Hi guys, some of you asked me to post the list of readings for this course .
I didn't manage to create a link on blogger, but here they are, thanks to the old good method "copy and paste".
RECOMMENDED
READINGS - NA1
CONTEMPORARY NOVEL
No1 Ladies Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective
Agency is a series of novels by Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith. The agency is located in Gaborone, capital of Botswana. Its founder is a Motswana woman, Mma Precious Ramotswe, who features as
the stories' protagonist and main detective. The episodic novels are as much
about the adventures and foibles of different characters as they are about
solving mysteries. Each book in the series follows on from the previous book.
They have been adapted for radio, television, and internet.
The Sunday Philosophy Club series - Alexander McCall Smith
These novels capture the charm of
Edinburgh featuring the insatiably curious philosopher and woman
detective. Whether investigating a case or a problem of philosophy, the
indefatigable Isabel Dalhousie, one of fiction’s most richly developed amateur
detectives, is always ready to pursue the answers to all of life’s questions,
large and small.
His Dark Materials trilogy - Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials is a trilogy of fantasy novels, coming together to form an epic, by Philip
Pullman comprising Northern Lights (1995, published
as The Golden Compass in North America), The Subtle
Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). It follows
the coming-of-age of
two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes against a backdrop of epic events
Restless - William Boyd
Espionage novel. The novel depicts the tale of a young woman who discovers that her
mother was recruited as a spy during World War II. The book continually
switches between time periods and, in doing so, from first to third person.
Atonement - Ian MacEwan
Atonement is a family saga (and partially a war)
novel written by author Ian
McEwan and published
in 2001. Set in four temporal periods and locations it is the story of a young,
upper-class and English girl's half-innocent mistake, that ruins lives, and her
adulthood in its shadow and reflection on the nature of writing to understand
and respond to her need for atonement.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - John Boyne
Bruno is a 9-year-old boy
growing up during World
War II in Berlin.[3] He
lives in a huge house with his loving parents, his twelve-year-old sister
Gretel (whom he refers to as a Hopeless Case), and maidservants.
His father is a high-ranking SS
officer who, after a visit
from Adolf Hitler (referred
to in the novel as "The Fury", Bruno's misrecognition of the
word "Führer") and Eva
Braun, is promoted to Commandant, and
to Bruno's dismay, the family has to move away to a place called
"Out-With" (which turns out to be Auschwitz Concentration Camp)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
- Mark Haddon
The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-time takes place in the year 1998 in and around the
town of Swindon, England. The fifteen-year-old narrator of the story,
Christopher John Francis Boone, discovers the slain body of his neighbor’s poodle,
Wellington, on the neighbor’s front lawn one evening and sets out to uncover
the murderer. His investigation is at times aided, and at other times hampered,
by the mild form of autism he lives with
Never Let me Go - Kazuo
Is
set in a dystopian world in which human clones are created so that they can
donate their organs as young adults. The novel follows the life story of Kathy, a clone who is raised at a boarding school for future
“donors.”shiguro
Rob Fleming is a London
record store owner in his mid-thirties whose girlfriend, Laura, has just left
him. At his record shop, named Championship Vinyl, Rob and his employees, Dick
and Barry, spend their free moments discussing mix-tape aesthetics
and constructing desert-island, "top-five" lists of anything that demonstrates their
knowledge of music.
It is a 1998 coming of age novel about tow boys,
Will, a 36-year-old bachelor, and Marcus, an eccentric introverted , bullied
12-year-old with a suicidal mother. Will, never having to work thanks to the
royalties from his father’s Christma’s song hit, has a lot of spare time. Most
of this is pent smoking, watching TV, listening to albums and looking for
female companionship.....
Angela’s
Ashes – Frank McCourt
This is a 1996 memoir by
the Irish-American author Frank
McCourt. The memoir consists of
various anecdotes and stories of Frank McCourt's impoverished childhood and
early adulthood in Brooklyn, New York and in Limerick, Ireland.
The
Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13/34 - Sue Townsend
The book is written in
a diary style,
and focuses on the worries and regrets of a teenager who believes himself to be
an intellectual. The story is in 1981 and 1982, and in the background it refers
to some of the historic world events of the time, such as the Falklands
Warand the wedding of Prince
Charles and Lady
Diana as well as the birth
of Prince William. Mole is also a fierce critic of prime ministerMargaret
Thatcher, listing her as one of his
worst enemies.
The
Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year- Sue Townsend
The day her
children leave home, Eva climbs into bed and stays there. She's had enough - of
her kids' carelessness, her husband's thoughtlessness and of the world's
general indifference.
CLASSICS
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by Ray
Bradbury published in 1953. It
is regarded as one of his best works. The novel presents a future American
society where books are outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are
found The title refers to the temperature that Bradbury understood to be
the autoignition point of paper.
1984 - George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian[1] novel by George Orwell published in
1949. The Oceanian province of Airstrip
One (formerly known as Great
Britain) is a world of perpetual
war, omnipresent government
surveillance, and public mind
control, dictated by a political
system euphemistically named English
Socialism (Ingsoc) under the
control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and
independent thinking as thoughtcrimes.[2] Their
tyranny is headed by Big Brother, the quasi-divine Party leader who enjoys an
intense cult of personality, but who may not even exist.
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Animal
Farm is an allegorical and dystopian novel by George
Orwell, published in England on 17 August 1945. According to Orwell, the book
reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalin era in the Soviet
Union. Old
Major, the old boar on the Manor
Farm, summons the animals on the farm together for a meeting, during which he
refers to humans as parasites and
teaches the animals a revolutionary song called 'Beasts
of England'. When Major dies, two
young pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, assume command and consider it a duty to prepare for
the Rebellion. The animals revolt and drive the drunken and irresponsible Mr Jones from the farm, renaming it "Animal
Farm". They adopt Seven Commandments of Animalism, the most important of
which is, "All animals are equal".
Brighton Rock - Graham Green
Brighton Rock is a novel by Graham
Greene, published in 1938, and later
made into films, a 1947 film and a 2010 film. The novel is a murder thriller set in 1930s Brighton. Although ostensibly an underworld thriller, the
book is also a challenge to Roman Catholic doctrine concerning the nature of sin and the basis of morality.
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 novel by J. D.
Salinger. Originally published
for adults, it has since become popular with adolescent readers for its themes
of teenage angst and alienation. The events he narrates take place in
the few days between the end of the fall school term and Christmas, when Holden
is sixteen years old. Pencey is Holden’s fourth school; he
has already failed out of three others. At Pencey, he has failed four out of
five of his classes and has received notice that he is being expelled
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Set in the prosperous Long
Island of 1922, The
Great Gatsby provides a critical social history of America during
the Roaring Twenties within its narrative. That era, known for
unprecedented economic prosperity, the evolution of jazz
music, flapper culture, and bootlegging and other criminal activity, is plausibly depicted
in Fitzgerald's novel. Nick Carraway, a young man from Minnesota, moves to
New York in the summer of 1922 to learn about the bond business. He rents a
house in the West Egg district of Long Island, a wealthy but unfashionable area
populated by the new rich, a group who have made their fortunes too recently to
have established social connections and who are prone to garish displays of
wealth. Nick’s next-door neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious man named Jay
Gatsby, who lives in a gigantic Gothic mansion and throws extravagant parties
every Saturday night.
In
Cold Blood - In Cold Blood Truman
Capote
A 1966 book by American author Truman
Capote; it details the brutal 1959
murders of Herbert Clutter, a successful farmer from Holcomb, Kansas, his wife, and two of their four children. When
Capote learned of the quadruple murder, before the killers were captured, he
decided to travel to Kansas and write about the crime
Good Bye to Berlin – Isherwood
The novel, a
semiautobiographical account of Isherwood's time in 1930s Berlin, describes pre-Nazi Germany and the people he met. It
is episodic, dealing with a large cast over a period of several years from late
1930 to early 1933. It is written as a connected series of six short stories
and novellas The reader is introduced to this world in the first section, “A
Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930).” This first of two diaries in the novel introduces
objects and people that the narrator can observe from the window of his room.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
In 1930s Edinburgh, six ten-year-old girls, Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny,
Monica, and Eunice are assigned Miss Jean Brodie, who describes herself as
being "in my prime", as teacher. Miss Brodie, determined that they
shall receive an education in the original sense of the Latin verb educere,
"to lead out", gives her students lessons about her personal love
life and travels, promoting art history, classical studies, and fascism. Under her mentorship, these six girls whom Brodie
singles out as the elite group among her students—known as the "Brodie
set"—begin to stand out from the rest of the school
The
Happy Prince and other Stories - Oscar
Wilde
The
Happy Prince and Other Tales (sometimes
called The Happy Prince and
Other Stories) is a collection of stories for children byOscar
Wilde first published in May
1888. It contains five stories, "The Happy Prince", "The Nightingale
and the Rose", "The Selfish Giant", "The Devoted Friend", and "The Remarkable Rocket". It is
most famous for its title story, "The Happy Prince".
NON-FICTION
Undercover economist – Tim Harford
Who
really makes money from fair trade coffee? Why is it impossible to buy a decent
second hand car? How do the Mafia make money from laundries when street gangs
pushing drugs don’t? Who really benefits from immigration? Looking at familiar
situations in unfamiliar ways, The Undercover Economist is
a fresh explanation of the fundamental principles of the modern economy,
illuminated by examples from the booming skyscrapers of Shanghai to the sleepy
canals of Bruges.
Ghosts of Spain - Giles Tremlett
Ghosts of Spain is a big book, both in terms of length (over 400 pages) and
subject matter. It covers more or less every aspect of modern Spain: religion
and monarchy; sex and family; drugs, politics and terrorism; as well as history-changing
events – Franco’s death, King Juan Carlos’ ascent to the throne and the
transition; 11M; and key personalities from the 20th century: Jesus Gil, Sabino
Arana, Manuel Fraga, Camaron de la Isla, Pedro Almodovar.
Touching
the Void - Joe Simpson
In 1985, Yates and Simpson
attempted a first-ascent of the previously unclimbed West Face of Siula Grande
in alpine
style. Several teams had previously
tried and failed to climb this face. Yates and Simpson were successful in their
attempt, and after summiting they descended via the difficult North Ridge.
Disaster struck on the descent when Simpson slipped down an ice cliff and
landed awkwardly, crushing his tibia into his knee joint, thus breaking his right leg.
