Tuesday, June 14, 2005

William Golding - Lord of the Flies


Born in 1911, Golding was the son of an English schoolmaster, a many-talented man who believed strongly in science and rational thought. Golding often described his father's overwhelming influence on his life. The author graduated from Oxford University in 1935 and spent four years (later described by Golding as having been "wasted") writing, acting,. and producing for a next small London theater. Golding himself became schoolmaster for a year, after marrying Ann Brookfield in 1939 and before entering the British Royal Navy in 1940.
Golding had switched his major from to English literature after two years in college a crucial change that marked the beginning of Golding's disillusion with the rationalism of his father. The single event in Golding's life that most affected his writing of Lord of the Flies, however, was probably his service in World war II. Raised in the sheltered environment of a private English School, Golding was unprepared for the violence unleashed by the war. Joining the Navy, he was injured in an accident involving detonators early in the war, but later was given command of a small rocket-launching craft. Golding was present at the sinking of the Bismarck—the crown ship of the German Navy—and also took part in the D-Day landings in France in June 1944. He later described his experience in the war as one in which “one had one’s nose rubbed m the human condition. After the war Golding returned to teaching English and philosophy at the same school where he had begun his teaching career. During the a nine years, from 1945 until 1954, he wrote three novels rejected for their derivative nature before finally getting the idea for Lord of the Flies after reading a bedtime boys adventure story to his small children. Golding wondered out loud to his wife whether it would be a good idea to write such a story but to let the characters "behave as they really would." His wife thought that would be a "first class idea." With that encouragement, Golding found that writing the story, the ideas for which had been germinating in his mind for some time, was simply a matter of getting it down on paper.
Lord of the Flies
William Golding's classic tale about a group of English schoolboys who are plane-wrecked on a deserted island is just as chilling and relevant today as when it was first published in 1954. At first, the stranded boys cooperate, attempting to gather food, make shelters, and maintain signal fires. Overseeing their efforts are Ralph, "the boy with fair hair," and Piggy, Ralph's chubby, wisdom-dispensing sidekick whose thick spectacles come in handy for lighting fires. Although Ralph tries to impose order and delegate responsibility, there are many in their number who would rather swim, play, or hunt the island's wild pig population. Soon Ralph's rules are being ignored or challenged outright. His fiercest antagonist is Jack, the redheaded leader of the pig hunters, who manages to lure away many of the boys to join his band of painted savages. The situation deteriorates as the trappings of civilization continue to fall away, until Ralph discovers that instead of being hunters, he and Piggy have become the hunted: "He forgot his words, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear on flying feet." Golding's gripping novel explores the boundary between human reason and animal instinct, all on the brutal playing field of adolescent competition

Larry Watson - Montana 1948 - 185p


Larry Watson was born in 1947 in Rugby, North Dakota. He grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, and was educated in its public schools. He received his BA and MA from the University of North Dakota, his Ph.D. from the creative writing program at the University of Utah, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Ripon College. Watson has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987, 2004) and the Wisconsin Arts Board.
Montana 1948
A young Sioux woman tossing with fever on a cot; a father begging his wife for help; a mother standing uncertainly in her kitchen with a 12-gauge shotgun: from these fragments of memory, evoked by the narrator as the novel opens, Watson builds a simple but powerful tale. It is Montana in 1948, and young David Hayden's father, Wesley, is sheriff of their small town--a position he inherited from his domineering father. Wesley is overshadowed by his older brother, Frank, a war hero who is now the town doctor. When Marie, the Sioux woman who works for the Haydens, fall ill, she adamantly resists being examined by Frank. Some probing reveals that Frank has been molesting the Indian women in his care. Wesley's dilemma--should he turn in his own brother?--is intensified when Marie is found dead and David confesses that he saw his uncle near the house before she died. The moral issues, and the consequences of following one's conscience, are made painfully evident here. Watson is to be congratulated for the honesty of his writing and the purity of his prose. Highly recommended.

Thursday, June 02, 2005

Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things


Arundhati Roy was born in 1961 in Bengal, India, and grew up in Kerala. She got her degree in architecture from the Delhi School of Architecture, but became a screenwriter instead, writing scripts for movies and television in India. She lives in Delhi with her husband, film-maker Pradeep Kishen.

Her first novel, The God of Small Things (1997), won the prestigious Booker Prize and became an international best-seller. The book, which took Roy five years to write, is not strictly autobiographical, but she says “the sadness of the book” * has stayed with her, and that she may never write another novel.
The God of Small Thing
With sensuous prose, a dreamlike style infused with breathtakingly beautiful images and keen insight into human nature, Roy's debut novel charts fresh territory in the genre of magical, prismatic literature. Set in Kerala, India, during the late 1960s when Communism rattled the age-old caste system, the story begins with the funeral of young Sophie Mol, the cousin of the novel's protagonists, Rahel and her fraternal twin brother, Estha. In a circuitous and suspenseful narrative, Roy reveals the family tensions that led to the twins' behavior on the fateful night that Sophie drowned. Beneath the drama of a family tragedy lies a background of local politics, social taboos and the tide of history?all of which come together in a slip of fate, after which a family is irreparably shattered. Roy captures the children's candid observations but clouded understanding of adults' complex emotional lives. Rahel notices that "at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside." Plangent with a sad wisdom, the children's view is never oversimplified, and the adult characters reveal their frailties?and in one case, a repulsively evil power?in subtle and complex ways. While Roy's powers of description are formidable, she sometimes succumbs to overwriting, forcing every minute detail to symbolize something bigger, and the pace of the story slows. But these lapses are few, and her powers coalesce magnificently in the book's second half. Roy's clarity of vision is remarkable, her voice original, her story beautifully constructed and masterfully told.

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

André Brink - A Dry White Season 320p. -The Other Side of Silence320p. - An Instant in the Wind 250p.


Andre Brink was a South African writer whose novels were often criticized by the South African government. Brink was educated in South Africa and France. He later became a professor of Afrikaans and Dutch literature at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. In essence, this meant depicting sexual and moral matters and examining the political system in a way that rapidly antagonized the traditional Afrikaner reader. His novels presented increasingly bleak and bitter evidence of the disintegration of human values that occurs under apartheid. A Dry White Season, 1969, a white liberal investigates the death of a black activist in police custody. A Chain of Voices, 1982, recounts through many points of view a slave revolt in 1825. Brink's works were well received abroad, but two were banned from South Africa. Those books were Looking on Darkness and A Dry White Season. he determined to involve himself in the opposition to apartheid, and his books have explored both the temptations of exile and the compulsion to return to South Africa and oppose the racist government. His novel Kennis von dle Aand (Looking on Darkness) was banned in 1974 and he responded by beginning to write in English as well as Afrikaans.
A Dry White Season
A heart gripping, eye watering, investigation about two innocent victims tortured and put to death by political powers. This detective story raises many important issues about political abuse and political lies that have been recently common in the United States of America, "the land of the free." One of the most significant issues in the story is about enforcing laws that hurt not only the ones being tortured and killed but also the entire society who becomes captive of its government through fear. This is a very strong and powerful story, complete with excitement, suspense, drama, comedy and love; making it a great combination to facilitate the introduction of important issues and at the same time keep the reader intrigued while using humor and love to lighten-up the tension of the reader.
The Other Side of Silence
Hanna X is a young German woman who, after years of abuse in a Bremen orphanage, escapes to her country's colonies in southwest Africa, only to be even more badly brutalized--mutilated, even--by the men she has volunteered to serve. Disfigured and mute, she is banished to Frauenstein, a desert asylum for broken, unwanted women. When Hanna saves frail young Katja from the violent advances of a drunken soldier by beating him to death, her silent rage comes alive and the tenor of Brink's story shifts from suffering to revenge. Forming a militia from the scarred victims of colonial oppression, natives and immigrant women alike, Hanna declares war on the Reich itself, organizing attacks on German desert outposts and ultimately coming face-to-scarred-face with the persistent shadows of her childhood--as well as the man responsible for her horrible disfigurement. This is familiar territory for Brink, a South African whose explorations of violence, memory, and apartheid have won him praise and media attention. His latest proves provocative by evoking these themes within the unconventional setting of German colonialism.
An Instant in the Wind

In Brink's hands, in 1750, a naive but spirited white woman from the Cape accompanies her Swedish explorer husband into the upmapped interior, only to find herself alone when the husband dies and the Hottentot retainers head for the hills.

She is found by a runaway slave, Adam, who for reasons of his own agrees to set off with her to the Cape.

Brink vividly describes the country through which they must travel. Against its physical presence, the couple become lovers. All of this is good fun. Brink was writing at a time when black/white relationships were forbidden under apartheid law. Indeed, the book for a while was banned. He delivers us a vintage love story, full of sex and spirit. (Funny how Coetzee, 25 years later when inter-racial sex is no longer verboten, sees the politics of such relationships in an entirely different way).

Laird Konig - The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane


"This has to be one of the most exciting books ever! I had discovered this book when I was 15 yers old and did a book report on it. I was so gratful they made a movie out of it, though I have to say the book is much better than the movie. "The little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane" is suspensful, scary, and yet compassionate. Take it from me, this is a great book. I hated to read and I havn't stopped talking about this book! I am now 41 years old and just now finding this book to read it again. Every teenager will love it." a reader
Personally, I thought the film was as amazing as the novel and Jodie Foster is excellent (she was 13 then!). Teacher.

Dee Brown - Bury my Heart at Wonded Knee


Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was first published in the United States in 1970. This landmark book ”which incorporated a number of eyewitness accounts and official records” offered a scathing indictment of the U.S. politicians, soldiers, and citizens who colonized the American West. Focusing mainly on the thirty-year span from 1860 to 1890, the book was the first account of the time period told from the Native-American point of view. It demonstrated that whites instigated the great majority of the conflicts between Native Americans and themselves. Brown began searching for the facts about Native Americans after he met several as a child and had a hard time believing the myths about their savagery that were popular among white people. Brown published his book a century after the events took place, but it was a timely publication, since many U.S. citizens were already feeling guilty about their country's involvement in the Vietnam War. Brown's book depicted, in detail, the U.S. government's attempt to acquire Native Americans' land by using a mix of threats, deception, and murder. In addition, the book showed the attempts to crush Native-American beliefs and practices. These acts were justified by the theory of Manifest Destiny, which stated that European descendents acting for the U.S. government had a God-given right to take land from the Native Americans

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Alice Walker - The Color Purple


Recognized as one of the leading voices among black American women writers, Alice Walker has produced an acclaimed and varied body of work, including poetry, novels, short stories, essays, and criticism. Her writings portray the struggle of black people throughout history, and are praised for their insightful and riveting portraits of black life, in particular the experiences of black women in a sexist and racist society. Her most famous work, the award-winning and best-selling novel The Color Purple, chronicles the life of a poor and abused southern black woman who eventually triumphs over oppression through affirming female relationships. Walker has described herself as a "womanist" — her term for a black feminist —
The Color Purple
Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.

FS Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby - 240p


American short-story writer and novelist, known for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s). With the glamorous Zelda Sayre (1900-48), Fitzgerald lived a colorful life of parties and money-spending. At the beginning of one of his stories Fitzgerald wrote the rich "are different from you and me". This privileged world he depicted in such novels as THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED (1922) and THE GREAT GATSBY (1925), which is widely considered Fitzgerald's finest novel.

"It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers - because if you ask a writer anything, you usually get an answer - still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying - only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers." (from The Last Tycoon, 1941)

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota of mixed Southern and Irish descent. He was given three names after the writer of The Star Spangled Banner, to whom he was distantly related. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a salesman, a Southern gentleman, whose furniture business had failed. Mary McQuillan, his mother, was the daughter of a successful wholesale grocer, and devoted to her only son. The family moved regularly, but settled finally in 1918 in St. Paul. At the age of 18 Fitzgerald fell in love with the 16-year-old Ginevra King, the prototype of Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

Jim Harrison - A Good Day to Die -180p easy


Jim Harrison is a widely admired poet, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter who received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English and Comparative Literature from Michigan State University in 1960 and 1966 respectively. Born in Grayling in 1937, raised in Reed City and Haslett, he is the son of a county agent who moved the Harrison family to the East Lansing area so his children could attend Michigan State University.
His work has been translated into 11 languages.

He currently lives with his family on a farm in northern Michigan.
A Good Day to Die
If you have never read Harrison, this is a great place to start. An entertaining read and fine introduction to the humor, wit, and insight of one of our most engaging authors. You'll hear Harrison's voice for weeks after finishing this book. And you'll want to read more.

Tobias Wolf - This Boy's life 288p


Born in Alabama in 1945, Tobias Wolff traveled the country with his peripatetic mother, finally coming to ground in Washington State, where he grew up. He attended the Hill School in Pennsylvania until he was expelled for repeated failures in mathematics in his final year, whereupon he joined the Army. He spent four years as a paratrooper, including a tour in Vietnam. Following his discharge he attended Oxford University in England, where he received a First Class Honours degree in English in 1972. Returning to the United States, he worked variously as a reporter, a teacher, a night watchman and a waiter before receiving a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University in 1975. He is currently Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, where he lives with his wife Catherine. They have three children.
This Boy's Life
In PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Wolff's fourth book, he recounts his coming-of-age with customary skill and self-assurance. Seeking a better life in the Northwestern U.S. with his divorced mother, whose "strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant breed" taught Wolff the virtue of rebellion, he considered himself "in hiding," moved to invent a private, "better" version of himself in order to rise above his troubles. Primary among these were the adultsdrolly eccentric, sometimes dementedwho were bent on humiliating him. Since Wolff the writer never pities Wolff the boy, the author characterizes the crew of grown-up losers with damning objectivity, from the neurotic stepfather who painted his entire house (piano and Christmas tree included) white, to the Native American football star whose ultimate failure was as inexplicable as his athletic brilliance. Briskly and candidly reportedWolff's boyhood best friend "bathed twice a day but always gave off an ammoniac hormonal smell, the smell of growth and anxiety"his youth yields a self-made man whose struggle to fit the pieces together is authentic and endearing.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Alexander McCall Smith - The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency


Alexander McCall Smith was born in Zimbabwe (called Southern Rhodesia at the time) and was educated there and in Scotland. He became a law professor in Scotland, and it was in this role that he first returned to Africa to work in Botswana, where he helped to set up a new law school at the University of Botswana. He is currently Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh, but has been a visiting professor at a number of other universities elsewhere, including ones in Italy and the United States (where he has twice been visiting professor at SMU Law School in Dallas, Texas).
The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency
“The Miss Marple of Botswana.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Smart and sassy . . . Precious’ progress is charted in passages that have the power to amuse or shock or touch the heart, sometimes all at once.” –Los Angeles Times

“I haven’t read anything with such unalloyed pleasure for a long time.” –Anthony Daniels, The Sunday Telegraph

A second book has been added due to the great demand.
Tears of the Giraffe is the follow up in the adventures of Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's only- and finest- female private detective.

Nick Hornby - About a Boy - A long way Down - 200p


Nick Hornby (born 1957) is an English writer who lives in Highbury, in north London.
Hornby built his name first with the memoir Fever Pitch (1992) about his lifelong support of Arsenal F.C., then followed it up with the best-selling novels High Fidelity (1995), About a Boy (1998) and How to be Good (2001). Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, and About a Boy appeal in particular to men in their twenties and thirties, and draw on the author's life experience. Hornby writes in a very funny and entertaining style, but many observers have noted that his stories also contain a hidden depth, not necessarily appreciated at a first glance.
About a Boy
When you're 36, going on 18, life is about being hip, being cool, and embracing all that Mothercare has to offer ...
Will is thirty-six but acts like a teenager. He reads the right magazines, goes to the right clubs and knows which trainers to wear. He's also discovered a great way to score with women - at single parents' groups, full of available (and grateful) mothers, all waiting for Mr Nice Guy. That's where he meets Marcus, the oldest twelve-year-old in the world. Marcus is a bit strange: he listens to Joni Mitchell and Mozart, he looks after his Mum and he's never even owned a pair of trainers. Perhaps if Will can teach Marcus how to be a kid, Marcus can help Will grow up - and they can both start to act their age ...
A long way down
New Years Eve at Toppers House, North London's most popular suicide spot. And four strangers are about to discover that doing away with yourself isn't quite the private act they'd each expected.

Perma-tanned Martin Sharp's a disgraced breakfast TV presenter who had it all - the kids, the wife, the pad, the great career - but he 'pissed it all away'. Killing himself is Martin's 'reasonable and appropriate response' to an unliveable life.

Maureen has to do it tonight, because of Matty being in the home. He was never able to do any of the normal things kids do - like walk or talk - and loving-mum Maureen can't cope any more. Dutiful Catholic that she is, she's about to commit the 'biggest sin of all'.

Half-crazed with heartbreak, loneliness, adolescent angst, seven Bacardi Breezers and two Special Brews, Jess's ready to jump, to fly off the roof. Lastly, there's JJ - tall, cool, American, looks like a rock-star (was, in fact, a rock-star before his band split) - who's weighed down with a heap of problems and pizza.

Four strangers, who moments before were all convinced that they were alone and going to end it all that way, sit down together, share out the pizza and begin to talk.

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Helen Fielding - Bridget Jones Diary


Please tell us about your career prior to Bridget Jones.

I was born at Morley in Yorkshire (England) and earned a degree in English at Oxford University, where I met Richard Curtis. I worked for the BBC on news, children�s programs and light entertainment�as a researcher, director and/or producer. I made documentaries in Sudan and Ethiopia for Comic Relief. In 1994, I wrote Cause Celeb, a novel set in Africa, dealing with the relationship between and celebrities and starving Africans. It is coming out in paperback in the U.S. market later this year. Then I was a journalist for The Independent, Sunday Times and Telegraph, doing light general features, and I was also a restaurant reviewer.
Bridget Jones Diary
A huge success in England, this marvelously funny debut novel had its genesis in a column Fielding writes for a London newspaper. It's the purported diary, complete with daily entries of calories consumed, cigarettes smoked, "alcohol units" imbibed and other unsuitable obsessions, of a year in the life of a bright London 30-something who deplores male "fuckwittage" while pining for a steady boyfriend. As dogged at making resolutions for self-improvement as she is irrepressibly irreverent, Bridget also would like to have someone to show the folks back home and their friends, who make "tick-tock" noises at her to evoke the motion of the biological clock. Bridget is knowing, obviously attractive but never too convinced of the fact, and prone ever to fear the worst. In the case of her mother, who becomes involved with a shady Portuguese real estate operator and is about to be arrested for fraud, she's probably quite right. In the case of her boss, Daniel, who sends sexy e-mail messages but really plans to marry someone else, she's a tad blind. And in the case of glamorous lawyer Mark Darcy, whom her parents want her to marry, she turns out to be way off the mark. ("It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting 'Cathy!' and banging your head against a tree.") It's hard to say how the English frame of reference will travel. But, since Bridget reads Susan Faludi and thinks of Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon as role models, it just might. In any case, it's hard to imagine a funnier book appearing anywhere this year.

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein - 350p


Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley née Godwin (August 30, 1797–February 1, 1851) was an English writer who is, perhaps, equally-famously remembered as the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and as the author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.
Frankenstein
The record needs to be set strait. First shock is that the creator is named Victor Frankenstein; the creature is just "monster" not Frankenstein. And it is Victor that is backwards which added in him doing the impossible by not knowing any better. The monster is well read in "Sorrows of a Young Werther," "Paradise Lost," and Plutarch's "Lives." The debate (mixed with a few murders) rages on as to whether the monster was doing evil because of his nature or because he was spurned?

George Orwell -1984 -1950 - 251p + Animal Farm 90p


Eric Blair was born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, in the then British colony of India, where his father, Richard, worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida, brought him to England at the age of one. He did not see his father again until 1907, when Richard visited England for three months before leaving again. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie and a younger sister named Avril. With his characteristic humour, he would later describe his family's background as "lower-upper-middle class."
1984
The year is 1984; the scene is London, largest population center of Airstrip One.

Airstrip One is part of the vast political entity Oceania, which is eternally at war with one of two other vast entities, Eurasia and Eastasia. At any moment, depending upon current alignments, all existing records show either that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia, or that it has always been at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia. Winston Smith knows this, because his work at the Ministry of Truth involves the constant "correction" of such records. "'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"

In a grim city and a terrifying country, where Big Brother is always Watching You and the Thought Police can practically read your mind, Winston is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. He knows the Party's official image of the world is a fluid fiction. He knows the Party controls the people by feeding them lies and narrowing their imaginations through a process of bewilderment and brutalization that alienates each individual from his fellows and deprives him of every liberating human pursuit from reasoned inquiry to sexual passion. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.
Animal Farm
Since its publication in 1946, George Orwell's fable of a workers' revolution gone wrong has rivaled Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as the Shortest Serious Novel It's OK to Write a Book Report About. (The latter is three pages longer and less fun to read.) Fueled by Orwell's intense disillusionment with Soviet Communism, Animal Farm is a nearly perfect piece of writing, both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works. When the downtrodden beasts of Manor Farm oust their drunken human master and take over management of the land, all are awash in collectivist zeal. Everyone willingly works overtime, productivity soars, and for one brief, glorious season, every belly is full. The animals' Seven Commandment credo is painted in big white letters on the barn. All animals are equal. No animal shall drink alcohol, wear clothes, sleep in a bed, or kill a fellow four-footed creature. Those that go upon four legs or wings are friends and the two-legged are, by definition, the enemy. Too soon, however, the pigs, who have styled themselves leaders by virtue of their intelligence, succumb to the temptations of privilege and power. "We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of the farm depend on us. Day and night, we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Frank Mc Court - Angela's Ashes - 400p


Angela's Ashes
Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood," writes Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes. "Worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Welcome, then, to the pinnacle of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to recent Irish immigrants Malachy and Angela McCourt, Frank grew up in Limerick after his parents returned to Ireland because of poor prospects in America. It turns out that prospects weren't so great back in the old country either--not with Malachy for a father. A chronically unemployed and nearly unemployable alcoholic, he appears to be the model on which many of our more insulting cliches about drunken Irish manhood are based. Mix in abject poverty and frequent death and illness and you have all the makings of a truly difficult early life. Fortunately, in McCourt's able hands it also has all the makings for a compelling memoir.

Gus Lee - China Boy - 320p


Gus Lee is the author of China Boy, Honor and Duty, No Physical Evidence, and Tiger’s Tale. He lives in Colorado.
China Boy
A warm, engaging story of seven-year-old Kai Ting, set in the tough Panhandle District of San Francisco in the 1950s. Lee includes all of the classic fairy-tale conventions: a wicked stepmother; a totally obnoxious bully, Big Willie Mack, who lives to beat Kai into pulp; Toussaint La Rue, a street-wise paladin who befriends him; and the YMCA "Knights" who teach this David to stand up to his street Goliath. Kai's Merlin is his Uncle Shim, a Mandarin scholar who longs to pass on his classical learning to Most Able Student Kai, the only living son of his father's Shanghai family. Readers will weep with Kai when he's locked out of the house and left as prey to the McAllister street bullies. They'll laugh with him when he confuses English idioms and ethnic street slang. They'll root heartily for him during his survival training at the Y where he transforms his body into a disciplined fighting machine, and cheer loudly when he learns to deal with the ghosts who haunt him.

Christy Brown - My Left Foot - 183 p


The book is a biography itself
My Left Foot
This was a very inspiring book written by Christy Brown, who was born with cerebral palsy, about his own life and the struggles that he had to overcome. Christy was born in 1933 in Ireland. Against many other's pushing to have Christy institutionalized, Christy's mother did not want to put him into an institution, therefore she kept him at home to be raised with the rest of the family. Christy surprised readers with his amazing abilities. He was able to communicate with his speech and his ability to write with his left foot. One night he lay on the kitchen floor, picked up a piece of chalk with his left foot and wrote, "mother" on the floor. This surprised his family and also gave them a lot of hope and faith in Christy

Bronte Sisters - 2 books


Emily Bronte
Emily Brontë was born at Thornton, Bradford, Yorkshire, and just after the birth of her sister Anne (20 April 1820), she moved with her family to Haworth, near Keighley, Yorkshire, where she spent most of her life. Today remembered chiefly as the author of the eighteenth-century romance Wuthering Heights (1847), set in her native Yorkshire, Emily Brontë was the second surviving daughter and fifth child
Wuthering Heights 370p
Published a year before her death at the age of thirty, Emily Brontë's only novel is set in the wild, bleak Yorkshire Moors. Depicting the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights creates a world of its own, conceived with an instinct for poetry and for the dark depths of human psychology.

Charlotte Bronte
Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), one of four surviving children of a clergyman, worked as a governess and teacher and wrote four novels
Jane Eyre 400p
Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead and subject to the cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. She takes up the post of governess at Thornfield Hall, falls in love with Mr. Rochester, and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman's passionate search for a richer life than that traditionally allowed women in Victorian society.

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit451 -


Ray Douglas Bradbury (born August 22, 1920) is a science fiction and fantasy writer. He educated himself at the library and, having been influenced by science fiction heroes like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, Bradbury soon began to successfully publish science fiction stories. He sold his first stories to pulp magazines in the early 1940s.
Fahrenheit451
Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is a dystopian fiction novel by Ray Bradbury. It is set in a world where books are banned and critical thought is suppressed; the central character, Guy Montag, is employed as a "fireman" (which, in this case, means "book burner"). 451 degrees Fahrenheit is stated as "the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns ...".

The novel reflects several major concerns of the time of its writing: the censorship and suppression of thought and ideas exercised in the United States in the 1950s as the result of McCarthyism; the burnings of books in Nazi Germany starting in 1933; and the horrible consequences of an explosion of a nuclear weapon.

Edward Bellamy - Looking Backwards - 1890 - 234p


Edward Bellamy was born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. He attended Union College, Schenectady, New York and college in Europe. He studied law, but left the practice and worked briefly in the newspaper industry in New York and in Springfield, Massachusetts. He left journalism and devoted himself to literature, short stories, and several novels.
Looking Backwards
According to Erich Fromm, Looking Backward is "one of the most remarkable books ever published in America." It was the third largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur. It influenced a large number of intellectuals, and appears by title in many of the major Marxist writings of the day. "It is one of the few books ever published that created almost immedately on its appearance a politcal mass movement.

John Steinbeck - 3 great books


John Earnest Steinbeck (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was one of the most famous American novelists of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, though his popularity with readers never was matched by that of the literary critics.

He was born in Salinas, California. The Salinas area, including the Salinas Valley, Monterey, and parts of the nearby San Joaquin Valley, acted as a setting for many of his stories. Because of his feeling for local color, the area is now sometimes called "Steinbeck Country".

The Pearl
Kino, a poor Mexican pearl fisher, finds a valuable pearl. Yet instead of bringing blessings, the pearl acts as a harbinger of misfortune to Kino and his wife, Juana. Ultimately, it is returned from whence it came. Steinbeck's parable, originally published in 1947, is a well-written retelling of an old Mexican folktale. Hector Elizondo, with his fine voice and great diction, reads with sincerity, keeping this simple, tragic tale moving toward its inevitable conclusion
Of Mice and Men
It tells the tragic story of George and Lennie, two displaced Anglo migrant farm workers during the Great Depression. Lennie is a large strong man with the mind of a child, and George is a small man with a quick wit who cares for him. The title of the story refers to a line in "To a Mouse" by the Scottish poet Robert Burns--a reference to plans gone awry. George and Lennie hope to save up enough money to buy a small farm of their own (Lennie is obsessed with the prospect of caring for rabbits), but this goal always remains out of reach
This story is a simple one in many ways. It's about the Depression, class relations, friendship, and how we treat people with disabilities. It has as much relevance today as it did when it first came out. I read it years ago, and I still remember it. Lenny 's an archetypical character.
The Moon is down
It was written in 1942 during World War II when Steinbeck worked as a reporter. The story details a military occupation of a small town in Northern Europe by the army of an unnamed nation at war with England and Russia. It is a very transparent reference to the occupation of Norway by the Germans during World War II

JD Salinger - Catcher in the Rye - 1951 - 220p


Jerome David Salinger (born January 1, 1919) is a United States author best known for The Catcher in the Rye, a classic coming-of-age story that has enjoyed enduring popularity since its publication in 1951. A major theme in Salinger's work is the agile but powerful mind of disturbed young men, and the redemptive capacity of children in the lives of such men.
Catcher in the Rye
Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists.

His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.

Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman - 1950 - play - 130p


Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist, and author. He was a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over 60 years, writing a wide variety of plays. Miller's best known works were The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, which are still widely studied and performed. He was also known for his short-lived marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
Death of a Salesman
The basic story is simple although there are some complicated questions and undercurrents in the play: it is about an older worker who runs out of energy, loses interest in his job at a smaller company, and is fired with no pension or pay package - pre wrongful dismissal days and litigation. Then we learn how that person deals with the situation and interacts with his wife and two sons.

Doris Lessing - The Grass is singing -1950 -240p


Born in 1919 in Persia. Her family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe) in 1925, to live a rough life farming maize
She was married twice (and twice divorced) and had three children. Her second husband was Gottfried Lessing, a German emigrant. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in London in 1949, after she had moved to Europe, where she has been living ever since.
The Grass is singing
The Grass is Singing" is at once a simple story and a complex psychological and social analysis. It is a commentary on race relations in imperial Rhodesia, and an exploration of the timeless dichotomy of culture and nature.

The book is perhaps most interesting when the author describes the ideology of white colonists in Africa. In particular, the idea that extreme racism develops out of a need to justify economic exploitation is poignantly posed. It is not that whites oppress blacks because they hate them, rather they hate them because they have to oppress them and deny their human worth to maintain their standard of living. Thus, newcomers from Britain must be taught how to deal with and feel about the natives, and poor whites are despised because they seem to blur the color lines.

Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird - 1960 - 300p


Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926. Lee published her first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, in 1960, after a two-year period of revising and rewriting under the guidance of her editor, Tay Hohoff, of the J. B. Lippincott Company. To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize, despite mixed critical reviews. The novel was highly popular, selling more than fifteen million copies. Though she delved into her own experiences as a child in Monroeville, Lee intended for the book to impart the sense of any small Deep South town and the universal characteristics of people everywhere.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up.

Colin Higgins - Harold and Maude - 1971 - 110p



While a film student at UCLA, writer/director Colin Higgins made a short subject for his master's thesis. That short was later expanded into the 1970 feature film Harold and Maude, which also represented Higgins' debut as a producer. Combining Higgins' two favorite movie elements, slapstick comedy and sudden death, Harold and Maude was a box-office failure but an almost instantaneous cult success. Five years later, Higgins scored his first tangible movie hit, Silver Streak (1975), which characteristically used a suspense-film plotline upon which to mount several first-rate comic sequences. The same formula was applied to Higgins' next moneymaker, Foul Play (1978). Shortly after serving as producer and screenwriter for Out on a Limb, Colin Higgins died of AIDS at the age of 47.
Harold and Maude
While Harold is part of a society where he can have no importance and no meaning, Maude has survived against totalitarianism. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Harold can only feel significant by dying. Maude, on the other hand, is a fictionalizer and a dreamer. She imagines beauty where there is none, believes in the innate goodness of people (but not the State), and practices what she calls her own individual revolution. Her backstory is only hinted in the film. She tells Harold at one point about Alfred Dreyfus seeing fantastic birds on Devil's Island and finding out later that they were only seagulls. She says that to her they would always be fantastic birds.

Monday, April 18, 2005

Marlo Morgan Mutant Message Down Under 208 p.


From Publishers Weekly
Morgan's much-hyped first novel, a fictionalized account of a "walkabout" she took in the Outback with a group of Aborigines, gains from the use of authentic detail, although the storytelling is hindered by the author's heavy New Age agenda and incessant cultural proselytizing. A 50-ish alternative health practitioner from the American Midwest, Morgan was working with underprivileged Aborigine youths in the inner cities of Australia when a group of Aborigines offered her a chance to learn firsthand about their culture. Morgan's account of the tribe's customs, healing methods, food-finding tactics, etc. is absorbing, and her willingness to forgo Western luxuries and to relish the experience is courageous and touching. Less compellingly, the author claims that she was "chosen" by the Aborigines to tell the rest of humanity that the so-called "real people" are refusing to reproduce because of the ravages of Western civilization, and that Westerners have a limited time to clean up their act. Morgan's rudimentary writing skills are stretched to the limit, and she lessens the power of her story and its egalitarian lessons by adopting the perspective that Western culture is innately inferior to the naturalistic beliefs of the Aborigines.

Charles Dickens Oliver Twist 490 p



Oliver Twist (1838) is Charles Dickens' second novel. The book was originally published in Bentley's Miscellany as a serial, in monthly installments that began appearing in February 1837 and continued through April 1839. George Cruikshank provided one steel etching per month to illustrate each installment.[1]

Oliver Twist is the first English novel with a child protagonist,[2] and is also notable for Dickens' unromantic portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives.[3] The book's subtitle, The Parish Boy's Progress alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and also to a pair of popular 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, "A Rake's Progress" and "A Harlot's Progress."[4]

An early example of the social novel, the book calls the public's attention to various contemporary social evils, including the workhouse, child labour and the recruitment of children as criminals. Dickens mocks the hypocrisies of the time by surrounding the novel's serious themes with sarcasm and dark humour. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of his hardships as a child laborer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s.

Oliver Twist has been the subject of numerous film and television adaptations, and is the basis for a highly successful British musical, Oliver!. from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Polanski's latest version was excellent)