Douglas Adams - THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
This book is not the "Guide" itself. Rather, it is the story of Arthur Dent, who, seconds before Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, is plucked off the planet by a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.   Science Fiction.

Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov - MASTER & MARGARITA
A fast-paced fantasy which brings the Devil and his pathetically comical helpers to earth to wreak havoc in an novel and entertaining style. This popular novel brings a love story, a satire, and a little of the Christian bible together into the mix. Difficult to put down. A lot of surprises.

Albert Camus - THE STRANGER
L'Etranger was written in 1946 and followed by more than ten additional novels in the space of 25 years. Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. "The Stranger" is a short tidy novel about a more or less ordinary man - self-centered but non competitive, living quietly in Algiers. One thoughtless act places him firmly in the grip of unyielding fate and seals his destiny.

Albert Camus - THE PLAGUE
The residents of a coastal town in North Africa, struck by plague, find themselves abruptly quarantined and physically cut off from the rest of the world.   A masterful novel with psychological, philosophical and political dimensions.

Karel Čapek - R.U.R. (ROSSUM'S UNIVERSAL ROBOTS)
This and other science-fantasy themed plays gained international recognition for Karel Čapek in the early 1920's. He is generally considered to be the greatest Czech author of the first half of the 20th Century and is remembered abroad mainly as a prophetic anti-utopian, warning the world against the excesses of scientism and technocracy. It's a commedy and it's fun ... and I recommend it.

Jimmy Carter - AN HOUR BEFORE DAYLIGHT
Autobiographical memoir of his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm by the 39th president of the United States.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - THE BOOR
A short one act, one scene play that takes place in the living room of an elderly widow. Powerfully packed and emotionally charged. Highly recommended both for your entertainment and as a script for a short play to be used in a high school competition

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - THE CHERRY ORCHARD
Classic Chekhov. There are a lot of loose ends as the curtain begins to fall, but Chekhov ties them all together in an unrealistic package at the conclusion. It is not a happy story, and the ending is somewhat depressing, but that seems to be the way Chekhov likes to end many of his works. I don't recommend it, but that puts me in the minority.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - THE KISS
An interesting psychological short story about a socially repressed soldier who finds hope, and then loses it. Although the depressing ending is in the classic Chekhov style, it works in this case. Recommended.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - VANKA
Vanka Zhukov, a nine-year old boy who had been apprenticed to a shoemaker writes a letter to his grandfather, begging him to come and take him home. A powerful emotional read, demonstrating Chekhov's skill and mastery of the short story. Without doubt this is Chekhov's most popular short story ever, and I highly recommend it.

Fyodor Dostoevsky - CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
An old woman is cruelly murdered and the killer struggles to restore order to his mind and to his relationship with society. Dostoyevsky's greatest work

Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson - THE GREAT TYPO HUNT
This is a travel/adventure book of sorts, featuring a few friends, circling the USA by car, correcting errors of spelling, punctuation and grammer, as they find them. Some successes & some failures along the way. Light reading;

Fyodor Dostoevsky - HOUSE OF THE DEAD
Another excellent work by Dostoyevsky. A slow moving but powerful psychological novel describing life in the Russian prison system in the 1800s. If you like Dostoyevsky, you will like HOUSE OF THE DEAD

Sergei Dovlatov, THE SUITCASE
Dovlatov takes as his subject the eight items brought with him when he emigrated from the FSU. These rather ordinary possessions, the contents of his little suitcase, serve as the basis for a series of interconnected tales (one per chapter) as Dovlatov relates the circumstances under which he acquired each of them. Comic, ironic, satiric. An excellent introduction to Dovlatov.

Antwone Quenton Fisher - FINDING FISH - A MEMOIR
This autobiographical memoir could have been titled Abused in Foster Care. It is the nearly tragic psychological story of a boy who was born in prison to a single mother, from whom he was taken, and raised in a cruel foster home in Cleveland, Ohio.   At seventeen he breaks free and begins the search for his identity.

Andre Gide - STRAIT IS THE GATE
A psychological love story. A tragic drama of self-denial and excessive introspection, sacrificing the real for the imaginary. Magnificent writing. Highly recommended. Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947.

Andre Gide - THE COUNTERFEITERS
The joy and pain elicited from relationships are the stuff of this tragic novel. If you are not immediately captivated by Bernard's letter to his father, you will certainly fall prey to the note that little George passes to his uncle.

GILGAMESH
In a mysterious and primitive world of walled cities, great plains and trackless forests, Gilgamesh, an intelligent and powerful king, is forced to face the limits of the human condition and to reconcile himself to tragedy. Rediscovered in the 19th century in the temple library and palace ruins in Nineveh, once the capital of the ancient Assyrian empire, this 2,000 BCE adventure was later added to and unified as a national epic by the Semitic Babylonians.

Franz Kafka - AMERIKA
In 1913, when Kafka began work on his unfinished novel, AMERIKA, he had never traveled outside of Prague, had no American friends at all, and understood very little English. When asked what he knows about America, he replied, "I know the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and I always admired Walt Whitman, and I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic." Clearly more optimistic and lighter in mood than any of Kafka's other writings.

Franz Kafka - THE TRIAL
A respected functionary in a bank, surprised by his unwarranted arrest and weighed down by an inscrutable bureaucracy, spends the rest of his life fighting a charge against him of whose nature he can get no information.

Harry Kemelman - THE NINE MILE WALK
Taking a single sentence out of context, Prof Nicky Welt not only deduces that a crime has been committed, he also provides the motive and a description of the perpetrators. If you like mystery stories you will be delighted with this collection of ingenious short puzzles each of which is solved cerebrally by Prof Welt. Recommended for anyone who enjoys reading a good detective story.

Milan Kundera - THE JOKE
A political statement, written on a postcard and intended as a joke, is taken seriously by the party faithful. Excellent first novel.

Milan Kundera - THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING
Charged with emotion, this philosophical novel explores the depths of erotic compulsion and its interplay with history, music, psychology and politics. For mature readers.

Andrei Makine - DREAMS OF MY RUSSIAN SUMMERS
The first novel ever to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, France's top literary awards. We first meet the narrator when he is a child. We do not learn his name or what he looks like, but through him we meet his grandmother, Sharlotta, and through her eyes we experience in the most impressionistic way, the historical bond between France and Russia. This is a psychological novel with historical and philosophical underpinnings. Published in 1995, this novel has already been translated into 25 languages.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
Time moves on, but nothing changes in this hundred-year epic novel, neither the names nor the faces, and certainly not the cruel fate that awaits each of the characters, save the ants.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH
A historical novel illuminating the accomplishments of Simon Bolivar, liberator of South America from Spanish domination. Bolivar's dream of a united South America fell victim to the myopic self aggrandizement of it's new regional leaders.

Yann Martel - LIFE OF Pi
Is it possible to survive for months in a lifeboat on the high seas accompanied by a hungry tiger? This well-written adventure is enhanced by the articulation of a philosophy of the commonality of modern religions as well as graphic descriptions of the things that even a vegetarian can learn to eat and savor.

Frank McCourt - ANGELA'S ASHES
Searing memoir of his childhood in Limrick, Ireland in the 1930s and 40s. You will feel the desperate poverty of his family, dressed in rags and always hungry. It is an uplifting story that keeps you smiling through your tears. Highly recommended.

Frank McCourt - 'TIS
Sequel to ANGELA'S ASHES.

Robert A. Monroe - JOURNEYS OUT OF THE BODY
Monroe explores a dimension far removed from the physical and spiritual realities of his life, a place unbounded by time or by death. Astral Projection. Not recommended.

Charles Portis, NORWOOD
Norwood sets out to find a former army buddy who owes him a little money, returning home with more than he had bargained for. Time and character of a past era are captured in the dialogue of this delightful novel.

J. K. Rowling - HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE
Although this crude fantasy is written for adolescents, it can serve as relaxing entertainment for adults who wish to learn what the children are reading these days.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery - THE LITTLE PRINCE
This delightful short story is often mistakenly classified as Children's Literature. Don't be put off by the child-focused sketches. Just sit back and enjoy the charming tale of a hapless prince and his insightful adventures.

Rafic Schami - DAMASCUS NIGHTS
A number of unrelated but captivating Near-Eastern tales linked together in an attempt to restore speech to an old wagon driver. Pleasant summer reading.

Clifford D. Simak - COSMIC ENGINEERS
A well crafted science-fiction tale that plays as well or perhaps even better today than it did when Simak wrote it in 1939.

Sophocles - THE OEDIPUS CYCLE - OEDIPUS REX, OEDIPUS AT COLONUS, ANTIGONE
It would be hard to imagine any tribulation more severe than that endured by Oedipus, king of Thebes. At the height of power, he discovers that that he had offended the common decency through unwitting parricide and incest. In a single day, he fell from sovereignty and fame to self-blinded degradation, and later was driven into exile. The profound myth of Oedipus gave Sophocles material for these three plays which, although produced independently of one another, comprise the Oedipus Cycle trilogy.

John Steinbeck - THE PEARL
An enduring and classic fable, sensitively told. It is the tragic story of a poor fisherman living in tune with his people and with nature until his unfortunate discovery of the first of two pearls beyond price. Discovery of the second pearl restores balance to his existence

J.R.R. Tolkien, THE HOBBIT
"If you care for journeys there and back, out of the comfortable Western world, over the edge of the Wild, and home again, and can take an interest in a humble hero (blessed with a little wisdom and a little courage and considerable good luck), here is a record of such a journey and such a traveler"
- J.R.R.Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien, THE LORD OF THE RINGS
The One Ring, which fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in THE HOBBIT, must be destroyed, and it is up to Bilbo's nephew Frodo to save the world from the evil empire by carrying the ring to the Cracks of Doom and destroying it. An epic adventure in persistence and courage, detailing the battle between light and dark, with more than a little magic along the way.

Michel Tournier - THE OGRE
LE ROI DES AULNES is the story of a French prisoner of war and his influence on World War II, but it is much more than that. It is the story of a sinister philosopher who calls himself an ogre, and who believes that the fate of the world is inextricably linked to his own. The novel won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award.

Edith Wharton - ETHAN FROME
Can a man endure the mental torture of life in a secluded farmhouse with two women? One is his wife while the other is the woman whom he loves.