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Chronologically:
Alphabetically:
To the Top
“From the moment I picked up your book until I laid
it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
-- Groucho Marx |
|
 Here's
more from the list of books we've read in alphabetical order for these
letters:
M, N, O, P,
Q and R
You can read the first paragraph from each of the books,
too.
M
| Title |
Author |
First
Paragraph |
| Madam
Secretary: A Memoir by Madeleine Albright |
Madeleine Albright |
I didn't want it to end. |
| Madame Bovary's Ovaries--a
Darwinian Look at Literature |
David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash |
Othello isn't just a story about a jealous
guy. Huckleberry Finn isn't just a rebellious, headstrong kid. Madame
Bovary isn't just a horny married woman. As students, we are told
about various ways to understand fiction: that Othello may also
teach us about deceit and loyalty (among other things), how Huck
will tell us about the American national character, that Madame
Bovary will help reveal the meaning of social transgression. In
addition, those who get deep and sophisticated enough may be urged
to examine what they read from various perspectives: those of Marx,
Freud, Jung, or maybe the French literary theorists Derrida or Foucault,
not to omit feminist and "queer" studies, socioeconomic
analyses, and the historical facts of each author's personal biography.
The list is nearly endless: New Criticism, old criticism, new histoiricism,
old historicism, critical theory, and sometimes crackpot theory. |
| Maus:
A Survivor's Tale:
Volume 1: My Father Bleeds History
Volume 2: : And Here My Troubles Began |
Art Spiegelman |
Together with the much-acclaimed first
volume of Spiegelman's Maus (1987--not reviewed), this unusual
Holocaust tale will forever alter the way serious readers think
of graphic narratives (i.e., comic books). For his unforgettable
combination of words and pictures, Spiegelman draws from high
and low culture, and blends autobiography with the story of his
father's survival of the concentration camps. In funny-book fashion,
the all-too-real characters here have the heads of animals--the
Jews are mice, the Nazis are rats, and the Poles are pigs--a stark
Orwellian metaphor for dehumanized relations during WW II. Much
of Spiegelman's narrative concerns his own struggle to coax his
difficult father into remembering a past he'd rather forget. What
emerges in father Vladek's tale is a study in survival; he makes
it through by luck, randomness, and cleverness. Physically strong,
he bluffs his way through the camps as a tinsmith and a shoemaker,
and also exploits his ability with languages. Every day in Auschwitz,
and later in Dachau, demands new bribes and masterly bartering.
All of this helps explain Vladek's art of survival in the present:
his cheap, miserly behavior; his disappointment over Spiegelman's
marriage to a non-Jew; his constant criticism of his own second
wife and his son; and even his inexcusable racism. Haunted by
the brother who died in the camps, Spiegelman (born in postwar
Sweden) also mourns his mother, who survived only to commit suicide
in the late 60's. Within the time span of the writing of Maus
(1978-91), Vladek died, and Spiegelman now must sort out his complex
feelings as he reflects on the success of the first volume--a
success built on the tragedy of the Holocaust. With all his doubts,
Spiegelman pushes on, realizing that his book deserves a place
in the ongoing struggle between memory and forgetting. Full of
hard-earned humor and pathos, Maus (I and II) takes your breath
away with its stunning visual style, reminding us that while we
can never forget the Holocaust, we may need new ways to remember.
From Kirkus Reviews. No first para. I borrowed this book. and
the CD-ROM. |
| Memoirs
of a Geisha |
Arthur S. Golden |
Suppose that you and I were sitting
in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at
our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had
happened a long while ago, and I said to you, “That afternoon
when I met so-and-so…was the very best afternoon of my life, and
also the very worst afternoon.” I expect you might put down your
teacup and say, “Well, now, which was it? Was it the best or the
worst? Because it can’t possibly have been both!” Ordinarily I’d
have to laugh at myself and agree with you. But the truth is that
the afternoon when I met Mr. Tanaka Ichiro really was the best
and the worst of my life. He seemed so fascinating to me, even
the fish smell on his hands was a kind of perfume. If I had never
known him, I’m sure I would not have become a geisha. |
| Middlesex |
Jeffrey Eugenides |
I was born twice: first, as a baby
girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960;
and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey,
Michigan, in August of 1974. Specialized readers may have come
across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, "Gender Identity in
5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites," published in the
Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe
you've seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly
outdated Genetics and Heredity. That's me on page 578,
standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering
my eyes. |
| Midnight in the
Garden of Good and Evil |
John Berendt |
He was tall, about fifty, with darkly
handsome, almost sinister features: a neatly trimmed mustache,
hair turning silver at the temples, and eyes so black they were
like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine—he could see out,
but you couldn’t see in. We were sitting in the living room of
his Victorian house. It was a mansion, really, with fifteen-foot
ceilings and large, well-proportioned rooms. A graceful spiral
stairway rose from the center hall toward a domed skylight. There
was a ballroom on the second floor. It was Mercer House, one of
the last of Savannah’s great houses still in private hands. Together
with the walled garden and the carriage house in back, it occupied
an entire city block. If Mercer House was not quite the biggest
private house in Savannah, it was certainly the most grandly furnished.
Architectural Digest had devoted six pages to it. A book
on the interiors of the world’s great houses featured it alongside
Sagamore Hill, Biltmore, and Chartwell. Mercer House was the envy
of house-proud Savannah. Jim Williams lived in it alone. |
| Midwives |
Bohjalian, Chris |
I used the word vulva as a child the way some kids said butt or penis
or puke. It wasn’t a swear exactly, but I knew it had an edge
to it that could stop adults cold in their tracks. Vulva
was one of those words that in every household but ours conveyed
emotion and sentiments at the same time that it suggested a simple
part of the basic human anatomy for one sex or an act—like vomiting
– that was a pretty basic bodily function. |
| The Mists of Avalon |
Marion Zimmer Bradley |
Even in high summer, Tintagel was a
haunted place; Igraine, Lady of Duke Gorlois, looked out over
the sea from the headland. As she stared into the fogs and mists,
she wondered how she would ever know when the night and day were
of equal length, so that she could keep the Feast of the New Year.
This year the spring storms had been unusually violent; night
and day the crash of the sea had resounded over the castle until
no man or woman within could sleep, and even the hounds whimpered
mournfully. |
| Monstrous
Regiment of Women |
Laurie King |
I sat back in my chair, jabbed the cap onto my pen, threw it into the drawer,
and abandoned myself to the flood of satisfaction, relief, and
anticipation that was let loose by that simple action. The satisfaction
was for the essay whose last endnote I had just corrected, the
distillation of several months’ hard work and my first effort
as a mature scholar: It was a solid piece of work, ringing true
and clear on the page. The relief I felt was not for the writing,
but for the concomitant fact that, thanks to my preoccupation,
I had survived the compulsory Christmas revels, a fête which had
reached a fever pitch in this, the last year of my aunt’s control
of what she saw as the family purse. The anticipation was for
the week of freedom before me, one entire week with neither commitments
nor responsibilities, leading up to my twenty-first birthday and
all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto. A small but
persistent niggle of trepidation tried to make itself known, but
I forestalled it by standing up and going to the chest of drawers
for clothing. |
| Moo |
Jane Smiley |
From the outside it was clear that
the building known generally as "Old Meats" had eased
under the hegemony of the horticulture department. Its southern
approach, once a featureless slope of green lawn, was now an undulating
perennial border whose two arms embraced a small formal garden
defined by a carefully clipped and fragrant boxwood hedge. In
front of that, an expanse of annuals flowed down the hillside
and spilled across flat ground in a tide of August reds, golds
and yellows. Here and there, discreetly placed experimentals tested
the climate. Right up against the windowless southern wall of
Old Meats, someone, sometime, without benefit of application,
grant, permission from administration or grounds crew, without
even the passing back and forth of a memo, someone had planted
then espaliered, a row of apricot and peach trees. In midsummer,
just at the end of summer session, they were seen to bear fruit—heavy
burnished apricots and big peaches swollen with juice that later
disappeared and never seemed to reappear on the salad bars or
the dessert bars in any of the dorms or fraternity houses. Nor
were they sold at any hort department fund-raising sale, the way
apples, Christmas trees, and bedding plants were. They just appeared
and disappeared, unnoticed by most though legendary to the few
who had stolen fruit, who kept an eye on the seed catalogues,
wondering when these cultivars, the Moo U. cultivars, might be
introduced to the open market. |
|
| 
To the Top
“Never judge a book by its movie.”
-- J. W. Eagan |
|
N
| Title |
Author |
First
Paragraph |
| Naked Once More |
Elizabeth Peters |
All across American there are strange little roads that lead nowhere. Deep-rutted
and narrow, slick with icy scum in winter, hidden by weeds in
summer, they wind over remote hills and brambled woodlands,
to end abruptly and without apparent purpose in remote spots
far from any sign of human habitation. Occasionally a clue as
to their function may appear: a rusty beer can, a scrap of plastic,
a few scattered bricks from a long-abandoned house. |
| 1984 |
George Orwell |
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks
were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his
breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through
the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough
to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. |
| News from Paraguay, The |
Lily Tuck |
For him it began with a feather. A bright blue
parrot feather that fell out of Ella Lynch's hat while she was
horseback riding one afternoon in the Bois de Boulogne. Blond,
fair-skinned and Irish, Ella was a good rider--the kind of natural
rider who rides with her ass, not her legs--and she was riding
astride on a nervous little gray thoroughbred mare. Cantering
a few paces behind Ella and her companion, Francisco Solano
Lopez was also a good rider--albeit a different sort of rider.
He rode from strength, the strength in his arms, the strength
in his thighs. Also he liked to ride big horses, horses that
measured over sixteen, seventeen hands; at home, he often rode
a big sure-footed cantankerous brown mule. Pulling up on the
reins and getting off his horse, his heavy silver spurs clanging,
Franco--as Francisco Solano Lopez was known--picked the feather
up from the ground, it briefly occurred to him that Innocencia,
his fat sister, would know what kind of parrot feather is was,
for she kept hundreds of parrots in her aviary in Asunción,
but it was Ella and not the feather that had caught Franco's
attention. |
O
|
Title |
Author |
First
Paragraph |
| One Hundred
Years of Solitude |
Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia
was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took
him to discover ice… |
|
One
True Thing |
Anna Quindlen |
Jail is not as bad
as you might imagine. When I say jail, I don’t mean prison.
Prison is the kind of place you see in old movies or public
television documentaries, those enormous gray places with guard
towers at each corner and curly strips of razor wire going round
and round like a loop-the-loop atop the high fence. Prison is
where they hit the bars with metal spoons, plan insurrection
in the yard, and take the smallest boy—the one in on a first
offense—into the shower room, while the guards pretend not to
look and leave him to find his own way out, blood trickling
palely, crimson mixed with milky white, down the backs of his
hairless thighs, the shadows at the backs of his eyes changed
forever. |
|
Orlando |
Virginia Woolf |
He—for there could
be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something
to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor
which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football,
and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks
and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a
cocoanut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had
struck it from the shoulders of a vast pagan who had started
up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now
it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased
blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the
lord who had slain him. |
| Outlander |
Diana Gabaldon |
It wasn’t a very likely
place for disappearances, at least at first glance. Mrs. Baird’s
was like a thousand other Highland bed-and-breakfast establishments
in 1945; clean and quiet, with fading floral wallpaper, gleaming
floors, and a coin-operated hot-water geyser in the lavatory.
Mrs. Baird herself was squat and easygoing, and made no objection
to Frank lining her tiny rose-sprigged parlor with the dozens
of books and papers with which he always traveled. |
|
| 
To the Top
“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one
at the end of a long day makes that day happier.”
-- Kathleen Norias
|
|
P
| Title |
Author |
First
Paragraph |
| Palace Walk |
Naguib Mahfouz |
She woke at midnight. She always woke up then without having to rely on an
alarm clock. A wish that had taken root in her awoke her with
great accuracy. For a few moments she was not sure she was awake.
Images from her dreams and perceptions mixed together in her
mind. She was troubled by anxiety before opening her eyes, afraid
sleep had deceived her. Shaking her head gently, she gazed at
the total darkness of the room. There was no clue by which to
judge the time. The street noise outside her room would continue
until dawn. She could hear the babble of voices from the coffeehouses
and bars, whether it was early evening, midnight, or just before
daybreak. She had no evidence to rely on except her intuition,
like a conscious clock hand, and the silence encompassing the
house, which revealed that her husband had not yet rapped at
the door and that the tip of his stick had not yet struck against
the steps of the staircase. |
| The Perfect Storm |
Sebastian Junger |
A soft fall rain slips down through
the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost
be licked off the air. Trucks rumble along Rogers Street and
men in t-shirts stained with fishblood shout to each other from
the decks of boats. Beneath them the ocean swells up against
the black pilings and sucks back down to the barnacles. Beer
cans and old pieces of styrofoam rise and fall and pools of
spilled diesel fuel undulate like huge iridescent jelly-fish.
The boats rock and creak against their ropes and seagulls complain
and hunker down and complain some more. Across Rogers Street
and around the back of the Crow's Nest, through the door and
up the cement stairs, down the carpeted hallway and into one
of the doors on the left, stretched out on a double bed in room
number twenty-seven with a sheet pulled over him, Bobby Shatford
lies asleep. |
| Personal History |
Katharine Graham |
My parents’ paths first crossed in
a museum on 23rd Street in New York. It was Lincoln’s
Birthday, 1908. Eugene Meyer, who was thirty-two years old,
had been in business for himself for only a few years, but had
already made several million dollars. Agnes Ernst, just twenty-one
and a recent graduate of Barnard, was strikingly beautiful.
She was earning her own living and helping to support her family
as well by her free-lance work for a newspaper, the old New
York Sun. She was also interested in the art world, which
was what brought her to the exhibit of Japanese prints. Both
her interests and her work were unusual for a woman in those
days. |
| Piano Tuner |
Daniel Mason |
It was afternoon in the office of
Colonel Killian, Directory of Operations for the Burma Division
of the British army. Edgar Drake sat by a pair of dark, rattling
heating pipes and stared out the window, watching the sweep
of rain. Across the room sat the Colonel, a broad, sunburnt
man with a shock of red hair and a thick mustache that fanned
out in combed symmetry, underlining a fierce pair of green eyes.
Behind his desk hung a a long Bantu lance and a painted shield
that still bore the scars of battle. He wore a scarlet uniform,
edged with braids of black mohair. Edgar would remember this,
for the braids reminded him of tiger's stripes, and the scarlet
made the green eyes greener. |
| The Picture of
Dorian Gray |
Oscar Wilde |
The studio was filled with the rich
odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst
the trees of the garden there came through the open door the
heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the
pink-flowering thorn. |
| The Pilot's Wife |
Anita Shreve |
She heard a knocking, and then a dog barking. Her dream left her, skittering
behind a closing door. It had been a good dream, warm and close,
and she minded. She fought the waking. It was dark in the small
bedroom, with no light yet behind the shades. She reached for
the lamp, fumbled her way up the brass, and she was thinking,
What? What? |
| Plainsong |
Kent Haruf |
Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the
kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over
the back lot where the sun was just coming up. When the sun
reached the top of the windmill, for a while he watched what
it was doing, that increased reddening of sunrise along the
steel blades and the tail vane above the wooden platform. After
a time he put out the cigarette and went upstairs and walked
past the closed door behind which she lay in bed in the darkened
guest room sleeping or not and went down the hall to the glassy
room over the kitchen where the two boys were. |
| Possession |
A S Byatt |
The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed
and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine
was missing, or, rather, protruded from amongst the leaves like
a bulky marker. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white
tape, tied in a neat bow. The librarian handed it to Roland
Michell, who was sitting waiting for it in the Reading Room
of the London Library. It had been exhumed from Locked Safe
no. 5, where it usually stood between Pranks of Priapus
and The Grecian Way of Love. It was ten in the morning,
one day in September 1986. Roland had the small single table
he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the
fireplace nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high
sunny window, through which you could see the high green leaves
of St. James’s Square. |
| Primary Colors |
Anonymous (aka Joe Klein) |
He was a big fellow, looking seriously
pale on the streets of Harlem in deep summer. I am small and
not so dark, not very threatening to Caucasians; I do not strut
my stuff. |
| The Prime of Life |
Simone de Beauvoir |
The most intoxicating aspect of my
return to Paris in Spetember, 1929, was the freedom I now possessed.
I had dreamed of it since childhood, when I played with my sister
at being a "grown-up" girl. I have recorded elsewhere
my passionate longing for it as a student. Now, suddenly, it
was mine. I was astonished to find an effortless buoyancy in
all my movements. From the moment I opened my eyes every morning
I was lost in a transport of delight. When I was about twelve
I had suffered through not having a private retreat of my own
at home. Leafing through Mon Journal I had found a story about
an English schoolgirl, and gazed enviously at the colored illustration
portraying her room. There was a desk, and a divan, and shelves
filled with books. Here, within these gaily painted walls, she
read and worked and drank tea, with no one watching her‹how
envious I felt! For the first time ever I had glimpsed a more
fortunate way of life than my own. And now, at long last, I
too had a room to myself. My grandmother had stripped her drawing
room of all its armchairs, occasional tables, and knickknacks.
I had bought some unpainted furniture, and my sister had helped
me to give it a coat of brown varnish. I had a table, two chairs,
a large chest which served both as a seat and as a hold-all,
shelves for my books. I papered the walls orange, and got a
divan to match. From my fifth-floor balcony I looked out over
the Lion of Belfort and the plane trees on the Rue Denfert-Rochereau.
I kept myself warm with an evil-smelling kerosene stove. Somehow
its stink seemed to protect my solitude, and I loved it. It
was wonderful to be able to shut my door and keep my daily life
free of other people's inquisitiveness. For a long time I remained
indifferent to the décor of my surroundings. Possibly because
of that picture in Mon Journal I preferred rooms that offered
me a divan and bookshelves, but I was prepared to put up with
any sort of retreat in a pinch. To have a door that I could
shut was still the height of bliss for me. |
| The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie |
Muriel Spark |
The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia
Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding
the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle
between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the
boyes were likely to be away. |
| Professor and the Madman, The |
Simon Winchester |
Popular myth has it that one of the most remarkable conversations in modern
literary history took place on a cool and misty late autumn
afternoon in 1896, in the small village of Crowthorne in the
county of Berkshire. |
|
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|
To the Top
"The happiest people are those who think the
most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means
of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures,
good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world.
And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness
in others."
--William Lyon Phelps
|
|
Q
|
Title |
Author |
First
Paragraph |
|
Queens' Play |
Dorothy Dunnett |
She wanted Crawford of Lymond. His nerves flinching from the first stir of
disaster, the Chief Privy Councillor understood his mistress
at last. |
R
| Title |
Author |
First
Paragraph |
| Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books |
Azar Nafisi |
In the fall of 1995, after resigning from my last academic post, I decided
to indulge myself and fulfill a dream. I chose seven of my best
and most comitted students and invited them to come to my home
every Thursday morning to discuss literarture. They were all
women--to teach a mixed class in the privacy of my home was
too risky, even if we were discussing harmless works of fiction.
One persistent male student, although barred from our class,
insisted on his rights. so he, Nima, read the assigned material,
and on special days he would come to my house to talk about
the books we were reading. |
| Red Gold |
Alan Furst |
Paris, 18 September, 1941. Casson woke in a room in a cheap hotel and smoked
his last cigarette. The window by the bed was open and the shade,
yellow and faded, bumped gently against the sill in the morning
breeze. When it moved he could see fierce blue sky, a bar of
sunlight on the lead sheeting of the roof across the courtyard.
Something in the air, he thought, a ghost of something, and
the sky was lit a certain way. So then, autumn. |
| Red Tent |
Diamant. Anita |
Their stories began with the day that my father appeared. Rachel came running
into camp, knees flying, bellowing like a calf separated from
its mother. But before anyone could scold her for acting like
a wild boy, she launched into a breathless yarn about a stranger
at the well, her words spilling out like water into sand. |
| The Road from Coorain |
Jill Ker Conway |
In her autobiography, Jill Ker Conway
writes that as a child she sought refuge from the adult concerns
and duties of her life by retiring to her swing in the eucalyptus
grove. There she "would kick furiously in order to rise
up higher and see a little farther beyond the horizon."
The Road From Coorain describes Jill Ker Conway's life until
the age of twenty-three when she leaves Australia for graduate
school at Harvard University and a life of academic honor, including
her role as the first woman president of Smith College. Dr.
Conway is a historian by training as well as by nature. Her
chronicle of her growth as she moves from an isolated childhood
on a drought-ridden sheep ranch to the center of crowded, confusing
urban life in Sydney is told with careful attention to each
emerging step of the journey. Her path to independent womanhood
winds around, between, and over the boulders of death and loss
in her family. Her father dies when she is a still a child;
her mother, unable to cope, suffers from alcoholism and depression.
Raised with British attitudes that essentially ignored the reality
of her native Australian culture, it is only in college that
Jill Ker Conway comes to recognize the necessity of studying
her country as an independent entity. Her personal evolution
comes to mirror her academic life as she realizes that she,
too, must claim her independence from her mother and familial
responsibilities. From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Kate
Boris-Brown. I borrowed this book. |
| Robber Bride, The |
Margaret Atwood |
The story of Zenia ought to begin when Zenia began.
It must have been someplace long ago and distant in space, thinks
Tony; someplace bruised, and very tangled. A European print, hand-tinted,
ochre-coloured, with dusty sunlight and a lot of bushes in it—bushes
with thick leaves and ancient twisted roots, behind which, out
of sight in the undergrowth and hinted at only by a boot protruding,
or a slack hand, something ordinary but horrifying is taking place. |
| Running with Scissors |
Augusten Burroughs |
My mother is standing in front of the bathroom mirror
smelling polished and ready; like Jean Naté, Dippity Do
and the waxy sweetness of lipstick. Her white, handgun-shpaed
blow-dryer is lying on top of the wicker clothes hamper, ticking
as it cools. She stands back and smoothes her hands down the front
of her swirling, psychedelic Pucci dress, biting the inside of
her cheek. |
|
| “Thank you for sending me
a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.”
-- Moses Hadas
To the Top |
|
Modified
03/11/07 by LRH
A Knotty Piner Production
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