good books

Recently these books have enlarged my world

The Leopard - de Lampadusa * a masterpiece

The Conscience of Zeno - Italo Svevo * a classic

Black Boy - Richard Wright * a black man grows up in the south in the 1930s, and moves to the north. Powerful.

Bullet Park - John Cheever * modern suburbia with a surreal twist

Darker Muses, the poet Nero - Dezso Kosztolanyi * highly original take on the emperor Nero, Seneca and the perils of art (Hungarian Classics)

Independence Day - Richard Ford * suburban guy finds his way out of his "Existence period". Long, and wonderfully ordinary. Pulitzer prize.

Legends of the Fall - Jim Harrison * masterful trio of novellas, 2 000 times better than the film. Magnificent writing.

Palace Walk - Naguib Mahfouz * portrait of an Islamic family in 1920s Cairo. Strong melodrama by Nobel laureate with a light touch.

The Passion - Jeanette Winterson * magical web of stories around a French soldier and a Venetian boatswoman in the age of Napoleon.

The Power & the Glory - Graham Green * drunken priest on the run.

The Second Coming - Walker Percy * love story between ageing businessman and escaped mental patient

Water Music - T. Coraghessan Boyle * richly textured adventures of Ned Rise & Mungo Park set in late eighteenth century London & West Africa.

The Europeans - Henry James * the arrival of Europeans amongst their American kin yields happy and unhappy love stories. Never thought I'd like a character named Gertrude.

Memoirs of a Geisha : A Novel - Arthur Golden * beautiful and moving fictional auto-biography of a 20th century geisha, astoundingly written by a male westerner. Reminds me of Jane Austen. Rumor has it Spielberg bought the film rights.

The Beach - Alex Garland * page-turning adventure about the journey to a "Traveller's" Eden, and the way a modern paradise turns "beaucoup bad". Richard, the main character is a post-modern hero: witty, alone, amoral, media-bred with a bizarre yen for the Vietnam war. Danny Boyle should do it justice in his film adaptation.

High Fidelity - Nick Hornby * laugh-out-loud funny. A hapless rock music afficionado muddles through a break-up with his girl-friend and the ensuing mid-life crisis. It isn't fair that women can read this book and find out this much about men. Also check out Hornby's newest

 

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Neuromancer - Count Zero - Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson * ground-breaking trilogy that defined cyberspace

Parable of the Sower - Octavia E Butler * sci-fi with a mystical bent

 

Collected Stories - Carson McCullers

The Poetry & Short Stories of Dorothy Parker * it doesn't get any more elegant and sober than this.

 

Black Dahlia - James Elroy * my favorite of the corrupt 50s LAPD series

Killer on the Run - James Elroy * chilling autobiography of serial killer

The Last Good Kiss - James Crumley

Georges Simenon * the Inspecteur Maigret novels of course, but also try the non-Maigret stories like La Mort de Belle, L'Escalier de Fer, Feux Rouges

A Hell of a Woman - Jim Thompson * Thompson is a major novelist/screenwriter. Hard-boiled deceptively simple prose. This story of an affect-less murderer was made into the film Série Noire.

A Face at the Window - Dennis McFarland * Story of a man's fascination and obsession with a ghost during a London holiday.

amazon's excellent book search

on-line books

zoetrope's all story site

Mason West's Great Books links

The complete works of Shakespeare at MIT

Chapter one has the first chapters of some books on-line

Read any good books lately?

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