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1) Shakespeare
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Summary
This book features a series of smart, witty, deeply perceptive essays about each of Shakespeare's plays, together with a further discussion of the poems. Writing with an incomparable knowledge of his subject but without a hint of pedantry, Van Doren elucidates both the astonishing boldness and myriad subtleties of Shakespeare's protean art. His Shakespeare is a book to be treasured by both new and longtime students of the Bard.
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A revelatory World War II novel about a German prisoner of war fleeing for the border and encountering a variety of Germans, good and bad and indifferent, along his way. Now available in a new English translation. The Seventh Cross is one of the most powerful, popular, and influential novels of the twentieth century, a hair raising thriller that helped to alert the world to the grim realities of Nazi Germany and that is no less exciting today than...
5) Lucky Jim
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First published in 1954, this book is a hilarious satire of British university life. It is a young man's book, in fact a book of two young men. They are not exactly angry young men, but they are extremely irritable. College friends with similar backgrounds, they graduated from both Oxford University and World War II to find themselves in an England in terminal decline. It has lost overseas possessions that had once been its pride, and the people in...
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"From fall to spring, J. A. Baker set out to track the daily comings and goings of a pair of peregrine falcons across the flat fen lands of eastern England. He followed the birds obsessively, observing them in the air and on the ground, in pursuit of their prey, making a kill, eating, and at rest, activities he describes with an extraordinary fusion of precision and poetry. And as he continued his mysterious private quest, his sense of human self...
9) Augustus
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"Winner of the 1973 National Book Award. In Augustus, the third of his great novels, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a[n] historical novel set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire, whose greatness was matched by his brutality. To tell the story, Williams also turned to a genre, the epistolary novel, that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher's Crossing...
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The British residents of Krishnapur, a Victorian outpost on the subcontinent of India in 1857, are initially unperturbed by rumors of strife from afar, but when they find themselves under siege by native soldiers, they withdraw into the Residency where they slowly come to realize the true character of colonialism.
11) The summer book
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"This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland." -- Publisher's description.
13) The Chrysalids
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After a global nuclear war, David, a member of a small community of religious and genetic fundamentalists, stays vigilant about deviations from the norm as abnormal plants and humans are destroyed, and when David realizes he possesses a special power, he wrestles with questions of freedom and oppression.
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A short, spellbinding novel about a WWI veteran finding a way to re-enter—and fully embrace—normal life while spending the summer in an idyllic English village.
In J. L. Carr’s deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the...
In J. L. Carr’s deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the...