Bookworm Bills Must Read List
Explore Bookworm Bill's must-read list of top book recommendations. Discover the best books to read, handpicked for avid readers and literary enthusiasts.
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Flashman
by George MacDonald Fraser
"If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."–P.G. Wodehouse The first novel in the Flashman series Fraser revives Flashman, a caddish bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, and relates Flashman’s adventures after he is expelled in drunken disgrace from Rugby school in the late 1830s. Flashy enlists in the Eleventh Light Dragoons and is promptly sent to India and Afghanistan, where despite his consistently cowardly behavior he always manages to come out on top. Flashman is an incorrigible anti-hero for the ages. This humorous adventure book will appeal to fans of historical fiction, military fiction, and British history as well as to fans of Clive Cussler, James Bond, and The Three Musketeers.
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Flash for Freedom!
by George MacDonald Fraser
A game of cards leads Flashman from the jungle death-house of Dahomey to the slave state of Mississippi as he dabbles in the slave trade in Volume III of the "Flashman Papers". When Flashman was inveigled into a game of pontoon with Disraeli and Lord George Bentinck, he was making an unconscious choice about his own future - would it lie in the House of Commons or the West African slave trade? Was there, for that matter, very much difference? Once again Flashman's charm, cowardice, treachery, lechery and fleetness of foot see the lovable rogue triumph by the skin of his chattering teeth.
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Flashman at the Charge
by George MacDonald Fraser
“Hilariously funny.”—The New York Times Book Review “Great dirty fun!”—Grand Rapids Press “The most entertaining anti-hero in a long time… Moves from one ribald and deliciously corrupt episode to the next… Wonderful and scandalous.”—Publishers Weekly The fourth volume of memoirs in which Harry Flashman confronts destiny with Lord Cardigan and the Light Brigade. Part of the Flashman series, comprising Flashman, Royal Flash, and Flash for Freedom, among others, which explores the successful though scandalous later career of the bully in Tom Brown's School Days.
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Flashman in the Great Game
by George MacDonald Fraser
“Hilariously funny.”—The New York Times Book Review One of literature's most delightful rakes is back in another tale of rollicking adventure and tantalizing seduction. The plucky Flashman's latest escapades are sure to entertain devotees as well as attract new aficionados.
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Flashman's Lady
by George MacDonald Fraser
When his beautiful and brainless wife Elizabeth is abducted from Singapore by a half-breed ex-Etonian millionaire, Harry Flashman sets out on an odyssey of reluctant pursuit.
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Flashman and the Dragon
by George MacDonald Fraser
“Flashman strikes again… Wonderful… hilarious.”—USA Today Lusting after a clergyman’s wife, smuggling opium to Hong Kong, coupling with an Amazonian woman river pirate, groveling before a ruthless warlord, and becoming the sexual plaything of the most beautiful and evil woman in the world, Harry Flashman, the supreme antihero of the Victorian era, is ready to rise to the occasion to matter what depths of dishonor he must plumb. In this uninhibited and uproarious adventure, Flashman is once again at his irascible best.
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Flashman and the Angel of the Lord
by George MacDonald Fraser
“A jolly read.”—The Wall Street Journal The tenth installment in The Flashman Papers finds Captain Harry Flashman of Her Majesty's Secret Service in the antebellum South, where the irrepressible, globe-trotting Victorian becomes the target of blackmailing beauties. Evading danger, bedding women, and profiting from every opportunity, Flashman once again weasels his way into history, this time in John Brown’s raid of Harper’s Ferry, just before the Civil War. As a result of Flashy’s letching, lying, cheating, and stealing on land, on sea, and on the rails, not only did John Brown become a martyr, Lincoln became president, and the nation plunged into a bloodbath.
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Flashman and the Tiger
by George MacDonald Fraser
For the first time in four years comes a new book in George MacDonald Fraser's long-running series chronicling the adventures of Sir Harry Paget Flashman. Eleventh in the series, Flashman and the Tiger features not one, but three stories of international intrigue that find the fictional Flashman thrown headlong into historical events around the world. This time out Flashman is thwarting an attempted assassination of Austria's Emperor Franz Josef ("The Road to Charing Cross"); getting to the bottom of the Tranby Croft gaming scandal–and the Prince of Wales' involvement in it ("The Subtleties of Baccarat"); and, in the title story, impacting the Zulu war while hunting down a longtime enemy. At once meticulously faithful to fact and wildly fanciful, Flashman and the Tiger is an educational romp through the annals of history; thirty years after he began the series, Fraser is at the top of his game.
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Arundel
by Kenneth Lewis Roberts
A young innkeeper in Maine tells of the terrible journey made by Colonial Benedict Arnold and his soldiers through the wilderness to Quebec, many months before the Declaration of Independence, in a vain-attempt to dislodge the British.
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Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detatchment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces. Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails grandaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi sumarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn. A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, CRYPTONOMICON is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring; the product of a truly icon
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Quicksilver
by Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson is one of America's most collectible authors. The ever-growing number of his devoted readers has created a huge demand for signed and first trade editions of his works. With Quicksilver: The Deluxe Limited Edition, William Morrow presents the first limited edition ever published of Neal Stephenson's work. Limited to a single edition of just 1,000 copies, the book is a beautifully designed example of the art of bookbinding. Each volume will be numbered and signed by Neal Stephenson. Collectors and readers alike will welcome the chance to add this handsome volume to their Neal Stephenson collection. Limited to an edition of 1,000 copies-never to be reprinted. Completely redesigned from the trade hardcover in a larger format-7" x 10". Each book numbered and signed by the author. Each volume hand-bound in Japanese silk. Each volume housed in a handsome slipcase featuring a die-cut aperture for the Quicksilver icon and covered in the same Japanese silk. The slipcase will also feature a silk ribbon pull for easy removal. Matching signed limited editions of the second and third volumes of Stephenson's Baroque Cycle will be published by William Morrow at six-month intervals.
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The Confusion
by Neal Stephenson
In the year 1689, a cabal of Barbary galley slaves -- including one Jack Shaftoe, a.k.a. King of the Vagabonds, a.k.a. Half-Cocked Jack, lately and miraculously cured of the pox -- devises a daring plan to win freedom and fortune. A great adventure ensues, rife with battles, chases, hairbreadth escapes, swashbuckling, bloodletting, and danger -- a perilous race for an enormous prize of silver ... nay, gold ... nay, legendary gold that will place the intrepid band at odds with the mighty and the mad, with alchemists, Jesuits, great navies, pirate queens, and vengeful despots across vast oceans and around the globe. Meanwhile, back in Europe ... The exquisite and resourceful Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, master of markets, pawn and confidante of enemy kings, onetime Turkish harem virgin, is stripped of her immense personal fortune by France's most dashing privateer. Penniless and at risk from those who desire either her or her head (or both), she is caught up in a web of international intrigue, even as she desperately seeks the return of her most precious possession -- her child. While ... Newton and Leibniz continue to propound their grand theories as their infamous rivalry intensifies, stubborn alchemy does battle with the natural sciences, nobles are beheaded, dastardly plots are set in motion, coins are newly minted (or not) in enemy strongholds, father and sons reunite in faraway lands, priests rise from the dead ... and Daniel Waterhouse seeks passage to the Massachusetts colony in hopes of escaping the madness into which his world has descended.
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The System of the World
by Neal Stephenson
"New York Times" bestselling author Stephenson pens the final volume in his ambitious and compelling epic of intrigue, adventure, and excitement, filled with a remarkable cast of characters in a time of genius, discovery, and change.