Reading List
Isabel Allende
Novelist
Isabel Allende is a Chilean-American novelist who has been called the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author. The House of the Spirits (1982) and City of the Beasts (2002) are among her best-known books, and her novels, which sometimes draw on magical realism, often weave personal experience and history together with elements of myth. She has lived in California since 1989 and became a US citizen in 1993. She received Chile’s National Literature Prize in 2010 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy · 2007 · Fiction
“Among the thousands of apocalyptic futuristic novels in existence, this one stands out as the most depressing. Yet it is so beautifully crafted that I have read it three times. In McCarthy's tale, the love of a father for his son sheds the only light in the midst of supreme horror and darkness. What a writer!” — via Article, January 2014
Broken Open
How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
by Elizabeth Lesser · Nonfiction
“Many years after my daughter's premature death, Lesser's spiritual memoir was a balm to my lingering sorrow. Broken down or broken open by pain? Bitterness or compassion? Self-pity or wisdom? These are choices we all have to make sooner or later.” — via Article, January 2014
Dracula
by Bram Stoker · Classics
“We all know this macabre Victorian novel loaded with sexual innuendo, suspense, Christian paranoia, blood, mystery, and even a zoophagous madman. What is there not to like? It is badly written, but the story fascinates me to this day.” — via Article, January 2014
The Female Eunuch
by Germaine Greer
“I channeled my fury into action and became a feminist journalist.” — via Article, January 2014
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez · 2004 · Fiction
“I realized that with a family like mine, I didn't have to invent anything to write fiction.” — via Article, January 2014
The Arabian Nights
Tales from a Thousand and One Nights
by Richard Francis Burton · Classics
“A thousand and one nights, hundreds of stories, magic, eroticism, adventure, and mischievous characters: What an orgy of the senses and imagination! I keep all this in mind when I write.” — via Article, January 2014
