Don Quixote (Part I, 1605 & Part II, 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes
In all the literature in all the world, never was there a character like Don Quixote to have predicted his own fame.
Tag: great book reviews
Candide (1759) by Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet]
By keeping it to a much smaller scale, Voltaire is able to enforce magnetic and grandiose ideas in a line equivalent to a line in poetry.
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*** 100th Post *** WHY I WRITE: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (1998) edited by Will Blythe
Writers write to feed that demon-babe who cries out from the misery the world has inflicted upon it. Hemingway and Orwell wanted to use their gifts to help change the world for the better. And the world, I believe, is glad they did.
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Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley
Many readers who cross the literary environs and pages of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818) will close the last pages of the book and consider Victor Frankenstein as one who is tragically flawed.
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Aspects of the Novel (1927) by E.M. Forster
Even though E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel was first written and used for lectures inside the classroom at Trinity College, Cambridge, I cannot help but to imagine sitting in a stuffy classroom, loosening my collar, briefly staring out the window onto a sunny spring day in 1927 only to be drawn back to a powerful sermon concerning the craft of writing, given by a professional who knew what he was talking about.
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Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy
In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy provides the reader with an overwhelming experience of cowboys roaming the range in search of scalps, either Mexican or American Indians.
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The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell is the book that awakened in writers and storytellers in publishing and in screenwriting to the larger scope of mythology as metaphor and to the underlining structure of stories.
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The Masks of God, Vol. II: Oriental Mythology (1962) by Joseph Campbell
The Masks of God: Vol. II, Oriental Mythology (1962) by Joseph Campbell is again one of those marathons of the mind.
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The Spies of Warsaw (2008) by Alan Furst
From there, the reader follows Mercier as he sways a German named Halbach to spy against his country. By book’s end, Mercier is able to smuggle top secret documents out of Germany but is promoted as punishment and ordered out of the country.
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Terry Fox Fun Run (2013) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
A fun run in Saigon
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Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (2008) by Robin Wright
”The Constitutional Rebellion of 1905-1911 forced the weak Qajar dynasty to agree to Iran’s first constitution and parliament. Foreshadowing the 1979 revolution, the revolt was launched by the same powerful troika–the clergy, bazaar merchants, and the intelligentsia–that would come together again later in the century. Their goal was to curtail the monarchy’s power.”
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Techno-Culture and the Future of Education
Immediately there is a question of metaphor in the title itself. ”A day made of glass” has an untold number of connotations. First, glass can either be extremely durable (as advertised in the video) but it can also be fragile. The future itself, as presented in the video, would be in a delicate state, or flux, of durability and destruction.
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50 Great Short Stories (1952) edited by Milton Crane
The collection starts with a bang with ”The Garden Party” (1922) by Katherine Mansfield and then tumbles its way through some well-known stories that are usually read in high school and college. There’s Hemingway’s ”The Three-Day Blow” (1925), E.M. Forster’s ”The Other Side of the Hedge” (1947), Henry James’s ”Brooksmith” (1892), Rudyard Kipling’s ”The Courting of Dinah Shadd” (1899) and Alexander Poushkin’s ”The Shot” (1894) translated by T. Keane.
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Atonement (2001) by Ian McEwan
”At first, when she pushed open the door and stepped in, she saw nothing at all. The only light was from a single green-glass desk lamp which illuminated little more than the tooled leather surface on which it stood. When she took another few steps she saw them, dark shapes in the furthest corner. “
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The Open Boat (1897) by Stephen Crane
”The welcome of the land to the men from the sea was warm and generous, but a still and dripping shape was carried slowly up the beach, and the land’s welcome for it could only be the different and sinister hospitality of the grave.”
