THE GREAT BOOKS LIST
A Progressive Exploration of the Great Books
| The List Era of Reformation and Rennaisance “I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike, and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two, are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.” Harold Bloom |
Book of the Week
Life Class By Pat Barker
This week sees the release of Pat Barker's latest novel, Life Class, one that sees her return to the Great War. Her Regeneration trilogy was widely acclaimed when it was published in the mid 1990s, the last of which, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize in 1995. That set of novels followed the lives of the poet Sigfried Sassoon and psychologist Dr. Rivers as they experienced the various battlefields of the Great War, the real front, the home front and the battle of the mind. Alan Cumyn of the Globe and Mail reviews Barker's latest visit to the war to end all wars and finds Barker finding another aspect of the carnage -- the effect on a set of lovers and friends in the early years of the war. Read the whole article here.
Michiko Kakutani relates in this weekend's New York Times review that a woman's lot in Afghanistan has never been a happy one.The Great Book list chose Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, “The Kite Runner” (2003), as one of the Best Novels of the Last 25 Years and his second novel may even surpase the success of the first. Says Kakutani "whereas “The Kite Runner” focused on fathers and sons, and friendships between men, his latest novel, “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” focuses on mothers and daughters, and friendships between women. Whereas “Kite Runner” got off to a gripping start and stumbled into contrivance and sentimentality in its second half, “Splendid Suns” starts off programmatically and gains speed and emotional power as it slowly unfurls." Read the whole review here. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. By Christopher Hitchens. Michael Kinsey relates in the New York Times that observers of the Christopher Hitchens phenomenon have been expecting a book about religion from him around now. But this impressive and enjoyable attack on everything so many people hold dear is not the book we were expecting. First in London 30 or more years ago, then in New York and for the last couple of decades in Washington, Hitchens has established himself as a character. This character draws on such familiar sources as the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene; the leftist politics of the 1960s (British variant); and — of course — the person of George Orwell. (Others might throw in the flower-clutching Bunthorne from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Patience,” but that is probably not an intentional influence.) Hitchens is the bohemian and the swell, the dashing foreign correspondent, the painstaking literary critic and the intellectual engagé. He charms Washington hostesses but will set off a stink bomb in the salon if the opportunity arises. Read the whole article here Travels With Herodotus. By Ryszard Kapuscinski Jason Burke in the Literary Review writes "Long-term admirers of Ryszard Kapuscinski may be disappointed to learn that in Travels with Herodotus, his last work, the Polish journalist and writer is mellower, kinder, warmer than in books published in the spit and fury of his younger years. The opening lines - a description of the moment when, as a young student in a devastated post-war Poland, he first heard the name of the Greek historian - lack the rawness of those other works. The preface of Another Day of Life, Kapuscinski's minor masterpiece on the war in Angola in 1975, commences with the words: 'this is a book ... about being alone and lost'. The first chapter starts with the bald statement: 'For three months I lived in Luanda, in the Tivoli Hotel.' From his hotel room, Kapuscinski said, he could see the freighters out to sea sailing away when the news from the front was so dismal that there was no point in staying. He of course stayed. The author of Travels with Herodotus is a happier man than the driven reporter of earlier works. So nor is there the horrific immediacy of Kapuscinski's descriptions of demonstrations in Tehran in 1979 that mark another great work, The Shah of Shahs. In that, a typically economic description of the government security forces carefully picking off a wheelchair-bound protestor left to his fate in the middle of a street by the crowd has a harrowing power. The image has stayed with me and surfaced at odd times, particularly while reporting from Iraq in recent years." Read the whole article here 
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