According to MSN Encarta: "Dickens always considered David Copperfield to be his best novel and the one he most liked."

EAST, WEST (a collection of stories) is available as a recorded book, with Rushdie reading. He is a brilliant reader, and uses a variety of accents for various characters. Try to find it!!!

I too loved "The Secret Garden" and I still find it a moving story about the healing power of nature.

I enjoyed reading "A Little Princess" too, but looking back it makes me squirm. The "princess" is an impossibly saintly thing, who is ultimately rewarded by attaining her proper place in the class system. (Her fellow-sufferer is rewarded by becoming her servant.) I wouldn't recommend it for future women.

According to the Powell's website, "Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical play A LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT is regarded as his finest work." Of his sad plays, it's probably the best for actors -- more good meaty scenes to perform and less experimental asides. Ditto A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN.

By contrast, STRANGE INTERLUDE is a howl to read and a nightmare to perform. I heard Glenda Jackson talking about it, and she said there's a state direction in which her character is supposed to have her eyes change color. "Which of course I totally failed to do," she added.

Whatever you start with, remember that O'Neill was an innovator for the stage, and was breaking new ground. THE HAIRY APE was, I believe, an exploration of how script, set, and movement can create an original experience -- it wasn't meant to be a purely literary piece.

From a review of "Slow Man":


"It is hard to find an admirer of J.M. Coetzee's work who does not think that his best book is DISGRACE, one of the strongest novels of the last quarter-century and, among other things, a masterpiece of misdirection."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=18430

Stolen from a fan website ( http://tal.forum2.org/stars ):

A naïve man is being tricked by powerful aristocrats. As a result, he will spend the rest of his life in a dark prison cell. However, with the aid of a fellow prisoner, he manages to escape, assumes a fake identity as an aristocrat, and his revenge on his oppressors is long and sweet.

Sounds familiar? Right. This is the core of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. It also happens to be the core of Alfred Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION. While Dumas' classic tale of high adventure took place in the early 19th century, Bester's version of the plot takes place several centuries hence. The futuristic setting is what earns the book its “science fiction” title, though it is more than a shallow “space opera”.

What makes the book so enjoyable (it is considered by many of Bester's readers to be his best book) is Bester's fast-paced, almost insane style.

Poking around on line, I found several readers who pick LOST ILLUSIONS as their favorite. One says it's a tie between LOST ILLUSIONS and A COURTESAN'S LIFE.

Another says, "LOST ILLUSIONS is one of my favorite Balzac books, but you couldn't pay me to read GERMINAL again!"

Since no favorite has been posted here, I just went to Amazon.com (just to read reviews! not to purchase! I promise!)* ... to look at the customer comments on his novels.

Several of the contributors there have commented on more than one book by Ishiguro, and ALL OF THOSE people say that "Remains of the Day" is far and away their favorite.


*Remember: Browse everywhere, but PURCHASE at your local independently owned bookstore!

At BookReporter.com, people are invited to answer the question: What author(s) has you racing to the store to buy his or her book the day it comes out, (if you have not pre-ordered it already)?

One contributer wrote: "Anything by Anna Quindlen, Anita Shreve, or Carol Joyce Oates."

So if you like Shreve and Oates, maybe you'll like Quindlen too.

First I have to admit that I've only read "U and I" and "Vox."

That said -- EACH of them left me excited about reading more by Nicholson Baker, and they are so different from each other that BOTH of them left me thinking, "What ELSE can he do?"

No, wait -- I've read some of his non-fiction. Baker is a crusader for the preservation of libraries. He wrote a controversial article for the New Yorker (2000) which was published in book form as "Double Fold" (2001) -- find some of the responses it generated at:

http://www.arl.org/preserv/baker.html