Books Read in 2008
Explore the eclectic reading list from 2008, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction like Junot Díaz's *The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao*, alongside sci-fi classics from Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov, plus memoirs and graphic novels.
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Viriconium
by M. John Harrison
A magnificent city existing on the ringes of the past, and on the brink of destruction, Viriconium • With a foreword by Neil Gaiman Available to American readers for the first time, this landmark collection gathers four groundbreaking fantasy classics from the acclaimed author of Light. Set in the imagined city of Viriconium, here are the masterworks that revolutionized a genre and enthralled a generation of readers: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Nights. Back in print after a long absence, these singular tales of a timeless realm and its enigmatic inhabitants are now reborn and compiled to captivate a whole new generation. Praise for M. John Harrison’s Viriconium “The world that Harrison depicts is intricate and authentic, peopled with a multitude of strange yet lifelike characters—a combination which serves to make his richly imagined empire of Viriconium feel very real indeed. . . . This omnibus collection from the author of Light is canon-reading for those who wish to know the genre's roots, as well as the heights, to which it can aspire.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Brilliant, beautiful, and absolutely essential reading. The breadth of vision and imagination alone in these books is unparalleled. It is truly one of a kind and will continue to haunt you in the best possible way for years.”—Jonathan Carroll, author of White Apples “Harrison’s Viriconium sequence is the jewel in the crown of 20th-century fantasy, a work that proves irrefutably that fantastic literature can be Art with a capital A, holding its own alongside the very finest writing of our time, or any other.”—Elizabeth Hand, author of Mortal Love “M. John Harrison is a true master of English prose. He possesses the eye of a painter, the ear of a bard, and a rigorous and playful intellect. The Viriconium novels and stories are infused with a haunting genius that never falters.”—K.J. Bishop, author of The Etched City
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Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work. Climb aboard for the swashbuckling adventure of a lifetime. Treasure Island has enthralled (and caused slight seasickness) for decades. The names Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins are destined to remain pieces of folklore for as long as children want to read Robert Louis Stevenson’s most famous book. With its dastardly plot and motley crew of rogues and villains, it seems unlikely that children will ever say no to this timeless classic. Enriched Classics enhance your engagement by introducing and explaining the historical and cultural significance of the work, the author’s personal history, and what impact this book had on subsequent scholarship. Each book includes discussion questions that help clarify and reinforce major themes and reading recommendations for further research. Read with confidence.
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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
by Alan Moore
In an alternate England in 1958, Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain seek the Black Dossier, which contains the history of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen through the centuries, while fleeing from deadly secret agents.
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Emma
by Jane Austen
The culmination of Jane Austen's genius, a sparkling comedy of love and marriage Now a major motion picture starring Anya Taylor-Joy Beautiful, clever, rich—and single—Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protegee Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen's most flawless work. 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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Socrates In Love (Novel-Paperback)
by Kyoichi Katayama
A bittersweet journey of young love, heartbreaking loss, and enduring devotion.
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The Giver
by Lois Lowry
In a future society, young Jonas is given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.
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The Man in the High Castle
by Philip K. Dick
It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. the few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war--and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan. This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.
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The Caves of Steel
by Isaac Asimov
A millennium into the future two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels chronicle the unlikely partnership between a New York City detective and a humanoid robot who must learn to work together. Like most people left behind on an over-populated Earth, New York City police detective Elijah Baley had little love for either the arrogant Spacers or their robotic companions. But when a prominent Spacer is murdered under mysterious circumstances, Baley is ordered to the Outer Worlds to help track down the killer. The relationship between Life and his Spacer superiors, who distrusted all Earthmen, was strained from the start. Then he learned that they had assigned him a partner: R. Daneel Olivaw. Worst of all was that the “R” stood for robot—and his positronic partner was made in the image and likeness of the murder victim!
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
A mischievous youth encounters a runaway slave and together they travel down the Mississippi in search of adventure.
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The Great Derangement
by Matt Taibbi
A REVELATORY AND DARKLY COMIC ADVENTURE THROUGH A NATION ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN—FROM THE HALLS OF CONGRESS TO THE BASES OF BAGHDAD TO THE APOCALYPTIC CHURCHES OF THE HEARTLAND Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi set out to describe the nature of George Bush’s America in the post-9/11 era and ended up vomiting demons in an evangelical church in Texas, riding the streets of Baghdad in an American convoy to nowhere, searching for phantom fighter jets in Congress, and falling into the rabbit hole of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Matt discovered in his travels across the country that the resilient blue state/red state narrative of American politics had become irrelevant. A large and growing chunk of the American population was so turned off—or radicalized—by electoral chicanery, a spineless news media, and the increasingly blatant lies from our leaders (“they hate us for our freedom”) that they abandoned the political mainstream altogether. They joined what he calls The Great Derangement. Taibbi tells the story of this new American madness by inserting himself into four defining American subcultures: The Military, where he finds himself mired in the grotesque black comedy of the American occupation of Iraq; The System, where he follows the money-slicked path of legislation in Congress; The Resistance, where he doubles as chief public antagonist and undercover member of the passionately bonkers 9/11 Truth Movement; and The Church, where he infiltrates a politically influential apocalyptic mega-ministry in Texas and enters the lives of its desperate congregants. Together these four interwoven adventures paint a portrait of a nation dangerously out of touch with reality and desperately searching for answers in all the wrong places. Funny, smart, and a little bit heartbreaking, The Great Derangement is an audaciously reported, sobering, and illuminating portrait of America at the end of the Bush era.
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The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss
Kvothe spends his life fighting hidden and familiar foes while struggling to master his magical powers and battle ancient evils that threaten his world.
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Sinai Tapestry
by Edward Whittemore
Tales of a blind man, written down by an imbecile. Such is the genesis of the Bible in this raucous, unsettling account of recent and not-so-recent history with its richly entwined odysseys: *Plantagenet Strongbow, twenty-ninth Duke of Dorset, seven feet, seven inches tall, the greatest swordsman, botanist and explorer of the Victorian age, who disappears in the Sinai in 1840 with his magnifying glass and portable sundial to reappear forty years later as an Arab holy man, after writing a scandalously accurate study of Levantine sex in thirty-three volumes, and disappears again only to emerge before his death in 1914 as the secret owner of the Ottoman Empire.*Skanderbeg Wallenstein, linguistic genius and fanatical Trappist monk from Albania who discovers the original Bible in the Sinai early in the nineteenth century and finds it "denies every religious truth ever held by anyone." Horrified by this, he forges an original that will justify faith and buries the real Sinai Bible in Jerusalem, where it remains hidden until retrieved in the twentieth century by.??*Hai Harun, former antiquities dealer and ethereal wanderer through history, born three thousand years ago, a shy knight wearing a rusty Crusader's helmet and faded yellow cloak while pursuing his hopeless mission as defender of the Holy City, and who, among many jobs in the service trades, has been a stone carver of winged lions during the Assyrian occupation, proprietor of an all-night grocery store under the Greeks, a waiter when the Romans were in power, and distributor of hashish and goats for the Turks. Discredited since the time of Christ, he has only one friend in modern Jerusalem, his loyal companion .?..* O'Sullivan Beare, the wily thirty-third son of a poor Irish fisherman, survivor of the Easter Rebellion and heroic guerrilla fighter against the Black and Tans, who flees to Mandated Palestine in 1920 disguised as a nun, uses false papers to take up residence in the Home for Crimean War Heroes though he's only twenty years old, and smuggles the first arms to the Haganah in a giant hollow stone scarab while working for.?.*Stern, son of Strongbow and a Jewish shepherd's daughter, exponent of a homeland for Jews and Moslems and Christians in the Middle East, witness to the massacre at Smyrna in 1922, and finally an ineluctable victim of the blood feuds of the area.In the years leading up to World War II, the separate journeys of discovery begun in the Sinai a century earlier involve many lives in many places as the unending search goes on for the real Sinai Bible: the lure of a Holy City, the promise of the desert, the bewildering varieties of love and the hopes and failures given to time, the bright somber colors of invincible dreams and dying days, together weave the chaos of events into a whole and decades into an era
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Kitchen Confidential Updated Ed
by Anthony Bourdain
A deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade from Chef Anthony Bourdain, laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine—now with all-new, never-before-published material
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
by Truman Capote
Truman Capote’s first novel is a story of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South. “Intense, brilliant . . . . Capote has an astonishing command . . . a magic all his own.” —The Atlantic At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully’s Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face—and heart—of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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Down and Out in Paris and London
by George Orwell
The adventures of a broke British writer as he works as a dishwasher in Paris and stays in homeless shelters in London.
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Murder in the Marais
by Cara Black
The first in a series of new crime fiction set in Paris, this standout first novel introduces the dauntless private investigator Aimee Leduc. Hired to investigate the grisly murder of an old Jewish woman in the Marais district of Paris, her undercover search requires that she plays a dangerous game that involves both current politics and old war crimes. A thrilling, quick-paced story, packed with suspense from a high-octane writer with a very promising future. 'A haunting, evocative debut.' - The New York Times
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
by Junot Díaz
Winner of: The Pulitzer Prize The National Book Critics Circle Award The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more... Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read and named one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.