GREAT LINE:
They knew very little of the ways of the wicked world – indeed, there was no one now living in all the realm who had any actual experience in dealing with dragons and their tricks.
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You may find this book in the Children’s section, but don’t let that deter you, even if you lack a smaller one to help you read it aloud. This is a wonderfully comic tale. When an evil dragon, one Chrysophylax (or Goldguard in the Vulgar) descends on the peaceful village of Ham, Farmer Giles, who once used a blunderbuss to see off a marauding giant, is called upon to save things. Fortunately, he has a magic sword, a gift from the King (something about a giant), to aid him. Soon enough, his sword manages to bring the dragon to ground. As everybody knows, if you catch a dragon surely you ought to hold it for ransom. But when it comes to negotiating with such a wily serpent, real troubles are bound to begin. Readers with a bit of Latin and Greek will discover a whole other level of comedy.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Farmer Giles of Ham
GREAT LINE:
The feminists had divined that, who once, when she rose to speak at a meeting, had hissed and cat-called, assuming her crowning glory to be the seductive and marketable product of an inhumanely tested bottle.
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With luck, once in a lifetime a novelist can take all the pieces and fit them together and come out with an absolutely wonderful work. Possession is one of those rare books. There is beautiful storytelling as each scene works in itself, drives the fast-moving plot forward toward solving a mystery, and reveals an extraordinary understanding of literature and ideas. It begins when two young academics discover secret love letters from a long-dead Victorian poet. There are amazing characters, including a brilliant professor who has spent a career studying that poet and has produced the definitive biography, proving that here was a great man who surely lived up to his own lofty ideals. On the side, the professor has a hobby of stealing anything he can get his hands on from the poet’s life. There is also poetry and interwoven tales that expand the inner hopes and thoughts of the characters. Most of all, it is the result of a life-long appreciation of the beauty of great writing and the joy of discovery, and also of the emptiness and cruelty of academic lives devoted to the study of beauty. This is, in all senses, a mature work by an author who has loved words, stories, books, and ideas and wants to make sense of all such love.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Possession
GREAT LINE:
If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer to understanding the mystery of human life.
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Why did the great nations of Europe, enjoying the highest level of prosperity and freedom in the history of the world, suddenly throw themselves into war against each other? And why didn’t they stop before they were financially ruined, their leaders disgraced, their populations imbued with racial hatred, and 10-million of their finest young men dead on the fields of battle? Keegan, a teacher at Britain’s Sandhurst military academy, tries to make sense of it all, using episodes from the war to show how generals, politicians, and ordinary soldiers became caught in a tragic unfolding of plans they could neither foresee nor control. This is history at the highest level.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The First World War