• Stephen Bates on surprises in Heller's Letters• Chris Cox reads Catch-22 fifty years after its publication, 75. Why are they great?
Pilgrim's Progress John BunyanThe one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair. I would love to see a television series made out of the James Joyce book, Finnegans Wake, just to see the reaction. All rights reserved. • Charlotte Mendelssohn celebrates the other Liz Taylor's short stories• Read Natasha Tripney's review of an early novel here, 78. American Pastoral Philip Roth For years, Roth was famous for Portnoy's Complaint . Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter (@nytimesbooks), sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar.
104 weeks on the list. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.' Are you wondering what happened to all those American writers from Bret Easton Ellis to Jeffrey Eugenides, from Jonathan Franzen to Cormac McCarthy?
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5) by J.K. Rowling. • Robert McCrum's World of Books column on Naipaul• Naipaul as the summer read of 2008• The Shadow of Empire: DJ Taylor's look at recent post-colonial novels, 84. Keep your kids busy reading with series they won't be able to put down.
She considers herself to be merely a witness to the passions of her characters than the author of them.
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The 51st book of the In Death series. Nostromo Joseph Conrad Conrad's masterpiece: a tale of money, love and revolutionary politics.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera Inspired by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, this is a magical fusion of history, autobiography and ideas. In a prequel to “The Pillars of the Earth,” a boatbuilder, a Norman noblewoman and a monk live in England under attack by the Welsh and the Vikings.
Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe Nigeria at the beginning of colonialism. Welcome back. If any network is brave enough to try and turn it into a television series I would expect the results to be pretty surreal. But they're little because they're still, well... 10 years old.Â, Being a tween is not always an easy thing, because their tastes in clothes, food, and favorites are constantly changing. Have you ever read any books that were not finished by the author? I don't know if this change is drastic enough to count as "subverting the genre tropes" but it does make for a very interesting read from a different perspective. Graphic novels like these are a good entry point into reading for kids who tend to avoid chapter books. Daniel Deronda George Eliot A passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling.• A new novel from George Eliot - the Guardian's first review of Daniel Deronda, from 1876, 29. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne A classic investigation of the American mind.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Nightmare Abbey, 12. • Jane Smiley on The Good Soldier, stylistic perfection• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: The Good Soldier, 44. Put in a little effort and research the translations of the books you are interested in as well. Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard.
You'll find that as your vocabulary grows, so will your enjoyment of the books. • Robert McCrum's 100 best novels - Three Men in a Boat, 34.
Writers such as JG Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess, Bruce Chatwin, Robertson Davies, John Fowles, Nick Hornby, Russell Hoban, Somerset Maugham and VS Pritchett narrowly missed the final hundred.
The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of adventure writing. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper LeeScout, a six-year-old girl, narrates an enthralling story of racial prejudice in the Deep South. Instead, pick something that is a little more recent and ease yourself into it first. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain Twain was a humorist, but this picture of Mississippi life is profoundly moral and still incredibly influential.
Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë Obsessive emotional grip and haunting narrative.• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Jane Eyre, 19. As a general rule we do not censor any content on the site.
Time Magazine's All-Time best 100 English language Novels from 1923 to 2005. A dagger indicates that some retailers report receiving bulk orders.
• Jason Cowley on the many incarnations of Dangerous Liaisons, 9.
Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard.