25 Books I enjoyed last year 02-03
Discover 25 unforgettable books I enjoyed last year, from Michel Faber's *Under the Skin* to Malcolm X's powerful autobiography and classics by Italo Calvino & Hermann Hesse. Explore this curated fiction and biography reading list.
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Under the Skin
by Michel Faber
"Under the Skin" is a first novel that defies categorization, an allegory for contemporary society run amok, set in the very real beauty of the Scottish Highlands. "Michel Faber has, it can truly be said--hand on heart--a vivid and original imagination".--"The Scotsman."
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The Quiet American
by Graham Greene
An eager American envoy is mysteriously assigned to Saigon during the French occupation of Indochina.
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X
If there was any one man who articulated the anger, the struggle, and the beliefs of African Americans in the 1960s, that man was Malxolm X. His AUTOBIOGRAPHY is now an established classic of modern America, a book that expresses like none other the crucial truth about our times. "Extraordinary. A brilliant, painful, important book." TEH NEW YORKTIMES
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Erewhon
by Samuel Butler
Setting out to make his fortune in a far-off country, a young traveller discovers the remote and beautiful land of Erewhon and is given a home among its extraordinarily handsome citizens. But their visitor soon discovers that this seemingly ideal community has its faults—here crime is treated indulgently as a malady to be cured, while illness, poverty and misfortune are cruelly punished, and all machines have been superstitiously destroyed after a bizarre prophecy. Can he survive in a world where morality is turned upside down? Inspired by Samuel Butler's years in colonial New Zealand and by his reading of Darwin's Origin of Species, Erewhon is a highly original, irreverent and humorous satire on conventional virtues, religious hypocrisy and the unthinking acceptance of beliefs. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Peter Camenzind
by Hermann Hesse
After a young writer leaves his Swiss mountain village to experience the world, his illusions are crushed by the suffering he witnesses, until a friendship with an invalid restores his hope.
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"The Yellow Wallpaper" and Other Stories
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Compiles seven stories that examine the relations between the sexes from a feminist perspective.
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Wild Swans
by Jung Chang
Tells the story of three women--Jung Chang, her mother, and her grandmother--whose lives and fortunes mirror the tumultuous twentieth century in China.
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All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
The masterpiece of the German experience during World War I, considered by many the greatest war novel of all time—with an Oscar–winning film adaptation now streaming on Netflix. “[Erich Maria Remarque] is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank.”—The New York Times Book Review I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. . . . This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army during World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another . . . if only he can come out of the war alive.
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Marcovaldo, Or, The Seasons in the City
by Italo Calvino
Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams-but the results are never the expected ones. Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book