Saturday, September 4, 2010

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Audio Book)


The Great Gatsby
by
F. Scott Fitzgerald



In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

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The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde (Audio Book)

The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde
The Selfish Giant
by
Oscar Wilde

This classic story by Oscar Wilde is set in a garden that is not unlike paradise. Children play freely among the trees and flowers. And then the owner, The Selfish Giant, returns from a long holiday and drives out the children. But all is not lost, for the giant finds redemption through a child.

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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Audio Book)



Frankenstein
by
Mary Shelley

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus movement. It was also a warning against the "over-reaching" of modern man and the is an 1818 novel written by Mary Shelley at the age of 19, first published anonymously in London, but more often known by the revised third edition of 1831 under her own name. It is a novel infused with some elements of the Gothic novel and the RomanticIndustrial Revolution, alluded to in the novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus and spawned a complete genre of . The story has had an influence across literature and popular culturehorror stories and films. Many distinguished authors, such as Brian Aldiss, consider this the very first science fiction novel.

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Friday, August 27, 2010

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
by
Arthur Golden

An alluring tour de force: a brilliant debut novel told with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism as the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.

Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love, always elusive, is scorned as illusion.

Sayuri's story begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. Through her eyes, we see the decadent heart of Gion--the geisha district of Kyoto--with its marvelous teahouses and theaters, narrow back alleys, ornate temples, and artists' streets. And we witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it. But as World War II erupts and the geisha houses are forced to close, Sayuri, with little money and even less food, must reinvent herself all over again to find a rare kind of freedom on her own terms.

Memoirs of a Geisha is a book of nuances and vivid metaphor, of memorable characters rendered with humor and pathos. And though the story is rich with detail and a vast knowledge of history, it is the transparent, seductive voice of Sayuri that the reader remembers.

A dazzling literary achievement of empathy and grace by an extraordinary new writer.


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The Life of Pi: From Archimedes to Eniac and Beyond

The Life of Pi: From Archimedes to Eniac and Beyond
The Life of Pi: From Archimedes to Eniac and Beyond

The desire to understand , the challenge, and originally the need, to calculate ever more accurate values of , the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, has challenged mathematicians–great and less great—for many many centuries and, especially recently, has provided compelling examples of computational mathematics. Pi, uniquely in mathematics is pervasive in popular culture and the popular imagination

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