some good books in no order
Discover a curated list of some good books in no particular order. Explore must-read titles across genres to find your next favorite read.
Item Not Found
ID: 0140445277
(Type: books)
Book
Spring Snow
by Yukio Mishima
"A classic of Japanese literature" (Chicago Sun-Times) and the first novel in the masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, set in 1912 Tokyo, featuring an aspiring lawyer who believes he has met the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend. It is 1912 in Tokyo, and the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders—rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power. Shigekuni Honda, an aspiring lawyer and his childhood friend, Kiyoaki Matsugae, are the sons of two such families. As they come of age amidst the growing tensions between old and new, Kiyoaki is plagued by his simultaneous love for and loathing of the spirited young woman Ayakura Satoko. But Kiyoaki’s true feelings only become apparent when her sudden engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion—and leads to a love affair both doomed and inevitable.
Book
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece, the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, and in doing so captures a breathtaking tapestry of late-nineteenth-century Russian society. As Matthew Arnold wrote in his celebrated essay on Tolstoy, "We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life."
Item Not Found
ID: 0451517938
(Type: books)
Book
Mao II
by Don DeLillo
WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • A profound novel about art, terror, masses, and the individual, from the National Book Award–winning author of White Noise, “one of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America” (The New York Times) “This novel’s a beauty. A vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing.”—Thomas Pynchon Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet hostage in Beirut. As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, his dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott’s lover—and Bill’s. An extraordinary novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist, Mao II is the work of an ingenious writer at the height of his powers.
Item Not Found
ID: 0156996936
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 1567313744
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0140131965
(Type: books)
Book
Hopscotch
by Julio Cortazar
"Cortazar's masterpiece ... The first great novel of Spanish America" (The Times Literary Supplement) • Winner of the National Book Award for Translation in 1967, translated by Gregory Rabassa Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.
Item Not Found
ID: 1883011698
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0802111947
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0684867850
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0520067452
(Type: books)
Book
The Cairo Trilogy
by Najīb Maḥfūẓ
A series of historical fiction based on the life of a family living in Cairo during the British Colonial period and afterward.
Book
The Border Trilogy
by Cormac McCarthy
From the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winner and one of America's greatest writers: available together in one volume, the three novels of Cormac McCarthy's award-winning and bestselling Border Trilogy constitute a genuine American epic. "An American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century." —San Francisco Chronicle Beginning with All the Pretty Horses and continuing through The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, McCarthy chronicles the lives of two young men coming of age in the Southwest and Mexico, poised on the edge of a world about to change forever. Hauntingly beautiful, filled with sorrow and humor, The Border Trilogy is a masterful elegy for the American frontier. Look for Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Passenger, coming October '22.
Book
The Dharma Bums
by Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac’s classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of nature “In [On the Road] Kerouac’s heroes were sensation seekers; now they are seekers after truth . . . the novel often attains a beautiful dignity.”—Chicago Tribune First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac’s most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans—mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer—whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco’s Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.
Item Not Found
ID: 8420633127
(Type: books)