| War and Peace by Leo Tolstoi, 1192 pages James Donahue 27 March 2002 So many great things, but here are only three of them: 1) Tolstoi has the ability to use completely fresh metaphors and allegories to describe events and feelings that nevertheless make perfect sense; 2) he has the uncanny ability to have different and unique characters (counts, thirteen-year-old girls, French officers, religious spinsters); he perfectly enters the head of each; and 3) he really gets into the mindset of what it is like to live through "historical" times | The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1346 pages Mike Gadd 12 August 2002 Phew! Finally done. What a great story though. I can''t imagine being tested on it for school. The index for people and place names was 18 pages long. No wonder people hated it who were forced to read it. The story itself rolls along quite merrily- full of all the ups and downs of a good adventure. Time to go watch the movie. |
The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels (1939-1945) by Joseph Goebbels, 1489 pages James Donahue 28 July 2003 Goebbels was third in command of the Third Reich, and in control of all media and film. (Also the subject of my next research paper for school.) These diaries are exquisitely detailed, giving one an excellent window into Hitler's regime. Three bizarre facts: 1) Goebbels had a severely clubbed foot, yet never mentions it even once in his diaries, although he does discount several other people as "genetically inferior" for being handicapped; 2) He loved and admired the movie "Gone With the Wind"; 3) This quote: "The greatest propaganda of any state is the news; this is always the case no matter what state." |
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, 1139 pages Steve Gadd 07 August 2003 A sprawling, thrilling opus full of WWII adventure, codebreaking, treasure hunting, and hacking. A ripping good yarn! |
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia by Rebecca West, 1158 pages Tony Pisarenkov 10 February 2004 "The answer is too long, as long indeed, as this book, which hardly anybody will read by reason of its length." (p. 773). The longest book I have read to date, and the only one that took me over a year to complete, "Black Lamb..." is razor-sharp political history thinly disguised as a brilliant travelogue. Writing in an age when members of a certain slice of society could travel and write without constraint, and regularly overwhelmed by an excess of enthusiasm, West is still, to me, the only way to understand Bosnia, Kosovo, and everything that happened in the Balkans in the last hundred... no, make it thousand, years. Without West, Robert Kaplan, Warren Zimmerman, Richard Holbrooke and many others could not have done what they did or written what they wrote. |
Shogun by James Clavell, 1100 pages James Donahue 04 May 2004 Summer is finally here, and while I have to keep reading for my class next year, I finally have some time to indulge in those glossy mega-reads I love so much. Clavell is always good for some swashbuckling, macho orientalism. Like Hemingway meets Grisham. One question: why do the pretty women always have to die in the end? |
Gai-jin by James Clavell, 1043 pages James Donahue 22 August 2004 The third in Clavell's historical series on Asia. Like his peer Clancy, Clavell writes novels like movies, and borrows from personal experience to make compelling mega-reads. Unfortunately he can also fall into Clancey's habit of predictable 'adventure'-plots and manly/womanly characters. This, one of the latest of his books, is the first to truly surprise me, and the first to really foreground legitimate woman characters. |
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, 1232 pages James Donahue 02 May 2005 While cramming at the last minute and taking my final exams, I slipped away for brief escapes into Hugo's attempt to capture the entire 19th-c in one Parisian book. Perfect because its so bombastic; who doesn't love the mega-read? Three comments: 1) I don't get why this is one of Eric Phillips' favorite book - on moral or stylistic grounds; 2) the definition of Hugo-esque = to not delete any thought, any sentence (the antonym of Kundera-esque); 3) not that I've seen it, but how in hell did this become transfored into an Andrew Lloyd Weber 'opera'? |
Shogun by James Clavell, 1152 pages Steve Gadd 16 May 2005 John Blackthorne wants to be the first Englishman to sail around the world, but he arrives in Japan with four of five ships lost and most of his crew perished. He, and his knowledge and inventory of firearms especially, find favor with a leader, and so begins an epic of war and love. There is plenty of swashbuckling, but there is some plodding as well, perhaps to be expected in a book this long. I don't know how accurate it is, but the view of sixteenth-century Japan is quite interesting. |
The Church in Africa by Bengt Sundkler, 1040 pages James Donahue 03 August 2005 A very impressive capstone to a career devoted to the subject. |
A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) by Madeline L'Engle, 1978 pages A Bennett 25 October 2005 I have heard that certain Talmudic writings are slightly less didactic than this hollow, unsatisfying ‘novel’ (if you can even call it that). I did learn a cool new word for a model of the solar system, but I have forgotten it now, and am loathe to re-open the book to find it again. This book may have seemed cutting edge and relevant when it was written, but it now seems slightly hysterical in its nuclear obliteration fear-based narrative. |
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956) by C. S. Lewis, 1583 pages James Donahue 05 April 2007 This is the end result of five months' worth of bedtime stories. I've never read the Chronicles before. In fact, growing up, I never even heard of them or knew anyone who read them. (Probably one of the top ten signs that you were not raised evangelical.) They were better than I thought, even if overly-allegorical and downright racist at times. The kids loved them - really touched their imaginations and made bedtime reading of "grown-up books" a must for all of us. |
Executive Orders by Tom Clancy, 1358 pages Steven Krise 29 October 2007 I'm not sure if it's the self-righteous moralism, the fascist politics, the support for the Nuremburg defense or the awful prose that leads me to hate this book. I thought previously that "Red Rabbit" may have been an anomaly but now after slogging thru more than 2000 pages of Clancy I am sure that I simply don't like Clancy's writing. |