I want to read this book
I read this book
Isaac Asimov, 1950
I, Robot
Isaac Asimov, 1950
GenevaBookClub: The three laws of Robotics: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm 2) A robot must obey orders givein to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. With these three, simple directives, Isaac Asimov changed our perception of robots forever when he formulated the laws governing their behavior. In I, Robot, Asimov chronicles the development of the robot through a series of interlinked stories: from its primitive origins in the present to its ultimate perfection in the not-so-distant future--a future in which humanity itself may be rendered obsolete.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
John le Carré, 1974
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John le Carré, 1974
GenevaBookClub: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the climax of the series of Cold War espionage novels written by British author and former spy John le Carré. As in the previous books in the series, the protagonist is George Smiley, a taciturn, middle-aged intelligence officer who has been in and out of the "Circus" (MI6) more times than most people can count. But when the head of the Circus, aka Control, sends his best field agent behind the Iron Curtain to learn the identity of a mole within the upper echelon of the Circus things go very badly and the mole escapes detection again.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1932
Journey to the end of the night
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1932
GenevaBookClub: Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Albert Camus, 1947
The plague
Albert Camus, 1947
GenevaBookClub: A gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes a omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.
Rated By 2 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
GenevaBookClub: Through the beloved Billy Pilgrim, we see the central themes of Vonnegut’s humanism along with his satirical take on how disgusting it is when humans don’t use their (limited) free will to prevent simple atrocities. A great example of how we use humor to deal with hardship, and the conflict between the way heroism is conveyed through stories for actions in situations that perhaps could have been avoided altogether. “So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
John Steinbeck, 1937
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck, 1937
GenevaBookClub: Of Mice and Men is the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, that move from place to place in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in California. It is a frequently banned book, risky, controversial, and modern. It asks, and pretty much answers, all the big questions. Does prejudice suck? Yes; Are we all prejudiced? Yes. ; Are we each responsible for the welfare of other people? Yes.; Is killing someone ever OK? Yes. ; Is euthanasia preferable to a living Hell? Yes.; Are men and women different? Yes, and then again, no. ; Is sex scary? It can be. Even when it costs $2.50. Especially when it costs $2.50. ; Is having a dream a bad idea? Maybe yes, if you’re within certain groups of our society.; Is this the opposite of the American Dream? Well, now that you mention it.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov, 1928
And Quiet Flows the Don
Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov, 1928
GenevaBookClub: The novel deals with the life of the Cossacks living in the Don River valley during the early 20th century, just prior to World War I. The book deals not only with the struggles and suffering of the Cossacks, but the landscape itself is vividly brought to life. And Quiet Flows the Don is an epic picture of Russian life during a time of crisis and examines it through political, military, romantic, and civilian lenses.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Ian Fleming, 1957
From Russia With Love
Ian Fleming, 1957
GenevaBookClub: This, the fifth Bond novel, was Fleming's last chance to rescue what was seen by his publishers as a series that had run its course. It is different to all of the previous novels in its structure and its level of intensity, and it set the tone for all the Bond novels that followed. It also lead, due its huge success and critical acclaim, to the creation of the Bond movie franchise.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Ralph Ellison, 1952
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison, 1952
GenevaBookClub: First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison's nightmare journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on the minds of both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be. As he journeys from the Deep South to the streets and basements of Harlem, from a horrifying "battle royal" where black men are reduced to fighting animals, to a Communist rally where they are elevated to the status of trophies, Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist ushers readers into a parallel universe that throws our own into harsh and even hilarious relief. Suspenseful and sardonic, narrated in a voice that takes in the symphonic range of the American language, black and white, Invisible Man is one of the most audacious and dazzling novels of our century.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Adam Johnson, 2012
The Orphan Master's Son
Adam Johnson, 2012
GenevaBookClub: he book deals with intertwined themes of propaganda, identity and state power in North Korea. The novel was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Jun Do is The Orphan Master's Son, a North Korean citizen with a rough past who is working as a government-sanctioned kidnapper when we first meet him. He is hardly a sympathetic character, but sympathy is not author Johnson's aim. In a totalitarian nation of random violence and bewildering caprice's poor, gray place that nonetheless refers to itself as "the most glorious nation on earth" an unnatural tension exists between a citizen's national identity and his private life. Through Jun Do's story we realize that beneath the weight of oppression and lies beats a heart not much different from our own one that thirsts for love, acceptance, and hope, and that realization is at the heart of this shockingly believable, immersive, and thrilling novel.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962
GenevaBookClub: The Gulag, the Stalinist labour camps to which millions of Russians were condemned for political deviation, has become a household word in the West. This is due to the accounts of many witnesses, but most of all to the publication, in 1962, of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the novel that first brought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to public attention. His story of one typical day in a labour camp as experienced by prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is sufficient to describe the entire world of the Soviet camps.First published in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir (New World). The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s and describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. The book's publication was an extraordinary event in Soviet literary history since never before had an account of Stalinist repression been openly distributed.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Philip Roth, 1997
American Pastoral
Philip Roth, 1997
GenevaBookClub: The story of Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk." The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and was included in Time's "All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Thomas Mann, 1901
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann, 1901
GenevaBookClub: Buddenbrooks was Mann's first novel, written when Mann was in his early twenties. Published in German in 1901, it's the saga of a merchant family based in the Hansa port of Lübeck during the 19th century, over 3 generations. It combines historical perspective with a keenly observed protrait of the bourgeoisie, and is written in Mann's characteristic detached, ironic style. The story and characters closely match Mann's own family history which explains its realism. The novel was an immediate success in Germany, and together with "The Magic Mountain" was the main reason for Mann receiving the Nobel prize for literature.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Margaret Atwood, 2003
Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood, 2003
GenevaBookClub: Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey–with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake–through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.
Rated By 2 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Jane Austen, 1813
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen, 1813
GenevaBookClub: So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's witty comedy of manners--one of the most popular novels of all time--that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989
GenevaBookClub: In 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper. Ishiguro's dazzling novel is a sad and humorous love story, a meditation on the condition of modern man, and an elegy for England at a time of acute change.
Rated By 2 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Alice Walker, 1982
The Color Purple
Alice Walker, 1982
GenevaBookClub: Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on the life of African-American women in the southern United States in the 1930s, addressing numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000-2009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
William Golding, 1954
Lord of The Flies
William Golding, 1954
GenevaBookClub: Lord of the Flies is a 1954 dystopian novel by Nobel Prize-winning English author William Golding about a group of British boys stuck on an uninhabited island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results. Its stances on the already controversial subjects of human nature and individual welfare versus the common good earned it position 68 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990–1999.
Rated By 2 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Thomas Hardy, 1886
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy, 1886
GenevaBookClub: Michael Henchard, a successful grain merchant, is the Mayor of the Wessex market town of Casterbridge and he has been keeping a dark secret for eighteen years. As his secret threatens to surface, and business competition arrives, his life becomes increasingly difficult.
"The Mayor of Casterbridge" charts the course of one man's character and the dramatic change of an isolated rural community into a modern city.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Aldous Huxley, 1932
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley, 1932
GenevaBookClub: Largely set in a futuristic World State, inhabited by genetically modified citizens and an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist.
Rated By 2 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Raymond Chandler, 1939
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler, 1939
GenevaBookClub: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid....He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. This is the Code of the Private Eye as defined by Raymond Chandler in his 1944 essay 'The Simple Act of Murder.' Such a man was Philip Marlowe, private eye, an educated, heroic, streetwise, rugged individualist and the hero of Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep. This work established Chandler as the master of the 'hard-boiled' detective novel, and his articulate and literary style of writing won him a large audience, which ranged from the man in the street to the most sophisticated intellectual. Selected as one of Time Magazine's All-Time 100 Novels, with the following review: "'I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.' This sentence, from the first paragraph of The Big Sleep, marks the last time you can be fully confident that you know what's going on.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Joseph Conrad, 1902
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad, 1902
GenevaBookClub: Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his adventure to a group of men onboard an anchored ship. The story told is of his early life as a ferry boat captain. Although his job was to transport ivory downriver, Charlie develops an interest in investing an ivory procurement agent, Kurtz, who is employed by the government. Preceded by his reputation as a brilliant emissary of progress, Kurtz has now established himself as a god among the natives in “one of the darkest places on earth.” Marlow suspects something else of Kurtz: he has gone mad. A reflection on corruptive European colonialism and a journey into the nightmare psyche of one of the corrupted, Heart of Darkness is considered one of the most influential works ever written.
Rated By 2 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Hunter S Thompson, 1971
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Hunter S Thompson, 1971
GenevaBookClub: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Günter Grass, 1959
The Tin Drum
Günter Grass, 1959
GenevaBookClub: On his third birthday Oskar decides to stop growing. Haunted by the deaths of his parents and wielding his tin drum Oskar recounts the events of his extraordinary life; from the long nightmare of the Nazi era to his anarchic adventures in post-war Germany.
Rated By 2 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Carrie Fisher, 1987
Postcards From The Edge
Carrie Fisher, 1987
GenevaBookClub: Fisher beautifully brings readers the inside of Hollywood through a web of humor, drugs, relationships, Hollywood Party Terror, and much more. The plot centers on a 30-year-old actress named Suzanne Vale, and follows her challenges as she overcomes her drug addiction, gets back into the swing of things, and falls in love, sort of.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Terry Pratchett, 1987
Equal Rites
Terry Pratchett, 1987
GenevaBookClub: On Discworld, a dying wizard tries to pass on his powers to an eighth son of an eighth son, who is just at that moment being born. The fact that the son is actually a daughter is discovered just a little too late. The town witch insists on turning the baby into a perfectly normal witch, thus mending the magical damage of the wizard's mistake. But now the young girl will be forced to penetrate the inner sanctum of the Unseen University--and attempt to save the world with one well-placed kick in some enchanted shins! Reissue.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Ray Bradbury, 1953
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury, 1953
GenevaBookClub: Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television 'family'. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people did not live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television. When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
Rated By 3 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Anna Burns, 2018
Milkman
Anna Burns, 2018
GenevaBookClub: Winner of the Man Booker Prize, one of the most challenging books of 2018 and also one of the most rewarding. In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumors start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous. Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.
Rated By 3 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Doris Lessing, 1950
The Grass Is Singing
Doris Lessing, 1950
GenevaBookClub: By Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing, a masterpiece of realism, ‘The Grass is Singing’ is a superb evocation of Africa’s majestic beauty, an intense psychological portrait of lives in confusion and, most of all, a fearless exploration of the ideology of white supremacy. The novel created a sensation when it was first published in 1950 and became an instant success in Europe and the United States.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
David Szalay, 2016
All That Man Is
David Szalay, 2016
GenevaBookClub: Winner of The Man Booker Prize, Nine men. Each of them at a different stage in life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving -- in the suburbs of Prague, in an overdeveloped Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a dingy Cyprus hotel -- to understand what it means to be alive, here and now. Tracing a dramatic arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, the ostensibly separate narratives of All That Man Is aggregate into a picture of a single shared existence, a picture that interrogates the state of modern manhood while bringing to life, unforgettably, the physical and emotional terrain of an increasingly globalized Europe.
Rated By 3 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Peter Stamm, 2017
To the Back of Beyond
Peter Stamm, 2017
GenevaBookClub: This inscrutable novel is a haunting love story of subtlety and pathos. It opens with a man who enjoys the kind of perfect life you can’t imagine anyone wishing to abandon: a pleasant house in a pretty Swiss town, an affectionate wife, two healthy children, a sensible career. Thomas never argues with Astrid; he is not attracted to any other woman, any other career. And yet … immediately on return from a seaside holiday in Spain, more like a migratory bird scenting the change of season than a man arriving at a difficult decision, while his wife is putting the children to bed, Thomas leaves his chilled wine unfinished and walks out. To leave or not to leave, that is the question.
Rated By 3 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Eva Hornung, 2017
The Last Garden
Eva Hornung, 2017
GenevaBookClub: In the early 19th century, 38 German Lutheran families, escaping the threat of persecution under the Prussian king, arrived in Port Adelaide, eventually establishing a small settlement in the Adelaide Hills. It was the first of several waves of German immigration to the area, the newcomers building villages and cultivating the land, all the while holding to their own religion, customs and traditions. In The Last Garden, Eva Hornung takes the bare bones of this history and transforms them into an allegorical tale of faith and renewal. In this quiet and subtle piece of writing, she explores not only the stultifying effects of social and spiritual isolation but also the prodigious healing power of the natural world. Fifteen-year-old Benedict Orion returns home from boarding school one summer to find both his parents dead
Rated By 2 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Elena Ferrante, 2011
My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante, 2011
GenevaBookClub: A modern masterpiece from one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante's inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Eka Kuriawan, 2002
Beauty is a Wound
Eka Kuriawan, 2002
GenevaBookClub: Published in 2002 and translated into English in 2015; set in 20th Century Eka Kuriawan (born 1975) uses magic realism, and his work has led to comparisons to Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Beauty Is a Wound set in the fictional coastal town of Halimunda, spans more than half a century. It revolves around Dewi Ayu, a wily prostitute of mythical beauty who has risen from the dead, and her accursed daughters, who are subjected to violence on a daily basis. The novel chronicles Indonesia’s occupation by the Japanese during the Second World War; its Indonesia
bloody struggle with the Dutch, who attempted to reassert their control over Indonesia after the war; the massacres of the mid-sixties; the violence and corruption that marked Suharto’s New Order regime; and the nation’s anxious lurch toward self-determination after Suharto’s leadership crumbled, in 1998.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015
The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015
GenevaBookClub: Published in 2015; set in 1970s Vietnam and Los Angeles. Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Viet Thanh Nguyen (born 1971) is a Vietnamese-American professor, the son of refugees from South Vietnam who fled to the US in 1975 after the fall of Saigon. A spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature and film. The story starts in April 1975 at the fall of Saigon. It follows soldiers in the defeated South Vietnamese army, who flee Vietnam to start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, a captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
George Orwell, 1934
Burmese Days
George Orwell, 1934
GenevaBookClub: Published in 1934; set in 1920s Burma, which was a British colony George Orwell (1903-1950) worked as a colonial policeman in Burma from 1922 to 1927. Burmese Days, his first novel, grew out of reflection on his own days as a colonial policeman in Burma during the 1920s. It tells the story of John Flory, a timber merchant, and his troubles relating to the other expats that he has to live and work with It provides a very caustic view of British colonialism at the ground level, where Orwell’s characters (and Orwell himself) must do “the dirty work of empire”.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Paul Theroux, 1973
Saint Jack
Paul Theroux, 1973
GenevaBookClub: Published in 1973; set in 1960s Singapore. Paul Theroux (born 1941) did a 3-year stint in Singapore where he taught at the English Department of the National University of Singapore Saint Jack was banned in Singapore for 30 years as it cast the country in an unfavourable light. His novel Jungle Lovers (1971) was similarly banned in Malawi for being critical of the government Brimming with sex, sleaze, and violence, Theroux’s gritty-yet-loving portrait of Singapore tells of an alienated American expat who works as a pimp, and how he struggles to make it big without losing his strange but strict code of morals.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Goh Poh Seng, 1972
If We Dream Too Long
Goh Poh Seng, 1972
GenevaBookClub: Published in 1972; set in 1960s Singapore. Singaporean writer Goh Poh Seng (1936-2010) was a medical doctor who was a well-known arts supporter – he also opened Singapore’s first Disco Lounge! Widely regarded as the first “true” Singapore novel If We Dream Too Long explores the dilemmas and challenges faced by its hero, Kwang Meng, as he navigates the difficult transitional period between youthful aspirations and the external demands of society and family Kwang Meng’s experiences question the concept of self amidst the dreariness and aimlessness of an increasingly urbanized and materialistic Asian society The book also provides a portrait of Singapore as it was in the 1960s, and a landscape and society that have undergone many changes.
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Cesare Pavese, 1949
The Moon and the Bonfires
Cesare Pavese, 1949
GenevaBookClub: Small town of Santo Stefano Belbo, in Piedmont, north-west Italy. The main character, known only by his nickname of Anguilla (Eel), has returned to his home town in the years immediately following the Second World War. He left twenty-five years earlier and had made his fortune in the United States. Returning to his home town, he finds many of the same smells and sights that filled his youth, but he also finds a town and its inhabitants that have been deeply changed by war and by the passage of time. “You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. Your own village means that you're not alone, that you know there's something of you in the people and the plants and the soil, that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you”. The rhythm of rural life and of nature – inexorable despite human efforts The “recherche” of roots. The physical and moral destruction caused by the war (resistance civil war in Italy)
Rated By 1 Members
I want to read this book
I read this book
Umberto Eco, 1980
The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco, 1980
GenevaBookClub: Eco’s first novel. Not only an intricate detective story. Combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory.
In 1327 a young Benedictine novice, Adso of Melk, and a learned Franciscan, William of Baskerville, visit a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy for a theological debate. The abbot, Abo of Fossanova, asks William to look into the recent death of the illuminator Adelmo of Otranto, who fell from the octagonal Aedificium, which houses the abbey’s labyrinthine library. “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means”. The meaning of “truth” from theological, philosophical, and historical perspectives The power of words and interpretation. The power of the culture and the reading.
Rated By 1 Members
book forums (active forums: 0, members in forums: 0)
x
lobby
x
loading...