through Peter’s friendship. Impetuous and stubborn, generous and cruel, a man of enormous energy and complexity, Peter the Great is brought fully to life.
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This historical book is written like an adventure novel, so it is not boring but in fact to the common readership it is easy to read. At the beginning of many chapters, the author presents the geographical or historial backgound, like the scene of Moscow and the important buildings on Kremlin Quarter, the old traditions in the wedding ceremony, the strelzsy (an equivalent to the musketeers in France), the warfare, the socio-economic background of Holland, England and Poland, the torture methods, the building of St. Peterburg, etc. Therefor, the book is not about Peter only; it is also about oldd Russia in a big picture, referring to a lot of sources in English and Russian. For this reason, this fascinating book – illustrate by maps and pictures – deserves a rating of 4.5.
Pride and prejudice – Jane Austen
Goodreads rating: 4.3
This is one of the world’s most popular novels. Pride and Prejudice – Austen’s own darling child – tells the story of fiercely independent Elizabeth Bennett, one of five sisters who must marry rich, as she confounds the arrogant, wealthy Mr. Darcy. What ensues is one of the most delightful and engrossingly readable courtships known to literature, written by a precocious Austen when she was just twenty-one years old.
Humorous and profound, and filled with highly entertaining dialogue, this witty comedy of manners dips and turns through drawing-rooms and plots to reach an immensely satisfying finale. In the words of Eudora Welty, Pride and prejudice is as ‘irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be.’
Quo vadis (Quo vadis) – Henryk Sienkiewicz
A Narrative of the Time of Nero, commonly known as Quo vadis, is a historical novel written in Polish. “Quo vadis, Domine?” is Latin for “Where are you going, Lord?” and appears in Chapter 69 of the novel in a retelling of a story from the apocryphal Acts of Peter, in which Peter flees Rome but on his way meets Jesus and asks him why he is going to Rome. Jesus says, “If thou desertest my people, I am going to Rome to be crucified a second time”, which shames Peter into going back to Rome to accept martyrdom.
The novel tells of a love that develops between a young Christian woman, Lycia (Ligia in Polish) and Marcus Vinicius, a Roman patrician. It takes place in the city of Rome under the rule of emperor Nero, c. AD 64.
Sienkiewicz studied the Roman Empire extensively before writing the novel, with the aim of getting historical details correct. Consequently, several historical figures appear in the book. As a whole, the novel carries a pro-Christian message.
Published in installments in three Polish dailies in 1895, it came out in book form in 1896 and has been translated into more than 50 languages. This novel contributed to Sienkiewicz’s Nobel Prize for literature in 1905.
Richard Halliburton’s complete book of marvels – Richard Halliburton
Goodreads rating: 4.6
Have you ever wanted to visit the ancient cities of the Aztecs and the Incas? Or see the harbor of Rio de Janeiro? How about treasure hunting — would you like to search for King Solomon’s legendary treasure? You would? Well, then! Come along with Richard Halliburton’s party, and you will see and touch the marvels of the world! You’ll climb Half Dome Mountain in Yosemite National Park, U.S.A., and Popocatepetl in Mexico and Fujiyama in Japan. You’ll swim in the Dead Sea and in the fire-filled waters of the Blue Grotto. You’ll visit New York City and the tombs of the Pharaohs, Moscow and ancient Pompeii, the Rock of Gibraltar and Timbuctoo (yes, this is too a real city named Timbuctoo!) The complete book of marvels will take you to all these places and many more.
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The exciting travels in the New World and Old of America’s foremost adventurer-Fully illustrated with maps and photographs, 2 in 1 book.
Sans famille (Nobody’s boy) – Hector Malot
Goodreads rating: 4.3
A compelling story in which orphaned Remi gets hired out to a traveling street entertainer when his foster parents fall on hard times. Going from village to village with its act, ‘nobody’s boy’ has numerous adventures until his boss also falls on hard times and perishes, homeless and destitute. Remi’s life includes a number of surprising twists and turns…
Read: Nobody’s boy (Sans famille) by Hector Malot, Florence Crewe-Jones (Translator)
Sapiens: A brief history of humankind – Yuval Noah Harari
Goodreads rating: 4.3
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens.
How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In this book, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical – and sometimes devastating – breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?
Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, the book challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power … and our future.
Sān guó yǎn yì (Romance of the three kingdoms) – Luo Guanzhong
Goodreads rating: 4.4
It is set in the turbulent years towards the end of the Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history, starting in 169 AD and ending with the reunification of the land in 280.
The story – part historical, part legend, and part mythical – romanticises and dramatises the lives of feudal lords and their retainers, who tried to replace the dwindling Han dynasty or restore it. While the novel follows hundreds of characters, the focus is mainly on the three power blocs that emerged from the remnants of the Han dynasty, and would eventually form the three states of Cao Wei, Shu Han, and Eastern Wu. The novel deals with the plots, personal and military battles, intrigues, and struggles of these states to achieve dominance for almost 100 years.
Romance of the three kingdoms is acclaimed as one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature; it has a total of 800,000 words and nearly a thousand dramatic characters (mostly historical) in 120 chapters. The novel is among the most beloved works of literature in East Asia, and its literary influence in the region has been compared to that of the works of Shakespeare on English literature. It is arguably the most widely read historical novel in late imperial and modern China.
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In fact, there were three empires as called by their leaders who proclaimed themselves to be emperors.
Sense and sensibility – Jane Austen
Goodreads rating: 4.1
Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor’s warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love—and its threatened loss—the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.
The novel has been in continuous publication through to the 21st century as popular and critical appreciation of all the novels by Jane Austen slowly grew.
Shiji (Records of the grand historian) – Sima Qian
Goodreads rating: 4.4 [4.6]
A monumental history of ancient China and the world finished around 94 BC by the Han dynasty official Sima Qian after having been started by his father, Sima Tan, Grand Astrologer to the imperial court. The work covers the world as it was then known to the Chinese and a 2500-year period from the age of the legendary Yellow Emperor to the reign of Emperor Wu of Han in the author’s own time.
The Records has been called a “foundational text in Chinese civilization”. After Confucius and the First Emperor of Qin, “Sima Qian was one of the creators of Imperial China, not least because by providing definitive biographies, he virtually created the two earlier figures.” The Records set the model for the 24 subsequent dynastic histories of China. In contrast to Western historical works, The Records do not treat history as “a continuous, sweeping narrative”, but rather break it up into smaller, overlapping units dealing with famous leaders, individuals, and major topics of significance.
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The work is so voluminous and accurate, after the author checked many documents and went to the sites mentioned in the stories to talk to the local people and to look at the scenes, so that he could feel the essence buried deep below. The book is not only about history in a systematic method (well developed for this time); it is also literature in extensive essays, a comprehensive research work that provides a big socio-economic view. The writer had to work under various constraint in slow transportation, inadequate indexing method…, and pressure from the royal family! For example, he mentioned that a prime minister mainly worked in the imperial palace in order to convey the idea that the queen had an affair with him. Many readers understand the hint but many others do not, such that one translator in the modern time has to provide a footnote to explain this hint. The book deserves a rating of 4.6 – the highest among the books introduced here, the same as The rise and fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer.
Shōgun – James Clavell
Goodreads rating: 4.4 [4.5]
A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life, two ways of love. All brought together in an extraordinary saga of a time and a place aflame with conflict, passion, ambition, lust, and the struggle for power…
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This 1975 novel is a major best-seller, by 1990 the book had sold 15 million copies worldwide. Beginning in feudal Japan some months before the critical Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Shōgun gives an account of the rise of the daimyō “Toranaga” (based upon the actual Tokugawa Ieyasu). Toranaga’s rise to the shogunate is seen through the eyes of the English sailor John Blackthorne, called Anjin (“Pilot”) by the Japanese, whose fictional heroics are loosely based on the historical exploits of William Adams. Many of the characters in the novel are based on their real-life counterparts.
The author is considered not merely writer, but also a sociologist and a historian elated to Japan. Therefore, his book deserves a rating of 4.5.
Sofies verden (Sophie’s world) – Jostein Gaarder
Goodreads rating: 3.9
One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: “Who are you?” and “Where does the world come from?” From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Śmierć miasta. Pamiętniki Władysława Szpilmana 1939–1945 (The pianist) – Władysław Szpilman
Goodreads rating: 4.2
The extraordinary story of one man’s survival in Warsaw, 1939–45.
The last live broadcast on Polish Radio, on September 23, 1939, was Chopin’s Nocturne in C# Minor, played by a young pianist named Wladyslaw Szpilman (1911-2000), until his playing was interrupted by German shelling. It was the same piece and the same pianist, when broadcasting resumed six years later. The pianist is Szpilman’s account of the years inbetween, of the death and cruelty inflicted on the Jews of Warsaw and on Warsaw itself, related with a dispassionate restraint borne of shock. Szpilman has not looked at his description since he wrote it in 1946; it is too personally painful. The rest of us have no such excuse.
Szpilman’s family were deported to Treblinka, where they were exterminated; he survived only because a music-loving policeman recognised him. This was only the first in a series of fatefully lucky escapes that littered his life as he hid among the rubble and corpses of the Warsaw Ghetto, growing thinner and hungrier, yet condemned to live. Ironically it was a German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, who saved Szpilman’s life by bringing food and an eiderdown to the derelict ruin where he discovered him.
Szpilman’s account was originally published in Poland in 1946, edited by Jerzy Waldorff, a Polish music critic and author’s friend. The book was almost immediately withdrawn by Stalin’s Polish minions as it unashamedly described collaborations by Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews with the Nazis. In 1997 it was published in Germany after Szpilman’s son found it on his father’s bookcase. This admirably robust translation by Anthea Bell is the first in the English language, with the sub-title The extraordinary story of one man’s survival in Warsaw, 1939–45. There were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland before the Nazi occupation; after it there were 240,000. Wladyslaw Szpilman’s extraordinary account of his own miraculous survival offers a voice across the years for the faceless millions who lost their lives.
The adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Goodreads rating: 3.8
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” (Ernest Hemingway)
Of all the contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, none has a better claim than The adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Intended at first as a simple story of a boy’s adventures in the Mississippi Valley—a sequel to Tom Sawyer—the book grew and matured under Twain’s hand into a work of immeasurable richness and complexity. More than a century after its publication, the critical debate over the symbolic significance of Huck’s and Jim’s voyage is still fresh, and it remains a major work that can be enjoyed at many levels: as an incomparable adventure story and as a classic of American humor.
The adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
Goodreads rating: 3.9
Tom Sawyer is sure to find trouble wherever the river leads him…
On the banks of the Mississippi River, Tom Sawyer and his friends seek out adventure at every turn. Then one fateful night in the graveyard they witness a murder. The boys make a blood oath never to reveal the secret, and they run away to be pirates in search of hidden treasure. But when Tom gets trapped in a cave with scary Injun Joe, can he escape unharmed?
The art of happiness – Dalai Lama & Howard C. Cutler
Goodreads rating: 3.9
Nearly every time you see him, he’s laughing, or at least smiling. And he makes everyone else around him feel like smiling. He’s the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, a Nobel Prize winner, and an increasingly popular speaker and statesman. What’s more, he’ll tell you that happiness is the purpose of life, and that “the very motion of our life is towards happiness.”
How to get there has always been the question. He’s tried to answer it before, but he’s never had the help of a psychiatrist to get the message across in a context we can easily understand. Through conversations, stories, and meditations, the Dalai Lama shows us how to defeat day-to-day anxiety, insecurity, anger, and discouragement.
Together with Dr. Cutler, he explores many facets of everyday life, including relationships, loss, and the pursuit of wealth, to illustrate how to ride through life’s obstacles on a deep and abiding source of inner peace.
The book thief – Markus Zusak
Goodreads rating: 4.4
Winner of the 2007 BookBrowse Ruby Award.
It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery…
Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist – books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau. This is an unforgettable story about the ability of books to feed the soul.
The call of the wild – Jack London
Goodreads rating: 4.1
A short adventure novel by Jack London published in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The central character of the novel is a dog named Buck. The story opens at a ranch in Santa Clara Valley, California, when Buck is stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively feral in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primordial instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild.
London spent almost a year in the Yukon, and his observations form much of the material for the book. The story was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1903 and was published a month later in book form. The book’s great popularity and success made a reputation for London. As early as 1935, the story was adapted to film, and it has since seen several more cinematic adaptations.
The Cambridge history of ancient China: From the origins of civilization to 221 BC – Michael Loewe (Editor), Edward L. Shaughnessy
Goodreads rating: 3.9
This book provides a survey of the cultural, intellectual, political, and institutional developments of the pre-imperial period. The four subperiods of Shang, Western Zhou, Spring and Autumn and Warring States, are described on the basis of literary and material sources and the evidence of recently found manuscripts. Chapters on the prehistoric background, the growth of language, and relations with the peoples of Central Asia provide the major context of China’s achievements in the 1,500 years under review. The teachings of China’s early masters are set alongside what is known of the methods of astonomers, physicians and diviners. A final chapter leads the reader forward to imperial times, as described in the volumes of The Cambridge History of China.
The catcher in the rye – J.D. Salinger
Goodreads rating: 3.8
The hero-narrator of The catcher in the rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. There are many voices in this novel: children’s voices, adult voices, underground voices – but Holden’s voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.
J.D. Salinger’s classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time’s 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In the 1950’s and 60’s it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
Goodreads rating: 3.8
A fascinating and absorbing thriller — perfect for history buffs, conspiracy nuts, puzzle lovers or anyone who appreciates a great, riveting story.
While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci — clues visible for all to see — yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.
Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion — an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others.
In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who seems to anticipate their every move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory’s ancient secret — and an explosive historical truth — will be lost forever.
The Da Vinci Code heralds the arrival of a new breed of lightning-paced, intelligent thriller utterly unpredictable right up to its stunning conclusion.
The essays of Warren Buffett – Warren Buffett & Lawrence A. Cunningham
Goodreads rating: 4.4
This is a must read for anybody interested in investment, management or business in general. It not only provides, in my opinion, the most sound investment strategies and advice, but also provides guidelines on how to run businesses with moral integrity and focus on providing value. It heavily criticizes various self-serving practices of “modern” CEOs, while at the same time not saying CEOs should not be well compensated.
The fault in our stars – John Green
Goodreads rating: 4.3
Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.
Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The fault in our stars is award-winning author John Green’s most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Goodreads rating: 4.4
The Godfather – the epic tale of crime and betrayal that became a global phenomenon.
Almost fifty years ago, a classic was born. A searing portrayal of the Mafia underworld, The Godfather introduced readers to the first family of American crime fiction, the Corleones, and their powerful legacy of tradition, blood, and honor. The seduction of power, the pitfalls of greed, and the allegiance to family—these are the themes that have resonated with millions of readers around the world and made The Godfather the definitive novel of the violent subculture that, steeped in intrigue and controversy, remains indelibly etched in our collective consciousness.
The grapes of wrath – John Steinbeck
Goodreads rating: 3.9
This is an American realist novel published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.
Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California. Along with thousands of other “Okies”, they seek jobs, land, dignity, and a future.
The grapes of wrath is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy.
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A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes the very nature of equality and justice in America.
For emotional urgency, evocative power, sustained impact, prophetic reach, and continued controversy, The grapes of wrath is perhaps the most American of American classics.
The great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Goodreads rating: 3.9
On its first publication in 1925, The great Gatsby was largely dismissed as a light satire on Jazz Age follies. Today, it is acknowledged as a masterpiece: a love story, an exploration of the American dream and arguably the greatest American novel of the 20th century. Narrator Nick Carraway tells the story of his neighbour Jay Gatsby, whose parties at his Long Island mansion are as lavish as his past is mysterious. Yet Gatsby cares only for one of his guests: his lost love Daisy Buchanan, now married and living across the bay. In Fitzgerald’s hands, this deceptively simple story becomes a near-perfect work of art, told in hauntingly beautiful prose.
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The great Gatsby follows a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West and East Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession for the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, The great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.
The Green Mile – Stephen King
Goodreads rating: 4.4
When it first appeared, one volume per month, Stephen King’s The Green Mile was an unprecedented publishing triumph: all six volumes ended up on The New York Times bestseller lists—simultaneously—and delighted millions of fans the world over.
Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk the Green Mile, keeping a date with “Old Sparky,” Cold Mountain’s electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working the Mile. But he’s never seen anyone like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence and shocking in its depravity. In this place of ultimate retribution, Edgecombe is about to discover the terrible, wondrous truth about Coffey, a truth that will challenge his most cherished beliefes… and yours.
The handmaid’s tale – Margaret Atwood
Goodreads rating: 4.1
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now…
The hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Goodreads rating: 4.3
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
Written for J.R.R. Tolkien’s own children, The hobbit met with instant critical acclaim when it was first published in 1937. Now recognized as a timeless classic, this introduction to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf, Gollum, and the spectacular world of Middle-earth recounts of the adventures of a reluctant hero, a powerful and dangerous ring, and the cruel dragon Smaug the Magnificent. Unforgettable!
The old man and the sea – Ernest Hemingway
Goodreads rating: 3.7 [4.0]
This is a short novel written in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba.
In 1953, The old man and the sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.
The picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
Goodreads rating: 4.1
This is a philosophical novel first published complete in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Fearing the story was indecent, the magazine’s editor without Wilde’s knowledge deleted roughly five hundred words before publication. Despite that censorship, The picture of Dorian Gray offended the moral sensibilities of British book reviewers, some of whom said that Oscar Wilde merited prosecution for violating the laws guarding the public morality. In response, Wilde aggressively defended his novel and art in correspondence with the British press, although he personally made excisions of some of the most controversial material when revising and lengthening the story for book publication the following year.
The longer and revised version of The picture of Dorian Gray published in book form in 1891 featured an aphoristic preface—a defence of the artist’s rights and of art for art’s sake—based in part on his press defences of the novel the previous year. The content, style, and presentation of the preface made it famous in its own right, as a literary and artistic manifesto. In April 1891, the publishing firm of Ward, Lock and Company, who had distributed the shorter, more inflammatory, magazine version in England the previous year, published the revised version of The picture of Dorian Gray.
In 2011, the Belknap Press published The picture of Dorian Gray: An annotated, uncensored edition, and it is the only novel written by Wilde.
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Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author’s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray’s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, “a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.” Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde’s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment.
The rise and fall of the Third Reich – William L. Shirer
Goodreads rating: 4.3 [4.5]
Hitler boasted that The Third Reich would last a thousand years. It lasted only 12. But those 12 years contained some of the most catastrophic events Western civilization has ever known.
No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich. When the bitter war was over, and before the Nazis could destroy their files, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced an almost hour-by-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolph Hitler. This record included the testimony of Nazi leaders and of concentration camp inmates, the diaries of officials, transcripts of secret conferences, army orders, private letters—all the vast paperwork behind Hitler’s drive to conquer the world.
The famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting through this massive documentation. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind.
This worldwide bestseller has been acclaimed as the definitive book on Nazi Germany; it is a classic work.
The accounts of how the United States got involved and how Hitler used Mussolini and Japan are astonishing, and the coverage of the war – from Germany’s early successes to her eventual defeat – is fascinating.
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This definitive chronicle of Hitler’s rise to power is hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most important works of history of our time”.
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The author spent considerable effort in going though piles and piles of documents, and combines his observation of real facts, in order to compile this voluminous book. Practically every fact has a reference source in English or German. Therefore, this book deserves a rating of 4.5.
The scarlet letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Goodreads rating: 3.4 [3.7]
Hester Prynne, a young, beautiful, and dignified woman, conceived a child out of wedlock, receives the public punishment of having to always wear a scarlet “A” on her clothing.
She refuses to reveal the father of her child, which could lighten her sentence. Her husband, the aptly-named Roger Chillingworth, who Hester thought had died in a shipwreck but was actually being held captive by Native Americans, arrives at the exact moment of her deepest public shaming and vows to get revenge. Her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, remains safely unidentified, but is wracked with guilt.
Though originally published in 1850, the story is set in seventeenth-century Massachusetts among Hawthorne’s Puritan ancestors. In The scarlet letter , he created a story that highlighted both their weaknesses and their strengths. His knowledge of their beliefs and his admiration for their way of life was balanced by his concerns about their rigid and oppressive rules.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s masterpiece, an iconic fable of guilt and redemption set in Puritan Massachusetts, has long been considered one of the greatest American novels.
The story of Hester Prynne – found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community, and abandoned, in different ways, by both her partner in sin and her vengeance-seeking husband – possesses a reality heightened by Hawthorne’s sympathy and his unmixed devotion to his supposedly fallen but fundamentally innocent heroine. The scarlet letter rightly deserves its stature as the first great novel written by an American, a work of moral force and narrative power that announced a literature equal to any in the world.
The snow goose – Paul Gallico
Goodreads rating: 4.1 [4.3]
Classic storytelling from a bestselling author. Gallico’s most famous story, The snow goose , is set in the wild, desolate Essex marshes and is an intense and moving tale about the relationship between a hunchback and a young girl.
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There can be few more wintry tales than Paul Gallico’s wartime classic The snow goose , a novella no thicker than a love letter, in which every sentence seems to shiver with the salt-laden chill of the desolate landscape in which it is set. As if inverting the Persephone myth, the world of the novella only comes to life during the winter months, when both the young girl Fritha and the goose return each year to Philip Rhayader’s lonesome sanctuary on the Essex marshes. From the opening paragraphs in which the reader is swept into this deliquescent wilderness, it is clear that the poster-paint box of summer will have no place in this story…
This love story between an uneducated village girl who comes to visit the hunchback outcast artist in his lighthouse bearing a wounded snow goose for him to heal spans nearly seven years – or seven winters – of their cautiously evolving friendship, man and girl speak not much more than a dozen lines to each other. The silence and growing sympathy of the first two-thirds of the novella, broken only by the cries of the wild birds, is in stark contrast to the noisy clamor of the conclusion, related entirely in dialogue between soldiers in the pub and officers in their club, who witnessed the man in his little boat and his heroic attempts to rescue the stranded men from the Dunkirk beaches.
Written during some of the darkest days of the last century, this sweet tale still makes heart-warming reading when the days are shortest.
The sound and the fury – William Faulkner
Goodreads rating: 3.9
This is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
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Voted one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, in 1998 it was ranked by the Modern Library the sixth greatest English-language novel of the 20th century.
The sun also rises – Ernest Hemingway
Goodreads rating: 3.8
The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The sun also rises is one of Ernest Hemingway’s masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway’s most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.
First published in 1926, The sun also rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
The thorn birds – Colleen McCullough
Goodreads rating: 4.2
Powered by the dreams and struggles of three generations, The thorn birds is the epic saga of a family rooted in the Australian sheep country. At the story’s heart is the love of Meggie Cleary, who can never possess the man she desperately adores, and Ralph de Bricassart, who rises from parish priest to the inner circles of the Vatican… but whose passion for Meggie will follow him all the days of his life.
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The thorn birds best-selling novel by the Australian author Colleen McCullough. Set primarily on Drogheda—a fictional sheep station in the Australian Outback named after Drogheda, Ireland—the story focuses on the Cleary family and spans the years 1915 to 1969.
The novel is the best selling book in Australian history, and has sold over 33 million copies worldwide.
The world is flat – Thomas Loren Friedman
The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century is an international best-selling book by that analyzes globalization, primarily in the early 21st century. The title is a metaphor for viewing the world as a level playing field in terms of commerce, wherein all competitors have an equal opportunity. As the first edition cover illustration indicates, the title also alludes to the perceptual shift required for countries, companies, and individuals to remain competitive in a global market in which historical and geographic divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Friedman himself is a strong advocate of those changes, calling himself a “free-trader” and a “compassionate flatist”, and he criticizes societies that resist the changes. He emphasizes the inevitability of a rapid pace of change and the extent to which the emerging abilities of individuals and developing countries are creating many pressures on businesses and individuals in the United States; he has special advice for Americans and for the developing world (but says almost nothing about Europe).
Friedman’s is a popular work based on much personal research, travel, conversation, and reflection. In his characteristic style, through personal anecdotes and opinions, he combines in The world is flat a conceptual analysis accessible to a broad public.
The world is flat won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2005.
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In this brilliant new book, the award-winning The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt. The world is flat is the timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists.
An expanded and revised version was published in hardcover in April 2006.
To kill a mockingbird – Harper Lee
Goodreads rating: 4.3
While To kill a mockingbird is a favorite book of pretty much everyone who has read it, it’s important to remember that it continues to be subversive and challenging to the status quo. The protagonist is a young girl named Scout and except for her father, all the main characters in the book are marginalized by the power structure of their town — a structure that still exists nearly everywhere — where wealthy white men control the lives of everyone else, and even the members of that group who want to use their status for something honorable, like Scout’s father Atticus, cannot win against the flattening wave of that power. Until something about that structure really changes, this book will remain required reading for every person in America.
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Goodreads rating: 3.8
Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë’s only novel. It was published in 1847 under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell”; Brontë died the following year, aged 30. After Emily’s death, Charlotte edited the manuscript of Wuthering Heights, and arranged for the edited version to be published as a posthumous second edition in 1850.
Although Wuthering Heights is now widely regarded as a classic of English literature, contemporary reviews for the novel were deeply polarised; it was considered controversial because its depiction of mental and physical cruelty was unusually stark, and it challenged strict Victorian ideals of the day regarding religious hypocrisy, morality, social classes and gender inequality.
Yukiguni (Snow country) – Kawabata Yasunari
Goodreads rating: 3.7
Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow country is widely considered to be the writer’s masterpiece: a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.
At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages — a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.
Zeit zu leben und zeit zu sterben (A time to love and a time to die) – Erich Maria Remarque
Goodreads rating: 4.4
After two years at the Russian front, Ernst Graeber finally receives three weeks’ leave. But since leaves have been canceled before, he decides not to write his parents, fearing he would just raise their hopes.
Then, when Graeber arrives home, he finds his house bombed to ruin and his parents nowhere in sight. Nobody knows if they are dead or alive. As his leave draws to a close, Graeber reaches out to Elisabeth, a childhood friend. Like him, she is imprisoned in a world she did not create. But in a time of war, love seems a world away. And sometimes, temporary comfort can lead to something unexpected and redeeming.
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance – Robert Pirsig
Goodreads rating: 3.7
Acclaimed as one of the most exciting books in the history of American letters, this modern epic became an instant bestseller upon publication in 1974, transforming a generation and continuing to inspire millions. A narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, the book becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions of how to live. Resonant with the confusions of existence, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance is a touching and transcendent book of life.
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“The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called ‘yourself.” – From Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance (ZMM)
Few books transform a generation and then establish themselves as touchstones for the generations that follow. ZMM is one such book. Years in the writing; rejected by 121 publishers; this modern epic of a man’s search for meaning became an instant bestseller on publication in 1974, acclaimed as one of the most exciting books in the history of American letters. It continues to inspire millions. An autobiography of the mind and body, ZMM is a deceptively simple narration about a motorcycle trip taken by a father and his eleven-year-old son; a summer junket that confronts mortal truths on the journey of life.
Анна Каренина (Anna Karenina) – Leo Tolstoy
Goodreads rating: 4.0
Acclaimed by many as the world’s greatest novel, Anna Karenin provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature – with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author’s own views and convictions.
Throughout, Tolstoy points no moral, merely inviting us not to judge but to watch.
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You may read: Anna Karenina (Wordsworth Classics) Paperback – August 1, 1997, by Leo Tolstoy (Author), Louise Maude (Translator), Aylmer Maude (Translator), E.B. Greenwood (Introduction)
Братья Карамазовы (The Brothers Karamazov) – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Goodreads rating: 4.3
The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel set in 19th-century Russia, that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, judgment, and reason, set against a modernizing Russia, with a plot which revolves around the subject of patricide. Dostoevsky composed much of the novel in Staraya Russa, which inspired the main setting. Since its publication, it has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.
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You may read: The Brothers Karamazov Paperback – June 14, 2002, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Author), Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)
До́ктор Жива́го (Doctor Zhivago) – Boris Pasternak
Goodreads rating: 4.0
This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak’s complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. The book quickly became an international best-seller.
Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak’s alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. The poems he writes constitute some of the most beautiful writing in the novel.
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The plot of Doctor Zhivago is long and intricate. It can be difficult to follow for two main reasons: first, Pasternak employs many characters, who interact with each other throughout the book in unpredictable ways, and second, he frequently introduces a character by one of his/her three names, then subsequently refers to that character by another of the three names or a nickname, without expressly stating that he is referring to the same character.
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You may read: Doctor Zhivago (Vintage International) Paperback – October 4, 2011, by Boris Pasternak (Author), Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)
Тихий Дон (And quiet flows the Don) – Mikhail Sholokhov
Goodreads rating: 4.0
And quiet flows the Don or Quietly flows the Don is an epic novel in four volumes . The first three volumes were written from 1925 to 1932 and published in the Soviet magazine Oktyabr in 1928–1932, and the fourth volume was finished in 1940. The English translation of the first three volumes appeared under this title in 1934.
The novel is considered one of the most significant works of world and Russian literature in the 20th century. It depicts the lives and struggles of Don Cossacks during the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and Russian Civil War. In 1965, Sholokhov was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for this novel. The authorship of the novel is contested by some literary critics and historians, who believe that it mostly was not written by Sholokhov.
You may read: And quiet flows the Don, Mikhail Sholokhov (Author), Stephen Garry (Translator), Penguin Books.
Как закалялась сталь! (How the steel was tempered!) – Nikolai Ostrovsky
Goodreads rating: 3.8
This is a socialist realist novel in which Pavel (“Pavka”) Korchagin is the central character. He is fighting on the Bolsheviks’ side in the Civil War (1918–1921). He is a quintessential positive hero of socialist realism. Tonia Toumanova is Pavel’s teenage love. Tonia and Pavel became good friends after their first encounter, which later develops into an intimate relationship. Though born of a wealthy and influential family, Tonia treated everyone equally unlike her friends, who only interact with other children of well-reputed families. However, this changed as she grew up, as she became more aware of her appearance and social status of others.
The first part of How the steel was tempered was published serially in 1932 in the magazine Young Guard. The second part of the novel appeared in the same magazine from January to May, 1934. The novel was published in 1936 in book form in a heavily edited version that conformed to the rules of socialist realism. In the serial version Ostrovsky had described the tense atmosphere of Pavel’s home, his suffering when he became an invalid, the deterioration of his relationship with his wife, and their separation. All of this disappeared in the 1936 publication and in later editions of the novel.
Преступлéние и наказáние (Crime and pushishment) – Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky
Goodreads rating: 4.2
The novel Crime and punishment was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. Later, it was published in a single volume. It is the second of Dostoevsky’s full-length novels following his return from 5 years of exile in Siberia. Crime and punishment is considered the first great novel of his “mature” period of writing.
Crime and punishment focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in Saint Petersburg who formulates a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her money. Before the killing, Raskolnikov believes that with the money he could liberate himself from poverty and go on to perform great deeds; but confusion, hesitation, and chance muddy his plan for a morally justifiable killing.
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You may read: Crime and punishment Paperback – August 22, 2001, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Author), Constance Garnett (Translator)
Оди́н день Ива́на Дени́совича Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha (One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich) – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Goodreads rating: 4.0
This is a novel first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir (New World). The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s and describes a single day in the life of an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.
The book’s publication was an extraordinary event in Soviet literary history since never before had an account of Stalinist repression been openly distributed. Novy Mir editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky wrote a short introduction for the issue entitled “Instead of a Foreword” to prepare the journal’s readers for what they were about to experience.
The main themes of One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich are totalitarian oppression and camp survival. Specifically discussed are the prison officials’ cruelty and spite towards their fellow man. Solzhenitsyn explains through Ivan Denisovich that everything is managed by the camp commandant to the point that time feels unnoticed; the prisoners always have work to do and never have any free time to discuss important issues.
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This book stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin’s forced work camps, One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn’s stature as “a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy”—Harrison Salisbury
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You may read: One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, H.T. Willetts (Translation), New York: Noonday/Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991), is the only translation that is based on the canonical Russian text and the only one authorized by Solzhenitsyn.
Война́ и мир (War and peace) – Leo Tolstoy
Goodreads rating: 4.1
This novel is regarded as a central work of world literature and one of Tolstoy’s finest literary achievements.
The novel chronicles the history of the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families.
Tolstoy said War and peace is “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle”. Large sections, especially the later chapters, are a philosophical discussion rather than narrative. Tolstoy also said that the best Russian literature does not conform to standards and hence hesitated to call War and peace a novel. Instead, he regarded Anna Karenina as his first true novel. The Encyclopædia Britannica states: “It can be argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s War and peace“.
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You may read: War and peace – Leo Tolstoy, Henry Gifford (editor), Aylmer Maude (translator), Louise Maude (translator)
Short stories
Short stories by Anton Chekhov, Ralph E. Matlaw (Editor)
Goodreads rating: 4.3
The thirty-four stories in this volume span Chekhov’s creative career. They present a wide spectrum of comic and serious themes and a variety of techniques. (His short novels, available in another Norton volume, Seven Short Novels by Chekhov, have been omitted.) Two of the stories have been translated for this edition by Professor Matlaw; the other translations, by Constance Garnett, Ivy Litvinov, and Marian Fell, have been revised in accordance with contemporary usage. Footnotes have been supplied wherever necessary to explain peculiarities of Russian life and the historical era in which Chekhov lived and wrote.
“Backgrounds” includes a rich selection of Chekhov’s letters, in new translations by Professor Matlaw, and Gorky’s celebrated essay on Chekhov, translated by Ivy Litvinov. The critical essays offer general views of Chekhov’s art and achievement and detailed analyses of particular stories. The critics are D. S. Mirsky, A. B. Derman (whose essay has been translated from the Russian especially for this edition), Renato Poggioli, Gleb Struve, Donald Rayfield, Karl Kramer, Virginia Llewellyn Smith, and Nils Ake Nilsson.
A Selected Bibliography directs readers to resources for further study.
- Chameleon (1884)
- Oysters (1884)
- A living chronology (1885)
- The huntsman (1885)
- Misery (1886)
- The requiem (1886)
- Anyuta (1886)
- Agatha (1886)
- Grisha (1886)
- A gentleman friend (1886)
- The chorus girl (1886)
- Dreams (1886)
- Vanka (1886)
- At home (1887)
- The siren’s song (1887)
- Sleepy (1888)
- The grasshopper (1892)
- In exile
- Rothschild’s fiddle (1894)
- The student (1894)
- The teacher of literature (1889-94)
- Whitebrow (1895)
- Anna on the neck (1895)
- The house with the mansard (1896)
- The pecheneg (1898)
- A journey by cart (1897)
- The man in a case (1898)
- Gooseberries (1898)
- About love (1898)
- A doctor’s visit (1902)
- The darling (1899)
- The lady with the dog (1899)
- The bishop (1902)
- The betrothed (1903).
The complete short stories of W. Somerset Maugham – W. Somerset Maugham
Goodreads rating: 4.5
Volume I (East and West) and Volume II (The World Over)
This is simply a magnificent collection of short stories. In the first volume – East and West – the stories are roughly between thirty to forty pages each. In the second volume – The world over – the length is more variable – ranging from a few pages to at most thirty. All the stories are quite different and each unique in their own way. They are an examination of the human condition; probing the basic human foibles that we all have; like greed, jealousy, envy, loathing, infidelity, lust – feelings that at one time or another affect and possess all human beings. Maugham scrutinizes the hurt feelings that are built around the love that human beings have for each other. Maugham weaves stories on these imperfect humans. The stories are narrative in scope and progress – one could say logically – to a sometimes sordid conclusion. This is what happens to people with imperfections. The stories reflect the human situation in which Maugham’s characters are swayed by the emotions that too often tempt and overwhelm them. Maugham’s narratives are well-rounded. Many of the endings are poignant.
The best short stories of William Somerset Maugham – W. Somerset Maugham
Goodreads rating: 4.5
17 stories:
The letter — The verger — The vessel of wrath — The hairless Mexican — Mr. Harrington’s washing — Red — Mr. Know-all — The alien corn — The book-bag — The round dozen — The voice of the turtle — The facts of life — Lord Mountdrago — The colonel’s lady — The treasure — Rain — P. & O.
One of the best short story writers in the English language.
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This is a great collection by master storyteller. Highly recommended for any who enjoy good short stories that can each be read in one or two short sittings.
The complete works of O. Henry – O. Henry & Harry Hansen (Foreword)
Goodreads rating: 4.3
Henry’s short stories are known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.
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While after the first dozen stories, you are pretty familiar with his formula and able to see many of the surprise endings coming, at the same time he is a master at flowery, yet humorous language and creating likable characters and idealized settings that you just go with the flow.
His amazing talent for phrasing, description and creating a setting catch hold of you and even though you have a good idea how it’ll end, you find yourself racing faster to see and feel a bit disappointed that it ended so soon.
His vagrants all possess an inner nobility, his cowboys are ( for the most part) rugged and kind, love generally wins out in the end and good triumphs over evil.
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One of the finest unsung authors of the 20th century, O. Henry’s brilliance lies in his ability to capture, with absolute precision, the idiosyncrasies of the average Joe (and Jane, of course) and portray them with such candor and humor that every character is endearing and sears into your memory. Humans are complex and who knows why they do whatever they do. O. Henry doesn’t attempt to unravel or psychoanalyze his characters but serves them up quite deliciously with his charming wit and excellent puns, warts and all, as they are. A story-teller par excellence! Be it romance, comedy or plain good old Irony- a genre grossly unexplored in today’s time! A man for all seasons, with stories that capture your emotions no matter how many times you read them.
Selected short stories by O. Henry (49 Stories) – O. Henry & Maple Press (Contributor)
Goodreads rating: 4.0
A prolific American short story writer, O. Henry was a master of surprise endings. Typical for his stories is a twist of plot which turns on an ironic or coincidental circumstance.
This selection brings together some of his 49 most renowned and entertaining short stories. Each one offer insights into human nature and the way it is affected by love, hate, wealth, poverty, gentility, disguise, and crime – themes that ran through the author’s own life… The most widely read author of his time, O. Henry died penniless but left behind a wealth of short stories that endure as classics of the genre.
Goodreads Ratings
As in any other rating systems, Goodreads Ratings are based on personal perception and, therefore, are for the reference purpose only, to give an idea of the book popularity, not necessarily the true reflection of quality.
The writer decides what books to introduce here before referring to their Goodreads Ratings. In other words, the selection of books is not influenced by their Goodreads Ratings.
The books could be evaluated based the Goodreads Ratings (maximum 5.0) as follows.
4.5 and above: masterpiece
4.0 to below 4.5: excellent
3.5 to below 4.0: very good
3.0 to below 3.5: good
With this evaluation method (with my own ratings in the square brackets, the following introduced books are masterpieces:
- Đường xưa mây trắng (Old path white clouds) by Thích Nhất Hạnh, Goodreads rating: 4.5
- How not to die by Michael Greger & Gene Stone, Goodreads rating: 4.5
- Le petit prince (The little prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Goodreads rating: 4.2 [4.5]
- Shiji (Records of the grand historian) by Sima Qian, Goodreads rating: 4.4 [4.6]
- Shōgun by James Clavell, Goodreads rating: 4.4 [4.5]
- Peter the Great: His life and world by Robert K. Massie, Goodreads rating: 4.2 [4.5]
- The rise and fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, Goodreads rating: 4.3 [4.6]
- The complete short stories of W. Somerset Maugham: 4.5
Notable excellent book (of Goodreads rating 4.4) are:
- Bare feet, iron will by James G. Zumwalt
- Cosmos by Carl Sagan
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s stone by J.K. Rowling
- Sān guó yǎn yì (Romance of the three kingdoms) by Luo Guanzhong
- The book thief by Markus Zusak
- The essays of Warren Buffett by Warren Buffett & Lawrence A. Cunningham
- The Godfather by Mario Puzo
- The Green Mile by Stephen King
- Zeit zu leben und zeit zu sterben (A time to love and a time to die) by Erich Maria Remarque
The lowest Goodreads Ratings are for:
- Biruma no tategoto (Harp of Burma) – Takeyama Michio: 3.6 [4.0]
- Lolita (Lolita) – Vladimir Nabokov: 3.6 [3.9]
- The old man and the sea – Ernest Hemingway, Goodreads rating: 3.7 [4.0]
- The scarlet letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne, Goodreads rating: 3.4 [3.7]
In the writer’s perception, the above-mentioned books are from very good to excellent.
In this selection, no book is below 3.5 in rating, meaning all of them are from good to masterpiece.
Diep Minh Tam
Một buổi chiều, hết giờ dạy học, thầy đồ tản bộ ra trước ao sen, cũng là lúc cô tiểu thư con quan đang đứng dưới ao hái hoa sen. Có lẽ lúc ấy mãi say sưa thế nào mà cô chủ đứng yên quá, cho nên mặt nước ao phản chiếu lấp ló hình ảnh thầm kín… Ngày ấy phụ nữ mặc váy rộng mà lại không mặc nội y để che lấy “vùng vịnh”, nên mới có hình ảnh lung linh trên bóng nước… Vừa lung linh vừa thấp thoáng, thế mới làm khổ thầy đồ!
Lên 6 tuổi, Ngân Giang được cha dạy cho chữ Hán, học “ké” chữ quốc ngữ của một thầy xóm hàng xóm và được người bác gái làm nghề thuốc yêu thích thơ Đường, dạy cho cách làm thơ phú… Nhờ vậy, mới lên 8 tuổi, bà có bài thơ đầu tiên tên “Vịnh Kiều” đăng trên báo Đông Pháp, với bút danh Nguyệt Quyên.
Ông được đánh giá là một nhà giáo, nhà thơ, chuyên gia nghiên cứu tiếng Việt và là một người nhiệt tình với văn hóa dân tộc Việt Nam. Ngoài thơ, Đông Hồ còn viết văn, ký, khảo cứu, văn học sử. Về văn, ông viết từ văn xuôi biền ngẫu đến văn xuôi hiện đại.
Nhà văn người Mỹ O. Henry được xem là một trong số ít cây bút viết truyện ngắn được yêu thích nhất trong mọi thời đại. O. Henry, tên thật là William Sydney Porter, sinh tại Greensboro, Bang New Carolina. Bà mẹ ông qua đời vì bệnh lao khi ông mới được 3 tuổi, và ông theo học tại trường tư do bà cô làm chủ cho đến năm lên 15. Đấy là quá trình giáo dục duy nhất mà ông tiếp nhận được. Ông bổ sung kiến thức của mình bằng cách đọc sách rất nhiều, và cũng bằng cách quan sát cùng lắng nghe những người quanh ông. Sau khi bỏ học, ông làm việc cho hiệu y dược của ông chú. Năm 1882, khi bắt đầu có triệu chứng bệnh lao lây từ bà mẹ, ông được gửi đến sống trong một trang trại chăn nuôi ở Bang Texas với hy vọng khí hậu nơi đồng nội giúp vượt qua cơn bệnh – tương tự như nhân vật chính trong truyện Hygeia at the Solito. Ít lâu sau, ông đã thử viết những truyện ngắn đầu tay và mấy mẩu truyện vui cười cho các nhật báo miền Tây-Nam. Kế đến, ông làm tại một cơ quan địa chính và lần lượt qua nhiều công việc khác nhau: vẽ kỹ thuật và kiến trúc, thư ký, đầu bếp nhà hàng, làm nhân viên cho công ty địa ốc, xưởng in, v.v… Hầu như từ mỗi ngành nghề, O. Henry đều có thể góp nhặt tư liệu cho các truyện ông viết.
NguyenBichThaiNguyen 