If you’re still chipping away at the list of 100 Books To Read In A Lifetime, these are some excellent options.
Bel Canto (4/5 stars, currently priced at $11.99)
“Blissfully Romantic….A strange, terrific, spellcasting story.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Bel Canto…should be on the list of every literate music lover. The story is riveting, the participants breathe and feel and are alive, and throughout this elegantly-told novel, music pours forth so splendidly that the reader hears it and is overwhelmed by its beauty.” —Lloyd Moss, WXQR
“Glorious.” —The New Yorker
Ann Pratchett’s award winning, New York Times bestselling Bel Canto balances themes of love and crisis as disparate characters learn that music is their only common language. As in Patchett’s other novels, including Truth & Beauty and The Magician’s Assistant, the author’s lyrical prose and lucid imagination make Bel Canto a captivating story of strength and frailty, love and imprisonment, and an inspiring tale of transcendent romance.
Love in the Time of Cholera (4/5 stars, currently priced at $11.99)
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love.
When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic.
As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs–yet he reserves his heart for Fermina.
Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral.
Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.
Me Talk Pretty One Day (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $9.99)
A new collection from David Sedaris is cause for jubilation. His recent move to Paris has inspired hilarious pieces, including Me Talk Pretty One Day, about his attempts to learn French.
His family is another inspiration. You Can’t Kill the Rooster is a portrait of his brother who talks incessant hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. And no one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers and cashiers with 6-inch fingernails.
Compared by The New Yorker to Twain and Hawthorne, Sedaris has become one of our best-loved authors…Sedaris’s essays on living in Paris are some of the funniest he’s ever written. At last, someone even meaner than the French!
The sort of blithely sophisticated, loopy humour that might have resulted if Dorothy Parker and James Thurber had had a love child.
The Devil in the White City (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $10.99)
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century.
The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C.
The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium.
Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.
The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. In this book the smoke, romance, and mystery of the Gilded Age come alive as never before.
Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $13.99)
The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published as Kerouac originally composed it
What should we have for dinner?
Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species.
In the years since, Pollan’s revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world.
Ten years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.
Click here to browse Amazon’s full list of 100 Books To Read In A Lifetime.
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