Tag: classic
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A Love Affair by Dino Buzzati
An overlooked classic. The 1963 story of an older Italian man becoming obsessed with a younger woman. It’s well-traveled ground but I’ve never read anything like this.
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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…