This book was on a booklist of the 100 best books written, and once read, you will have to agree. It will take a while to get into it because theres a great deal of expository writing at the beginning, but stick with it and youll be introduced to some fascinating characters in the town of Middlemarch. <p> Dorothea Brooke is a young woman about to take a much older husband, determined to find purpose in her life by assisting him with his ...
Having withstood the test of time and considered the first great work of the Western tradition, The Odyssey can do well enough without introduction. <p> This translation is among the most accurate on the market. Classics professors have urged students to read this translation, the best English source available. Despite the usual popularity of the Fitzgerald translation, the Pope version provides a more literal translation with consistent ...
Utopia, written in 1516 by Thomas More, is probably one of the most important books ever written. Why?. Simply because it influenced many people, and motivated many events: it made a difference. <p> Utopia means, literally, no place. The word didnt exist until More coined it in this book. He wanted to make a critic regarding the English society of his time, but needed to cloak it under a fictional mantle due to censure. Displeasing the k ...
After having read (and loved) Jane Austens more famous novels EMMA and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, you will find MANSFIELD PARK a true delight. Fanny Price is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle as charity to her more lowly-married mother, and is raised with her cousins with the idea she needs refinement and education to become as good a woman as her lesser social standing will allow. Fanny is nervous and self-effacing, struggling with her new situa ...
A young country lass is abandoned in London without any money or supervision. Having come there with the intention of entering into service, she is instead unwittingly swept into prostitution because she is so lovely and there is a strong market for maidenhead. By dumb luck, Fanny manages to hold onto her virginity just long enough to give it to Charles, who remains the love of her life despite her subsequent dalliances. Fanny and Charles are se ...
This book will turn out to be one the best gifts youll ever get. Jeromes witty ramblings are the funniest you will ever read. Mark Twain comes close to Jeromes style but is a poor second. Jerome finds humor in the commonplace and the every day occurrences which all of us, even a good 100 years later, can identify with. <p> Starting with his self-diagnosis of every ailment, excepting house-maids knee, to his singular insights into his fr ...
A highly comic romp with the English gentry, you know, those fellows of Eton, living in Manors (and having impeccable ones,I am told), with little to do but receive social approval for whatever they do; all with the quietly dignified, prescient aid of their butler. Pleasant enough, but P.G. Wodehouse masterfully parodies the upper crust and their sometimes foolish pretences as he skewers one Bertram Bertie Wooster (A lesser man, caught in this a ...
For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succes de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and arousing novel. <p> Madame Bovary is the greatest novel written by Gustave Flaubert. The 185 ...
Not everybody knows Faust(us). But a lot do. Most readers know this tragic personnage who allied himself with the devil and finally paid the price for his betrayal of God from a famous play written by J.W. Goethe. It was him who wrote the most famous version of Fausts history. But he wasnt the only dramatist who considered this lost magician worth a tragedy. Exactly 2 centuries and 1 year before Goethe published his work, a play by the Englishma ...
