by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry In The Little Prince, an unnamed narrator crashes his airplane in the middle of the Sahara Desert. With a dwindling supply of water, he works frantically to repair his craft, but is met unexpectedly by a small boy who doesn’t seem to understand the urgency of the situation. The boy questions him,…
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by Robert M. Pirsig I must say, this year in reading’s been an interesting one for me. I mean, it’s had its ups and downs––nowhere near as many books that I love, love, LOVED like last year, but not one but two where I had something akin to a religious experience while reading. The first…
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by J. D. Salinger This is a book I’ve been meaning to re-read for quite some time. I think I’ve been hesitant to pick it up mainly because of my experience doing so with another book I previously held in such high regard, The Shining. It doesn’t feel good reframing, for the worse, the way…
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by Voltaire Candide follows its titular character through trials and tribulations that take him around the globe in pursuit of Cunégonde, the woman he loves. At a young age, his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, instilled an understanding in Candide of the concept of Optimism, or a universal good in the world, and the young man takes…
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by Homer The Odyssey continues the story immediately after the sacking of Troy by the Greeks, so you can imagine it’s at least a bit exciting, picking this up so soon after finishing The Iliad. The hero, Odysseus, attempts to return to Ithaca, to his patient wife and son whom he left as an infant….
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by Homer What a time to be alive, the era of glory and warfare recounted within The Iliad. Life gave no room for softness was we know it today: You were forced to cruelty, or else be left to the whims of those without mercy. A more modern discussion of peace and harmony among men…
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by Stephen Hawking Well, here’s another one that’s been sitting on my shelf for a long time now. And I think I can be excused for being a bit intimidated by this one. I mean, it’s not that long or anything, but I was well concerned that opening A Brief History of Time would be…
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by Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is Wolfe’s account of the psychedelic adventures Ken Kesey, the author, and his band of “heads” (acid heads), the Merry Pranksters––often in their crazy hippie bus. Having met Kesey in the midst of his drug possession trials in the late ’60s, Wolfe cobbled his book together from…
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by Margaret Atwood It’s interesting to me when similar techniques employed by different authors elicit vastly different responses from me. In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, the ending is reminiscent of one such technique I loved from Omar El Akkad’s American War, in that the whole final chapter reads like a transcript from a…
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