God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

by Kurt Vonnegut After taking control of the Rosewater Foundation, Eliot Rosewater dedicates his time and the copious amounts of money in his trust to helping average Americans, no strings attached. Some people––including his father, Senator Lister Ames Rosewater, the man who started the Foundation as a way to prevent tax collectors from getting at…
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Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius Not long ago, I was reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors to Perception with the full intention of reviewing it, but I was struggling to come up with anything meaningful for discussion. I found the book to be extraordinary in many ways, even important enough to help me through some difficult times, but…
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The Essential Rumi

translated by Coleman Barks Jelaluddin Rumi was a sufi mystic who lived in Persia and Anatolia in the thirteenth century. I’ve read not only that his works have been hugely influential on Middle Eastern literature, but also that translations of these poems remain extremely popular in the West––as I feel they should be after experiencing…
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Tarzan of the Apes

by Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes is the book that introduced the world to the now all but ubiquitously known king of the jungle. After the death of his parents in a remote region of Africa, the infant Tarzan is raised by a great ape, taught to survive in the wild. As he…
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Fight Club

by Chuck Palahniuk Though it feels at least a bit silly to write up a synopsis for a book as famous as Fight Club, a review without a synopsis conversely feels incomplete. (Those who don’t believe me are welcome to check out some of my older reviews in which I believed synopses to be frivolous.)…
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The Good Soldier Schweik

by Jaroslav Hašek The Good Soldier Schweik is said to be one of the most famous pieces of Czech literature that exists, if not the most famous. It’s at least the most widely-translated and far-reaching novel to come out of the region, with lasting influences on language and culture in the Czech Republic and elsewhere….
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Scoop

by Evelyn Waugh Understanding the importance of getting the best man to cover the impending civil war in the small African nation of Ishmaelia, Lord Copper, owner of the Daily Beast newspaper, follows the advice of a dinner companion to enlist novelist John Boot to go. Miscommunication and misunderstanding causes his staff to send the…
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The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe This one’s been on my shelf for a long time now. It seemed like a timely thing after reading a Paul Wells article suggesting that The Bonfire of the Vanities was the key to understanding the Donald Trump mentality, at least early on in his presidency. However, the book’s long, so it…
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Angela’s Ashes

by Frank McCourt Angela’s Ashes is McCourt’s famous memoir describing his staggering poverty growing up in Ireland in the 1930s. While this may at first glance sound similar to something I recently reviewed, I assure you this is a different thing entirely, both with regard to style and focus. McCourt chronicles a life of severe…
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The Diary of a Young Girl

by Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl is Frank’s personal diary kept during the two years spent in hiding in a small apartment in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during WWII. Upon hearing the Dutch government was seeking out personal accounts of the conflict for later publication, she wrote and rewrote many passages with the intention…
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