GREAT LINE:
As I was going to prostrate myself to his hoof, he did me the honor to raise it gently, even if detractors are pleased to think it improbable.
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Gulliver’s Travel is really four independent stories. The first, his voyage to Lilliput, which has been endlessly retold, is the simplest. The second, to a land of giants, and the third, a country ruled by academics, rise in subtlety and complexity. But the fourth part, where wise horses rule and men and women live as wild beasts, takes social and political satire to a whole new level, at once funny, cruel, and wise. Definitely not for children. it stands alone as one of the greatest works of literature ever written. You will never see life quite the same way again.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Gulliver’s Travels
GREAT LINES:
On the third night, she told him that once after a lecture they’d attended, she let him speak to the chairman of his department without telling him that he had a dab of pâté on his chin. She’d been irritated with him for some reason, and so she’d let him go on and on, about securing his fellowship for the following semester, without putting a finger to her own chin as a signal.
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This is a beautiful collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri about the lives of immigrants and first generation Americans. The plot-lines play second fiddle to the character developments, which are exquisite. Lahiri is genius at showcasing universally felt emotions – her prose is restrained yet carries tremendous weight in its simplicity. Even though her characters are mostly of Indian descent, any person who has ever felt like a foreigner or out-of-place will be able to relate. The stories can be at times sad or heavy, but Lahiri’s insights into what it is to be human make it worth it. It is ultimately a celebration of the fullness of life. If you are looking for a deep, emotional read, this is the book for you!
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Interpreter of Maladies
OPENING LINE:
The first time I saw the empty store on Blossom Street I thought of my father.
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Lydia Hoffman is a cancer survivor and the owner of the yarn shop on Blossom Street. She starts a class teaching how to make a baby blanket which three other women join. Jacqueline is recently divorced and she really dislikes her pregnant daughter-in-law. But she is hopeful that will change when she knits a baby blanket for her. Carol and her husband have been trying to get pregnant for a long time, and she thinks perhaps knitting a baby blanket will help. Alex is a younger woman who has been ordered by the court to do community service and she decides to join the class to knit a baby blanket and donate it to a worthy cause. This is the story of four individual women and their troubles. But even more, it is the story of how they come together to help each other with friendship and community as the result.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Shop on Blossom Street
GREAT LINES:
You aint got nothin left here but enemies and a mama that’s gone drive you to drink. You done burned ever bridge there is and you ain’t never gone get another boyfriend in this town and everbody know it. So don’t walk your white butt to New York, run it.
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We should all be so fortunate to have characters like Minnie, Abileen and Ms. Skeeter in our lives: so selfless they make you feel hopeful, so loving they make you feel warm and so fierce in their convictions they actually make you feel fearful and all in the face of a deep ignorance that made you feel sick. Even if you haven’t already experienced ladies like them in your life, they were well-enough developed that you grew to know them. This was an easy read even though the material was often hard to stomach, and some of the lines had me laughing out loud. Chocolate pie will never be the same!
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Help
OPENING LINE:
We had voyaged far into space and now we were returning.
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A boy is kidnapped from his aunt’s care during a trip to the planetarium at the start of this novel, which spans 15 years and several continents as the two slowly work to find each other again. The author is a poet, which shows in his luminously gorgeous prose and patent love of names and wordplay. This dreamy work is obsessed with notions of loss, fate, discovery and destiny; but it also grounds the reader with two fantastic characters both struggling to find what they are looking for while ending up exactly where they need to be.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: A Trip to the Stars
OPENING LINE:
When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake–not a very big one.
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This 1985 Pulitzer Prize winner is the story of two retired Texas rangers. In the years following the Civil War they lead one of the first cattle drives from Texas to Montana. They have rivers to cross, bandits to deal with and clashes with Native Americans. The book is real dealing with real people in the backdrop of a big open country. First, you have the friendship between Gus and Call, the two old rangers. Then Gus still has a crush on a woman from his past who the pair meet on their way to Montana. There are people trying to do good and those that are bitter. With these characters and the well-written landscapes, McMurtry has brought this period of history to life. My grandfather was a cowboy at this time in history and through that lens I could picture every thing that happens in the story.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Lonesome Dove
OPENING LINE:
I am a forty-one-year-old woman living by myself, in the same one-bedroom flat where I have always lived, in a derelict building on the outskirts of Beijing that is threatened to be demolished by government-backed real estate developers.
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This is a powerful collection of stories by local author Yiyun Li. Most are set in 20th century China and certainly there is a strong sense of time and place. But the dominant feature of the stories are the characters. Li’s main characters are outsiders, people who in various ways have positioned themselves away from their family members, co-workers and the rest of society. They often have different expectations for their lives than the people around them and in many ways they are alone. Through these people Li explores the themes of fidelity, loyalty, family, responsibility, isolation and loss. Each is victim as well as hero and their stories were so attuned to the human experience they made me ache.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
OPENING LINE:
“When men plot to rule the world,” the old man said, “they do it in plain sight.”
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In an election year, it is good to have an alternative to the daily debates, attacks, posturing and relentless pressures of the real campaign. If you need that diversion, then follow this unlikely hero, the librarian, on an entertaining and complicated romp in the final days of a presidential campaign. Part thriller and part comedy and part parody, the plot follows the librarian’s rude awaking to the dark side of Washington politics, meeting both virtuous and dicey characters along the way to saving the world. Beinhart wrote American Hero which turned into the film Wag the Dog. This book is along that line in election coverage, but a different angle. Even though written in 2004, it is relevant today.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Librarian
OPENING LINE:
They burst into the sky, every bird in creation, angry and agitated, awakened by the same primary thought, erupting in a white feathered cloudburst, anxious and graceful, angled in ever-tightening circles toward the ground, drifting close enough to touch, and then close enought to see that it wasn’t birds — it was paper.
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Brian Remy wakes to find himself lying in a pool of his own blood, from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Frighteningly, he has no memory of the incident, and this is just the first of many memory gaps for Remy. It’s only days after September 11, and Remy is a cop who was at the site that day who gives tours of The Zero to visiting politicians and celebrities. As we lurch forward with Remy through increasingly disorienting memory lapses, we discover that he has a new job with a unnamed government agency, trying to uncover a terrorist cell. Each new lucid surfacing is like joining a movie midway through, and Remy starts to fear what he may be doing during his blacked-out gaps. Walter infuses his feverish story with equal parts black humor and paranoia, and brilliantly skewers our post 9/11 war on terror.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Zero
GREAT LINES:
I have lived in Middle-earth, and so have you; and it matters to us, or you would not be reading this book, and I would not be writing this essay. All these years since Tolkien died, and yet he still reveals the world, the wide and wild world, to us.
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Even if you haven’t read what the BBC called “the most popular work of fiction of the 20th century”, this book of short essays by fantasy and science fiction writers helps to explain the power of a work of fiction to change a person’s life. The offerings range from humorous (a woman named Galadriel in a power suit) to profound (the author’s musings on immortality upon the birth of his son), to thoughtful (a woman sees a blossom in the Alps, and is reminded of elanor, the tiny but significant flower of Galadriel’s garden) with plenty of wonderfully dated memories of 1960’s afternoons in paperback book stores. These are meditations not just on Middle Earth but reflections on mortality, friendship, love, virtue, war, loyalty, power, good and evil, and duty. Nor are they literary essays, but personal accounts from successful authors musing on their very first reading of the Lord of the Rings, and how it changed their lives and writing. A “comfort” read for Tolkien fans, who will then be inspired to take another trip to Middle Earth themselves.
Check the BPL Catalog for this title: Meditations on Middle Earth