Monday, September 13, 2010

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov.




Lolita
by
Vladimir Nabokov
Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.

Lady Chatterly’s Lover - D. H. Lawrence



Lady Chatterly’s Lover
by
D. H. Lawrence
Perhaps the most famous of Lawrence's novels, the 1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover is no longer distinguished for the once-shockingly explicit treatment of its subject matter--the adulterous affair between a sexually unfulfilled upper-class married woman and the game keeper who works for the estate owned by her wheelchaired husband. Now that we're used to reading about sex, and seeing it in the movies, it's apparent that the novel is memorable for better reasons: namely, that Lawrence was a masterful and lyrical writer, whose story takes us bodily into the world of its characters


Friday, September 10, 2010

THE TRAGEDY OF ROMEO AND JULIET

THE TRAGEDY OF ROMEO AND JULIET By William Shakespeare
THE TRAGEDY OF ROMEO AND JULIET
By
William Shakespeare


Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of playwright William Shakespeare about two young "star-cross'd lovers" whose deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet and Macbeth, is one of his most frequently performed plays. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers.


War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy


War and Peace
by
Leo Tolstoy

Epic historical novel by Leo Tolstoy, originally published as Voyna i mir in 1865-69. This panoramic study of early 19th-century Russian society, noted for its mastery of realistic detail and variety of psychological analysis, is generally regarded as one of the world's greatest novels. War and Peace is primarily concerned with the histories of five aristocratic families--particularly the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, and the Rostovs--the members of which are portrayed against a vivid background of Russian social life during the war against Napoleon (1805-14). The theme of war, however, is subordinate to the story of family existence, which involves Tolstoy's optimistic belief in the life-asserting pattern of human existence. The heroine, Natasha Rostova, for example, reaches her greatest fulfillment through her marriage to Pierre Bezukhov and her motherhood. The novel also sets forth a theory of history, concluding that there is a minimum of free choice; all is ruled by an inexorable historical determinism.

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A JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH




A JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH
By
Jules Verne

Novel by Jules Verne, published in 1864 in French as Voyage au centre de la Terre. It is the second book in his popular science-fiction series Voyages extraordinaires (1863-1910). Otto Lidenbrock, an impetuous German professor of geology, discovers an encoded manuscript in which a 16th-century explorer claims to have found a passageway to the center of the Earth. Otto impulsively prepares a subterranean expedition, enlisting his young nephew Axel and a stoic Icelandic guide, Hans Bjelke. After descending into an extinct volcano in Iceland, the men spend several months in a underground world of luminous rocks, antediluvian forests, and fantastic sea creatures until they ride a volcanic eruption out of Stromboli Island, off the coast of Italy