GenevaBookClub: A philosophical novel, the first of Robert M. Pirsig's texts in which he explores his Metaphysics of Quality. The book describes, in first person, a 17-day journey on his motorcycle from Minnesota to California by the author and his son Chris, joined for the first nine days by close friends John and Sylvia Sutherland. The trip is punctuated by numerous philosophical discussions, referred to as Chautauquas by the author, on topics including epistemology, ethical emotivism and the philosophy of science.

GenevaBookClub: The book features Rabbi Kushner's perspective on how people can better deal with evil that enters their lives. Rarely does a book come along that tackles a perennially difficult human issue with such clarity and intelligence. Harold Kushner, a Jewish rabbi facing his own child's fatal illness, deftly guides us through the inadequacies of the traditional answers to the problem of evil, then provides a uniquely practical and compassionate answer that has appealed to millions of readers across all religious creeds. Remarkable for its intensely relevant real-life examples and its fluid prose, this book cannot go unread by anyone who has ever been troubled by the question: "Why me?"

GenevaBookClub: Watchmen is a graphic novel originally published as a limited comic series between 1986 and 1987. Set in an alternate America where super powered beings are being stripped off of both their costumes and moral duties, Watchmen looks deep into the superhero psyche. Watchmen was recognized in Time's List of the 100 Best Novels as one of the best English language novels published since 1923 and is regarded my many as one of the most significant works of 20th Century literature. If you have never read a graphic novel, this is the best place to start. The depth, complexity and originality are outstanding.

GenevaBookClub: War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men. A s Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature.

GenevaBookClub: Vanity Fair was published as a series of installments, beginning in 1847. Even before all installments had been published, the work was an enormous hit. Thackeray was hailed for his realistic satire, and yet at the same time criticized for his ruthless depiction of his characters. It is difficult to locate any redeeming qualities in the characters of Vanity Fair, as each character seems totally consumed by the pursuit of social mobility and wealth. In particular, the novel's heroine (if she can be properly labeled as such) seems entirely devoid of conscience.

GenevaBookClub: The narrative drive of Stowe's classic novel is often overlooked in the heat of the controversies surrounding its anti-slavery sentiments. In fact, it is a compelling adventure story with richly drawn characters and has earned a place in both literary and American history. Stowe's puritanical religious beliefs show up in the novel's final, overarching theme—the exploration of the nature of Christianity and how Christian theology is fundamentally incompatible with slavery.

GenevaBookClub: Khushwant Singh digs into the Partition of India with a deep local focus, providing a human dimension which brings to the event a sense of reality, horror, and believability. Summer of 1947: Partition does not mean much to the Sikhs and Muslims of Mano Majra, a village on the border of India and Pakistan. Then, a local money-lender is murdered, and suspicion falls upon Juggut Singh, the village gangster who is in love with a Muslim girl. When a train arrives, carrying the bodies of dead Sikhs, the village is transformed into a battlefield, and neither the magistrate nor the police are able to stem the rising tide of violence. Amidst conflicting loyalties, it is left to Juggut Singh to redeem himself and reclaim peace for his village. In a relatively short book, the reader gets to know a lot of characters in detail. Examination of the varied groups of people increases cultural and social understanding of that time and place & shows that the blame couldn't be placed on any one group.

GenevaBookClub: The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women. As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.

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.

GenevaBookClub: The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic. Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

GenevaBookClub: A historical novel with strong lesbian themes written by Sarah Waters and published in 1998. Set in Victorian England during the 1890s, it tells a coming of age story about a young woman named Nan who falls in love with a male impersonator, follows her to London, and finds various ways to support herself as she journeys through the city. The picaresque plot elements have prompted scholars and reviewers to compare it to similar British urban adventure stories written by Charles Dickens and Daniel Defoe.

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.

GenevaBookClub: Things Fall Apart is acclaimed as the finest novel written about life in Nigeria at the end of the nineteenth century. Published in 1958, it is unquestionably the world’s most widely read African novel, having sold more than eight million copies in English and been translated into fifty languages. A simple story of a "strong man" whose life is dominated by fear and anger, Things Fall Apart is written with remarkable economy and subtle irony. Uniquely and richly African, at the same time it reveals Achebe's keen awareness of the human qualities common to men of all times and places.

GenevaBookClub: Tommy Orange is a 38 year old American novelist and writer from Oakland, California. This is his first book. Told as a series of loosely connected stories centered around Oakland, California that all come together by the end of the book. Many of the characters are young, not full-blood and living on the margins of modern America. 300 pages, published in 2019. Finalist for 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.

GenevaBookClub: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, generally referred to by its shortened title The Wealth of Nations, is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith. First published in 1776, the book offers one of the world's first collected descriptions of what builds nations' wealth, and is today a fundamental work in classical economics. By reflecting upon the economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the book touches upon such broad topics as the division of labour, productivity, and free markets.

GenevaBookClub: A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover—these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.

GenevaBookClub: Written in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.

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.

GenevaBookClub: Perhaps the greatest Turkish novel of the twentieth century, being discovered around the world only now, more than fifty years after its first publication, The Time Regulation Institute is an antic, freewheeling send-up of the modern bureaucratic state. At its center is Hayri Irdal, an infectiously charming antihero who becomes entangled with an eccentric cast of characters—a television mystic, a pharmacist who dabbles in alchemy, a dignitary from the lost Ottoman Empire, a “clock whisperer”—at the Time Regulation Institute, a vast organization that employs a hilariously intricate system of fines for the purpose of changing all the clocks in Turkey to Western time. Recounted in sessions with his psychoanalyst, the story of Hayri Irdal’s absurdist misadventures plays out as a brilliant allegory of the collision of tradition and modernity, of East and West, infused with a poignant blend of hope for the promise of modernity and nostalgia for a simpler time.

GenevaBookClub: Second novel of the internationally popular Inspector Montalbano series While chasing down a mafia crime, Montalbano finds a cave with symbolic artifacts and the bodies of two young lovers, hidden since World War II. The young couple is guarded by a terracotta dog. “A stimare da come l’alba stava appresentandosi, la iurnata s’annunziava certamente smèusa, fatta cioè ora di botte di sole incaniato, ora di gelidi stizzichii di pioggia, il tutto condito da alzate improvvise di vento. Una di quelle iurnate in cui chi è soggetto al brusco cangiamento di tempo, e nel sangue e nel ciriveddro lo patisce, capace che si mette a svariare continuamente di opinione e di direzione, come fanno quei pezzi di lattone, tagliati a forma di bannèra o di gallo, che sui tetti ruotano in ogni senso ad ogni minima passata di vento”. The mix of cultures in Sicily The unfairness of the death and injustice.

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.

GenevaBookClub: Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.

Mehran: For centuries, fame and fortune were to be found in the west – in the New World of the Americas. Today, it is the east which calls out to those in search of riches and adventure. Sweeping right across Central Asia and deep into China and India, a region that once took centre stage is again rising to dominate global politics, commerce and culture. A major reassessment of world history, The Silk Roads is a dazzling exploration of the forces that have driven the rise and fall of empires, determined the flow of ideas and goods and are now heralding a new dawn in international affairs.

GenevaBookClub: The Ship of Fools has established Cristina Peri Rossi, author of a dozen other books of poetry and prose, as a leading writer in Europe and Latin America. This is her most important work in English and is recognized as a modern classic. The novel seemingly takes the form of a mosaic of travel vignettes, as the reader follows the protagonist, Equis, a misfit who travels to a number of deliberately vague locations. By inviting the reader to see modern society through the eyes of the main character, Peri Rossi is using the technique of defamiliarization to produce a biting satire of today's world. Masculinity and power are dominant themes in this innovative novel by a major feminist writer. Biting satire . . . worthy of Gulliver’s Travels.” —Women’s Review of Books.

GenevaBookClub: Tim Winton is Australia's most decorated and beloved novelist. Short-listed twice for the Booker Prize and the winner of a record four Miles Franklin Literary Awards for Best Australian Novel. In The Shepherd's Hut, Winton crafts the story of Jaxie Clackton, a brutalized rural youth who flees from the scene of his father's violent death and strikes out for the vast wilds of Western Australia. All he carries with him is a rifle and a waterjug. All he wants is peace and freedom. But surviving in the harsh saltlands alone is a savage business. And once he discovers he's not alone out there, all Jaxie's plans go awry. He meets a fellow exile, the ruined priest Fintan MacGillis, a man he's never certain he can trust, but on whom his life will soon depend. The Shepherd's Hut is a thrilling tale of unlikely friendship and yearning, at once brutal and lyrical, from one of Australia's finest storytellers.

GenevaBookClub: James Bamford has been the preeminent expert on the National Security Agency since his reporting revealed the agency’s existence in the 1980s. Now Bamford describes the transformation of the NSA since 9/11, as the agency increasingly turns its high-tech ears on the American public. The Shadow Factory reconstructs how the NSA missed a chance to thwart the 9/11 hijackers and details how this mistake has led to a heightening of domestic surveillance. In disturbing detail, Bamford describes exactly how every American’s data is being mined and what is being done with it. Any reader who thinks America’s liberties are being protected by Congress will be shocked and appalled at what is revealed here.

GenevaBookClub: Richard Dawkins' reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have forced thousands of readers to rethink their beliefs about life. In this bestselling, now classic volume, Dawkins explains how the selfish gene can also be a subtle gene. The world of the selfish gene revolves around savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit, and yet, Dawkins argues, acts of apparent altruism do exist in nature. Bees, for example, will commit suicide when they sting to protect the hive, and birds will risk their lives to warn the flock of an approaching hawk. The Selfish Gene is a remarkable exposition of evolutionary thought, a work that has been hailed for its stylistic brilliance and deep scientific insights, and continues to stimulate whole new areas of research today.

GenevaBookClub: Hailed some feminists as the single most important theoretical work of this century, but ignored or reviled by others, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex occupies an anomalous place in the feminist canon. Yet it has had an undeniable impact not only on the development of critiques of sexual politics but on twentieth-century Western thinking about the concept of "woman" in general.

GenevaBookClub: The story of America's space program from its inception in the 1950's up to the end of the Gemini program (so it doesn't include the Apollo program which culminated on the moon landings from 1969). A wonderful recital of larger-than-life, heroic, risk-taking on an epic scale with a budget to match. Wolfe's style, dubbed the new journalism, doesn't pull any punches and is full of funny, pithy comments on the people who first put Americans into space. It's a story of technology, politics and above all of hard-bitten test pilots who aren't afraid to put their lives on the line and who've watched their friends die doing the same.

GenevaBookClub: A Socratic dialogue, authored by Plato around 375 BC, concerning justice, the order and character of the just city-state, and the just man.

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.

GenevaBookClub: Machiavelli composed The Prince as a practical guide for ruling (though some scholars argue that the book was intended as a satire and essentially a guide on how not to rule). This goal is evident from the very beginning, the dedication of the book to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence. The Prince is not particularly theoretical or abstract; its prose is simple and its logic straightforward. These traits underscore Machiavelli’s desire to provide practical, easily understandable advice.

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.

GenevaBookClub: Arguably the best work from the ever-quotable Wilde, this novel is a guide for how to live a life of pure decadence. It is packed with impeccable wit, clever one-liners, and an excessive amount of egotistical vanity. At the very least, this book will show you the glory and the pitfalls of being the best looking chap around.

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.

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.

GenevaBookClub: A memoir that traces the early travels of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, then a 23-year-old medical student, and his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist. Leaving Buenos Aires, Argentina, in January 1952 on the back of a sputtering single cylinder 1939 Norton 500cc dubbed La Poderosa ("The Mighty One"), they desired to explore the South America they only knew from books. During the formative odyssey Guevara is transformed by witnessing the social injustices of exploited mine workers, persecuted communists, ostracized lepers, and the tattered descendants of a once-great Inca civilization. By journey's end, they had travelled for a symbolic nine months by motorcycle, steamship, raft, horse, bus, and hitchhiking, covering more than 8,000 kilometres.

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)

GenevaBookClub: As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes. With it's startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.

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.