1,000 Books to Read Before You Die : A Life-Changing List by James Mustich (Author) Format:Hardback 960 pages, full-color photos and illustrations throughout Publisher:Workman Publishing Imprint:Workman Publishing ISBN:9781523504459 Published:1 Oct 2018 Classifications:Literary essays, Literary reference works Readership:General (US: Trade) Weight:1520g Dimensions:245 x 186 x 49 (mm) Pub. Country:United States Description Get lost in a thousand great books. Fourteen ... 展开完整描述 ▼
1,000 Books to Read Before You Die : A Life-Changing List
by James Mustich (Author)
Format:Hardback 960 pages, full-color photos and illustrations throughout
Publisher:Workman Publishing
Imprint:Workman Publishing
ISBN:9781523504459
Published:1 Oct 2018
Classifications:Literary essays, Literary reference works
Readership:General (US: Trade)
Weight:1520g
Dimensions:245 x 186 x 49 (mm)
Pub. Country:United States
Description
Get lost in a thousand great books. Fourteen years in the making and fifth in the series that has over 4.4 million copies in print, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die is an eclectic and extraordinary book about books, as compulsively readable, entertaining, surprising, and enlightening as the 1,000-plus volumes it recommends. The author, James Mustich, has been a bookseller for decades, including two running the acclaimed independent book catalog A Common Reader, and 1,000 Books is like his personal store, where every book is excellent.
Mustich"s incomparable writing - lively, informed, erudite yet with an undisguised enthusiasm - not only reveals why the particular title you"re reading about is vital but also gives you the urgent feeling that you need to drop everything, right now, and read that book. The expected pillars are here - Dante, Proust, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka - but made completely fresh in these animated essays. And in between, the unexpected titles - from Harold and the Purple Crayon to Fun Home, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to Tell Me a Riddle - are made completely essential.
Aeschylus is here, and so is Nancy Drew, Herman Melville, and Edwidge Danticat. The alphabetical listing by last name results in the joy of juxtaposition - Grimm next to Grisham, Clarice Lispector followed by Hugh Lofting - prompting a rich appreciation for the gorgeous mosaic that is our literary heritage, whether poetry, science fiction, memoir, travel writing, biography, children"s literature, the novel. Because ultimately what this book is not is a canon.
It is, rather, an uncommon celebration of the best that our authors have put into words - and, as one of the entrants, the critic David Denby, put it, that "special character of solitude and rapture" that is the act of reading.
