Tag: classic
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Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Orwell’s classic is, well, classic.
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Money by Martin Amis
Amis’ most popular work stands up very well. Edgy and funny, with a weird relevance even after all these years.
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Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The preamble: My paternal grandparents’ basement was a cultural goldmine. They raised nine(!) kids in a small house (I think any house is a small house when there’s 9 kids in it), and all the books and records that the kids didn’t take when they moved out, wound up mixed up in the basement —…
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Adulthood Rites by Octavia E. Butler
I was assigned Dawn in an English class in university in the late 1990s. It blew me away and I was instantly a Butler fan. I haven’t read this one in more than 20 years, and it stands up as well as any of Butler’s other works. It’s calm, thoughtful, and full of ideas. I…
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Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
I am way late to the Ray Bradbury party. I’ve been reading old sci-fi since I was young, but other than Fahrenheit 451 in grade 10 I never opened another book of his until a couple of years ago. Don’t be like me, start today. Start with this one or Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury is the…
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The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
I get the significance of this, and I can see why it was a big deal. I am sure that if you’re a devotee of the genre, this would be fascinating. To unsophisticated me though, it was a decent way to kill a few hours. I’ll be more likely to pick up other Raymond Chandler…
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Foundation by Isaac Asimov
I read this in high school in the 1990s. It really holds up. A classic among classics, really. Like The Martian Chronicles, this originally was a bunch of short stories. When you look at the dates that these stories were published, the ideas here are eons ahead of their time. Looking forward to the next one.
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
This was wild. It read like a fairy tale, and also like a waking nightmare. Each sentence was perfect, but as a whole the thing will scar you for life. It goes a lot deeper than it first appears to, chasing ideas of how scent works on a subconscious level. But also it is just…
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Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
This was challenging and excellent. For the first hundred pages or so, I constantly felt like I wasn’t paying close enough attention, then it all came into focus and took off like a rocket. Rushdie’s writing is dense and demanding. Every day, I had to talk myself into picking this up. Then as soon as…
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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Picked this up shortly after reading The Poisonwood Bible, and you can see the influence this book had on it. Parts of Kingsolver’s book feel like the same story told from the opposing perspective. No doubt that was Kingsolver’s intent, and she did it well. Anyway, this is great – classics are often classic for a…