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Chronologically:
Alphabetically:
To the Top
"For books are more than books. They are the
life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived
and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives."
- Amy Lowell (1874 - 1925) |
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Here's more from the list of books we've read in alphabetical
order for these letters:
G, H, I, J,
K, and L
You can read the first paragraph from each of the books,
too.
G
| Title |
Author |
First
Paragraph |
| Girl With a Pearl Earring |
Tracy Chevalier |
From Amazon: With
precisely 35 canvases to his credit, the Dutch painter Johannes
Vermeer represents one of the great enigmas of 17th-century art.
The meager facts of his biography have been gleaned from a handful
of legal documents. Yet Vermeer's extraordinary paintings of domestic
life, with their subtle play of light and texture, have come to
define the Dutch golden age. His portrait of the anonymous Girl
with a Pearl Earring has exerted a particular fascination for
centuries--and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart
of Tracy Chevalier's second novel of the same title.
Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on Vermeer's
prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's
quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows.
First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate
with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and
ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model. Chevalier vividly
evokes the complex domestic tensions of the household, ruled over
by the painter's jealous, eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn
mother-in-law. At times the relationship between servant and master
seems a little anachronistic. Still, Girl with a Pearl Earring
does contain a final delicious twist.
Throughout, Chevalier cultivates a limpid, painstakingly
observed style, whose exactitude is an effective homage to the
painter himself. Even Griet's most humdrum duties take on a high
if unobtrusive gloss:
I came to love grinding the things he brought
from the apothecary--bones, white lead, madder, massicot--to see
how bright and pure I could get the colors. I learned that the
finer the materials were ground, the deeper the color. From rough,
dull grains madder became a fine bright red powder and, mixed
with linseed oil, a sparkling paint. Making it and the other colors
was magical. |
| A
Good Scent From a Strange Mountain Stories |
Robert Olen Butler |
I have no hatred
in me. I’m almost certain of that. I fought for my country long
enough to lose my wife to another man, a cripple. This was because
even though I was alive, I was dead to her, being far away. Perhaps
it bothers me a little that his deformity was something he was
born with and not earned in the war. But even that doesn’t matter.
In the end, my country itself was lost and I am no longer there
and the two of them are surely suffering, from what I read in
the papers about life in a unified Vietnam. They mean nothing
to me, really. It seems strange even to mention them like this,
and it is stranger still to speak of them before I speak of the
man who suffered the most complicated feeling I could imagine.
It is he who makes me feel sometimes that I am sitting with my
legs crossed in an attitude of peace and with an acceptance of
all that I’ve been taught about the suffering that comes from
desire. |
| A
Great Deliverance |
Elizabeth
George |
This
extraordinarily well-reviewed first novel introduces Scotland
Yard's Inspector Thomas Lynley and his assistant, Barbara Havers,
as they investigate a brutal murder. Publisher's Quotes. No first
para. I borrowed this book. |
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The
Great Gatsby |
F. Scott Fitzgerald |
In my younger and
more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve
been turning over in my mind ever since.“Whenever you feel like
criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the
people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
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To the Top
“Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding
thought.”
-- Sir Arthur Helps
To the Top
"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,
and some are to be chewed and digested." - Sir Francis Bacon (1561
- 1626)
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H
| Title |
Author |
First
Paragraph |
| Hanna's Daughters |
Marianne Fredriksson |
Her mind was as clear as a winter’s day, a day as quiet and shadowless as
if snow had just fallen. Harsh sounds penetrated, the clatter
of dropped enamel bowls and cries. It frightened her. Like the
weeping from the next bed slicing into the whiteness. |
| Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, A |
Dave Eggers |
Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy,
the trees calligraphic. Exhaust from the dryer billows out of
the house and up, breaking apart while tumbling into the white
sky. |
| Hours, The |
Michael Cunningham |
The Hours is both an homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even
as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he
intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women.
One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a
dream that will soon lead to Mrs. Dalloway. In the present, on a beautiful June day
in Greenwich Village, 52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan is planning
a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. And in Los
Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant and unsettled, does her
best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but can't seem to
stop reading Woolf. These women's lives are linked both by the
1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each
keeps returning to. Clarissa is to eventually realize:
There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem,
against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything
we've ever imagined.... Still, we cherish the city, the morning;
we hope, more than anything, for more.
As Cunningham moves between the three women, his transitions are seamless.
One early chapter ends with Woolf picking up her pen and composing
her first sentence, "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the
flowers herself." The next begins with Laura rejoicing over
that line and the fictional universe she is about to enter. Clarissa's
day, on the other hand, is a mirror of Mrs. Dalloway's--with,
however, an appropriate degree of modern beveling as Cunningham
updates and elaborates his source of inspiration. Clarissa knows
that her desire to give her friend the perfect party may seem
trivial to many. Yet it seems better to her than shutting down
in the face of disaster and despair. Like its literary inspiration,
The Hours is a hymn to consciousness and the beauties and
losses it perceives. It is also a reminder that, as Cunningham
again and again makes us realize, art belongs to far more than
just "the world of objects." --Kerry Fried –
Amazon.com |
| Housekeeping |
Marilynne Robinson |
My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister,
Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and
when she died, of the sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster,
and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher. Through
all of these generations of elders we lived in one house, my grandmother's
house, built for her by her husband, Edmund Foster, an employee
of the railroad, who escaped this world years before I entered it.
It was he who put us down in this unlikely place. He had grown up
in the Middle West, in a house dug out of the ground, with windows
just at earth level and just at eye level, so that from without,
the house was a mere mound, no more a human stronghold than a grave,
and from within, thd perfect horizontality of the world in that
place fore-shortened the view so severely that the horizon seemed
to circumscribe the sod house and nothing more. So my grandfather
began to read what he could find of travel literature, journals
of expeditions to the mountains of Africa, to the Alps, the Andes,
the Himalayas, the Rockies. He bought a box of colors and copied
a magazine lithograph of a Japanese painting of Fujiyama. He painted
many more mountains, none of them identifiable, if any of them were
real. They were all suave cones or mounds, single or in heaps or
clusters, green, brown, or white, depending on the season, but always
snowcapped, these caps being pink, white, or gold, depending on
the time of day. In one large painting he had put a bell-shaped
mountain in the very foreground and covered it with meticulously
painted trees, each of which stood out at right angles to the ground,
where it grew exactly as the nap stands out on folded plush. Every
tree bore bright fruit, and showy birds nested in the boughts, and
every fruit and bird was plumb with the warp in the earth. Oversized
beasts, spotted and striped, coud be seen running unimpeded up the
right side and unhastened down the left. Whether the genius of this
painting was ignorance or fancy I never could decide. |
| Howard's End |
E.M. Forster |
One may as well begin with Helen's letters
to her sister. |
| House of Sand and Fog |
Andre Dubus III |
From Amazon: Andre Dubus III wastes no time in capturing the dark side of the immigrant
experience in America at the end of the 20th century. House of
Sand and Fog opens with a highway crew composed of several nationalities
picking up litter on a hot California summer day. Massoud Amir
Behrani, a former colonel in the Iranian military under the Shah,
reflects on his job-search efforts since arriving in the U.S.
four years before: "I have spent hundreds of dollars copying
my credentials; I have worn my French suits and my Italian shoes
to hand-deliver my qualifications; I have waited and then called
back after the correct waiting time; but there is nothing."
The father of two, Behrani has spent most of the money he brought
with him from Iran on an apartment and furnishings that are too
expensive, desperately trying to keep up appearances in order
to enhance his daughter's chances of making a good marriage. Now
the daughter is married, and on impulse he sinks his remaining
funds into a house he buys at auction, thus unwittingly putting
himself and his family on a trajectory to disaster. The house,
it seems, once belonged to Kathy Nicolo, a self-destructive alcoholic
who wants it back. What starts out as a legal tussle soon escalates
into a personal confrontation--with dire results.
Dubus tells his tragic tale from the viewpoints of the
two main adversaries, Behrani and Kathy. To both of them, the
house represents something more than just a place to live. For
the colonel, it is a foot in the door of the American dream; for
Kathy, a reminder of a kinder, gentler past. In prose that is
simple yet evocative, House of Sand and Fog builds to its inevitable
denouement, one that is painfully dark but unfailingly honest. |
I
| Title |
Author |
First
Paragraph |
| In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner |
Elizabeth George |
Julian Britton was a man who knew that his life thus far had amounted to
nothing. He bred his dogs, he managed the crumbling ruin that
was his family’s estate, and daily he tried to lecture his father
away from the bottle. That was the extent of it. He hadn’t been
a success at anything save pouring gin down the drain, and now,
at twenty-seven years of age, he felt branded by failure. But
he couldn’t allow that to affect him tonight. Tonight he had
to prevail. |
| In the Presence of the
Enemy |
Elizabeth George |
Charlotte Bowen thought she was dead. She
opened her eyes into cold and darkness. The Cold was beneath
her, feeling just like the ground in her mother’s garden planter,
where the never-stop drips from the outdoor tap made a patch
of damp that was green and smelly. The darkness was everywhere.
Black pushed against her like a heavy blanket, and she strained
her eyes against it, trying to force out of the endless nothing
a shape that might tell her she wasn’t in a grave. She didn’t
move at first. She didn’t reach out either fingers or toes because
she didn’t want to feel the sides of the coffin because she
didn’t want to know that death was like this when she’d thought
there’d be saints and sunlight and angels, with the angels sitting
on swings playing harps. |
| In
the Time of the Butterflies |
Julia Alvarez |
She is plucking her bird of paridise of
its dead branches, leaning around the plant every time she hears
a car. The woman wil never find the old house behind the hedge
of towering hibiscus at the bend of the dirt road. Not a gringa
dominicana in a rented car with a road map asking for street
names! Dedé had taken the call over at the little museum
this morning. |
| Into the Wild |
Jon Krakauer |
Jim Gallien had driven four miles out of Fairbanks when he spotted the hitchhiker
standing in the snow beside the road, thumb raised high, shivering
the gray Alaska dawn. He didn’t appear to be very old: eighteen,
maybe nineteen at most. A rifle protruded from the young man’s
backpack, but he looked friendly enough; a hitchhiker with a
Remington semiautomatic isn’t the sort of thing that gives motorists
pause in the forty-ninth state. Gallien steered his truck on
to the shoulder and told the kid to climb in. |
| Into Thin Air |
Jon Krakauer |
Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal,
I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against
the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet.
I understood on some dim, detached level that the sweep of earth
beneath my feet was a spectacular sight. I’d been fantasizing
about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany
it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, actually
standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn’t summon
the energy to care. |
| Is Sex Necessary? or Why You
Feel The Way You Do |
James Thurber & E.B. White |
In no other civilized nation are the biological aspects
of love so distorted and transcended by emphasis upon its sacredness
as they are in the United States of America. In China it's all
biology. In France it's a mixture of biology and humor. In America
it's half, or two-thirds, psyche. The Frenchman's idea,
by and large, is to get the woman interested in him as a male.
The American idea is to point out, first of all, the great and
beautiful part which the stars and the infinite generally, play
in Man's relationship to women. The French, Dutch, Brazilians,
Danes, etc., can proceed in their amours on a basis entirely divorced
from the psyche. The Chinese give it no thought at all,
and never have given it any thought. The American would be lost
without the psyche, lost and a little scared. |
| Island at the Center of the World |
Russell Shorto |
On a late summer's day in the year 1608, a gentleman of London made his way
across that city. He was a man of ambition, intellect, arrogance,
and drive--in short, a man of his age. Like our own, his was
an era of expanding horizons and a rapidly shrinking world,
in which the pursuit of individual dreams led to new discoveries,
which in turn led to newer and bigger dreams. His complicated
personality--including periodic fits of brooding passivity that
all but incapacitated him--was built around an impressive self-confidence,
and at this moment he was almost certainly convinced that the
meeting he was headed toward would be of historic importance.
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To the Top
“Most new books are forgotten within a year, especially
by those who borrow them.”
--Evan Esar |
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L
| Title |
Author |
First
Paragraph |
| La Cucina -- A Novel of Rapture |
Lily Prior |
Tip the flour in a heap on the table. The old oak table, legacy of Nonna
Calzino, smoothed to a brilliant luster by all the years of
daily use. Not too much flour. Not too little. Just the right
amount. Fine flour milled from durum wheat by Papa Grazzi at
Mascali. Sprinkle in some sea salt, a good measure. Add some
fresh eggs and some extra egg yolks, sufficient for the amount
of flour, and also some good olive oil and a very little cold
water. |
| Leaves of Grass |
Walt Whitman |
From
the intro: America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or
amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions…accepts
the lesson with calmness…is not so impatient as has been supposed
that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature
while the life which served its requirements has passed into
the new life of the new forms…perceives that the corpse is slowly
borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house…perceives
that it waits a little while in the door…that it was fittest
for its days…that its action has descended to the stalwart and
well-shaped heir who approaches…and that he shall be fittest
for his days.
From the first poem, Song of Myself:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. |
| Legs |
William Kennedy |
"I really don’t think
he’s dead," I said to my three very old friends. |
| Liar’s
Club |
Mary Karr |
In this funny, razor-edged
memoir, Mary Karr, a prize-winning poet and critic, looks back
at her upbringing in a swampy East Texas refinery town with
a volatile, defiantly loving family. She recalls her painter
mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip into
psychosis; a fist swinging father who spun tales with his cronies
- dubbed the Liars' Club; and a neighborhood rape when she was
eight. An inheritance was squandered, endless bottles emptied,
and guns leveled at the deserving and undeserving. With a row
authenticity stripped of self pity,and a poet's eye for the
lyrical detail, Karr shows us a "terrific family of liars
and drunks...redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth." Publisher's
Quotes. No first para. I borrowed this book. |
| Like
Water for Chocolate |
Laura Esquivel |
Take care to chop the onion
fine. To keep from crying when you chop it (which is so annoying!);
I suggest you place a little bit on your head. The trouble with
crying over an onion is that once the chopping gets you started
and the tears begin to well up, the next thing you know you
can’t stop. I don’t know whether that’s ever happened to you,
but I have to confess it’s happened to me, many times. Mama
used to say it was because I was especially sensitive to onions,
like my great-aunt, Tita. |
| Lincoln: A Novel |
Gore Vidal |
Elihu B. Washburne opened his gold watch. The spidery
hands showed five minutes to six. |
| Little
Women |
Louisa May Alcott |
"Christmas won’t be Christmas
without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. |
| Lolita |
Vladimir Nabokov |
Lolita, light of my life, fire
of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue
taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three,
on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. |
| Look Homeward, Angel |
Thomas Wolfe |
A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch
is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania,
and thence into the hills that shut in Altamount over the proud
coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel,
is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic
in a dusty world. |
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