Tag Archives: Novels

10 Intellectually Challenging Novels

Posted by

2

How would you interpret the phrase “the psychology of fiction”? In their feature in the Scientific American, Keith Oatley and Ingrid Wickelgren posit that the emotions fiction evokes are real, despite the “unreal” qualities of the stories and characters. They highlight 10 books that have a seemingly universal power to sway the reader’s mind.

The 10 novels:
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Mrs. Dalloway: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

Do check out their feature; scroll over each title to learn more about the novel.

I’ve read Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina, and Beloved. I have The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Middlemarch on my shelves. I agree that some of these books have affected me emotionally; indeed, Beloved is the first novel I read that pursued me. A wonderful professor, Dr. Michael Wenthe, taught me the book while I was in college. For my related assignment I rewrote the scene in the forest when Sethe begins to choke from Denver’s perspective. Then in graduate school I spent three class session teaching Beloved to an advanced and very engaging group of students. And just this week I edited a chapter of Dr. Anton Trinidad’s dissertation which is partly about the emotional effects on readers after experiencing Beloved.

To this list I would add 1984 by George Orwell and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I would also add The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, one of my all-time favorite books (though not a novel).

Any other suggestions for this list?

10 Superb Book First Lines

Posted by

8

In no particular order. (Oh, and I cheated on the first one – it’s two sentences…)

-o- “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1966)

-o- “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.”
Italo Calvino, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979)

-o- “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1887, trans. by Constance Garrett)

-o- “124 was spiteful.”
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

-o- “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915, trans. by Stanley Corngold)

-o- “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

-o- “This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.”
William Goldman, The Princess Bride (1973)

-o- “‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die.’”
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

-o- “All children, except one, grow up.”
J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1904)

-o- “In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting–with various combinations of dread, hope and ennui–for something momentous to occur.”
Tom Robbins,  Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

15 Writers Who Have Influenced Me

Posted by

0

There are many more than fifteen writers who influenced me. The below lists mentions barely any of the first writers I read, the works that influenced the rest of my reading experience. But it’s a start!

1. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

2. Oscar Wilde

3. Leo Tolstoy

4. William Goldman

5. William Golding

6. John Steinbeck

7. Roald Dahl

8. Stephen King

9. Michael Foucault

10. Fyodor Dostoevsky

11. Pablo Neruda

12. e.e. cummings

13. T.H. White

14. Ernest Hemingway

15. Edgar Allan Poe

Aleph by Paulo Coehlo

Posted by

0

If you’ve never read a book by Paulo Coehlo, I strongly recommend the experience. The Alchemist is my favorite, and it is short and readable in many settings. Coehlo’s most recent book is Aleph. The story takes place amid a spiritual quest on the Trans-Siberian rail. Coehlo reveals parts of his soul in this book, as all skilled authors do in their work. Check out this review by Y.S. Fing on the Washington Independent Review of Books’ website.