I'm sorry, I just can't let this stand without putting in another word of my own. I hated "A Christmas Carol" when I read it early on, and it's still far from my favorite Dickens. DON'T assume you don't like Dickens, should you start here and dislike it. Try Great Ex, as dewey decimal suggests. Or Dombey and Son, or Our Mutual Friend.

"The Sword in the Stone" is an enchanting novel and a great way to get to know T.H. White.

"A Wrinkle in Time" is a classic, and deservedly so. It can't hurt to start there.

Du Maurier's "Rebecca" has become so associated with the (very good) film made from it that perhaps not enough people read the book. It is a wonderful novel, with many depths of meaning and nuance about the nature of relationships, trust, love and need. A great place to start.

Chekhov's short stories are unparalleled for pith, meaning, beauty and emotion in compact form (or any form, perhaps). You can hardly go wrong with any collection of them; if the first doesn't grab you, jump to the next. He wrote many superb ones and few that are not worth reading.

The following is copied in from WIKIPEDIA (www.wikipedia.com):

[Raymond Carver wrote:]
"Chekhov's stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared. It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote — for few, if any, writers have ever done more — it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish.[99]"

Ernest Hemingway, another of Carver's influences, was more grudging, saying: "Chekhov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer".[100] And Vladimir Nabokov once complained of Chekhov's "medley of dreadful prosaisms, ready-made epithets, repetitions".[101] But he also declared The Lady with the Dog "one of the greatest stories ever written" and described Chekhov as writing "the way one person relates to another the most important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice."[102]

For the writer William Boyd, Chekhov's breakthrough was to abandon what William Gerhardie called the "event plot" for something more "blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life".[103]

Virginia Woolf mused on the unique quality of a Chekhov story in The Common Reader:

"But is it the end, we ask? We have rather the feeling that we have overrun our signals; or it is as if a tune had stopped short without the expected chords to close it. These stories are inconclusive, we say, and proceed to frame a criticism based upon the assumption that stories ought to conclude in a way that we recognise. In so doing we raise the question of our own fitness as readers. Where the tune is familiar and the end emphatic—lovers united, villains discomfited, intrigues exposed — as it is in most Victorian fiction, we can scarcely go wrong, but where the tune is unfamiliar and the end a note of interrogation or merely the information that they went on talking, as it is in Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.[104]"

PLEASE DO NOT post any information here. Instead, post ALL TITLES AND INFORMATION for "Ellis Peters" and Edith Pargeter's several other pennames on the "Edith Pargeter" page. Thank you,
Editor

PLEASE SEE AUTHOR UNDER "G" FOR "GARCIA MARQUEZ." Please do not post any information on this page. Thank you.

(I am the author of these books.) Unless you are only interested in mysteries, I recommend starting with "Among the Ginzburgs," then doubling back to "Back East" if you like it. "Among the Ginzburgs" is about five grownup siblings who spend a weekend at their family's former country house. The occasion is the sudden return of the father who abandoned them years before. In "Back East," a successful female songwriter moves back east to New York from L.A. and immediately falls in love with a young gay man; ultimately, seismic shifts in her family reroute her work and her life.
For mystery readers, "Corpse de Ballet" (murder in a ballet company, of course) came first chronologically and so makes sense as a starting place, but I suspect "Slightly Abridged" may draw you in faster and be a better place to start. Both feature the amateur sleuthings of Juliet Bodine, blocked Regency Romance writer. You definitely don't need to have read "Corpse" to follow the story of "Slightly Abridged."

Master Harold...and the Boys is a terrific play, very painful, moving and beautifully put together. You can't go wrong starting there, I think.

Now the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly, Sara Nelson came to the job with an extraordinary ardor for books.

"Lovingly crafted, classically modeled, fascinatingly set...a real treat. Pall has written a literate, wryly funny, sharp-eyed story."
--BOOKNEWS from The Poisoned Pen

"Sleek and sophisticated...The witty dialog and insightful handling of talent and ego add verve and dash to the theatrical mystery familiar to the readers of Ngaio Marsh."
--www.crimepays.com, Partners Picks

From PUBLISHERS WEEKLY:

Terpsichore, the ancient Greek goddess of dance, must be smiling down from her home on Mt. Helicon at Pall's (Back East) splendid first entry in this cleverly themed series with its insights into the egos, jealousies, pains and passions of a Manhattan ballet company. Juliet Bodine, a successful writer of Regency novels and ex-professor of English literature at Barnard, puts aside her own deadlines to give literary advice to her longtime friend, Ruth Renswick, choreographer for the Jansch Ballet Company of New York, who is creating a new ballet based on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. A ballet fan herself, Juliet is fascinated by the personalities of the company and the process of creating a new production. When a lead dancer dies suddenly, she's convinced it was murder, but her old Harvard friend, police detective Murray Landis, concludes the death was a suicide. Case closed, but not for Juliet. From the executive director to the lowliest member of the corps, the characters come alive through Juliet's astute observations and the extremely well-crafted dialogue. Vivid settings capture summer in New York, and one can almost feel the heat and steam of the ballet studio. Both mystery fans and ardent balletomanes will be left with great expectations and eager anticipation for the next in the series.

From Publishers Weekly:

"Great expectations have been fulfilled! The second book in Pall’s Nine muses series, this one inspired by Erato, the muse of love poetry, and again starring New York romance writer Juliet Bodine, is sure to please fans of Corpse de Ballet (2001). Ada Case Caffrey, a spry octogenarian who enjoys reading her own erotic verse at poetry slams, shows Juliet some recently discovered manuscript pages from the memoirs of Regency London’s most infamous courtesan, Harriette Wilson. The sheets contain a hitherto unknown couplet attributed to Byron. Juliet refers Ada to Dennis Daignault, a rare books dealer whom she has been dating. But Ada never returns from her meeting with Dennis, and Juliet files a missing persons report. When Ada turns up strangled and stuffed under a car on Riverside Drive, Juliet finds herself a likely suspect in a homicide investigation. Despite the erotic theme, nothing here would make a maiden aunt blush. Pitch-perfect dialogue furthers the wonderfully intricate plot. Juliet’s recollections of her first conversation with Ada, and of Ada’s verses, lead to the dramatic denouement to a fully satisfying mystery." (Apr. 7) - February 24, 2003


"Slam Dunk" from The Washington Post

"Mystery reviewers, like other readers, sometimes check out jacket blurbs when deciding which new books to take on. Blurbs alone aren't make-or-break -- they get maybe 25 points on the University of Michigan admissions scale -- but they can spur a reviewer on to a closer look and, on rare occasions, lead to a "not to my taste" instant rejection.

Mistakes can be made. I set aside Slightly Abridged (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) when I noted that author Ellen Pall's first mystery, Corpse de Ballet, had been praised by just two publications, and one was Romantic Times. Not for me, I thought.

Wrong. A second look -- which came when the early chapters of a crime-fiction bigfoot's new work proved disappointing -- got me hooked right away on a delightful new series by a writer who comes across as a sort of sprightly Ruth Rendell. Pall may have been noticed by Romantic Times because her amateur sleuth, Juliet Bodine, is a popular writer of Regency romances. There's nothing either gauzy or overwrought about Bodine herself, however; she is a witty, canny young New Yorker whose involvements with men are entirely and rather sweetly up-to-date.

Working under her pseudonym, Angelica Kestrel-Haven, on "A Christian Gentleman," Bodine is caught in a no-inspiration funk, and she is blocked. She is afraid she might even have to quit writing and "find a job teaching English literature, probably at some small college with a sense of humor." Then Ada Case Caffrey arrives. She is an 84-year-old fan from upstate New York who wants Bodine's help with appraising and possibly selling a manuscript fragment found in a secret compartment in a bedpost. The author of the pages appears to be Harriette Wilson, a Regency-era courtesan with a taste for extortion and connections to Lord Byron, whose verse to her she quotes in the unearthed memoir section.

Imperious and manipulative, Caffrey is a funny, self-dramatizing old bohemian who takes the New York downtown poetry-slam scene by storm with her erotic verses -- until, that is, she turns up strangled in a garbage bag along Riverside Drive, her manuscript gone. Caffrey was such a wonderfully insufferable piece of work that her death jars Bodine out of her blank-page panic and also recharges her off-again-on-again, sort-of romance with NYPD detective Murray Landis.

Both New Yorkers to the bone, Bodine and Landis are amusingly out of their element when the murder investigation takes them to the Adirondacks hamlet where Caffrey was involved with both a theatrical group, the Adirondactors, and radical environmentalists. The variegated range of suspects in New York and Espyville is to Bodine like "a Chinese finger puzzle, one of those tubes of braided straw that constrict more tightly around one's fingers the more one pulls away. The only route of escape was to move into the puzzle, deeper into the trap. Like turning into a skid. Or developing a character." - by Richard Lipez © 2003 The Washington Post Company

"Precise, shrewd, and brightly amusing." Kirkus

"Moving story spiked by arid wit...surprise follows surprise in the life of a heroine one cares about and wishes well." Publishers Weekly

"Vivid characters coupled with a tightly structured plot make this novel a pleasurable and moving experience...an enhancing addition to most fiction collections." Library Journal

Extremely readable... [Examines] with absolute acuity the ever expanding and contracting familial pull of brothers and sisters, husbands and wives."
Wendy Wasserstein, The New York Times Book Review

"The sentences uttered by these literary descendants of Salinger's Glass family are good enough to eat. So are the sentences that describe them."
Anna Shapiro, The New Yorker

From a review by Michael Turton, in The View From Taiwan:


Jade Phoenix, a finalist for a literary prize, is the first novel by former US diplomat Syd Goldsmith. The book is set in Taipei and Washington, DC, during the 1970s, and tells the stories of two disparate men, American student and journalist Nick Malter, and Taiwanese millionaire Ko-sa Ong, who form a deep friendship across vast cultural and political gulfs, and their love for the same woman, Jade Phoenix. The story plays out against the background of the recognition of China, the derecognition of Taiwan, and the rise of the Taiwanese independence movement.

The great strength of Goldsmith's story lies in its rich depiction of the realities of Taiwan during the heyday of KMT rule. Goldsmith, who knows many of the historical persons who appear as characters in the book, both real and fictionalized, is able to leverage his vast knowledge of the island to produce a book that is not only historically informed but also culturally accurate. Angel's discovery that Nick is "cheating" on her, or Ko-sa's demolition of his marriage trying to get a son, are prime examples of the way Goldsmith uses culturally-driven misunderstandings to propel the story.

In many novels of other cultures, one experiences the Other through the eyes of the hero who moves to the exotic culture and brokers the reader's understanding of it. Goldsmith refuses to fall into that trap, for he brings Ko-sa back to the US, so that the reader may experience his own culture as the Other seen through the eyes of Ko-sa. Nor does Goldsmith create an idealized picture of either culture in an attempt to play one off the other - just as Nick suffers injustices and confusions in Taiwan, so does Ko-sa in America.

This is an entertaining and educational book, a magnificent journey into a turbulent time, filled with interesting characters, fascinating history, and told in bluff, rapid prose that never gets in the reader's way. I hope a copy of it finds its way into your hands soon.

From Albry Montalbano's review of
"So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading,"

published in "Literary Review," Spring, 2004

"I have a New Year's plan: I'm setting out to read a book a week for the next year and write a diary of the experience," writes Sara Nelson in her memoir So Many Books, So Little Time. But this book is much more than what she intended it to be. It reads like a memoir including interracial marriage, sibling rivalry, teaching an eight-year-old to hit a baseball, erotic literature, all these seemingly disparate elements of Nelson's life brought to bear on the art of choosing the next good read. By the end, Nelson admits, "[ ... ] for every moment that was exhilarating, there was one that was frustrating. For every reading experience that was edifying, there was one that was elusive. And just as I thought I had a handle on what I was doing and how important it all was, I realized I was as clueless as ever." But what a great read the year made for the rest of us.

Excerpts from other reviews:

Library Journal, starred review, September 15, 2003
...a fitting conclusion to a work that will make readers run to the shelf to discover which book beckons next. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Time Out New York, October 16-23, 2003
...Nelson is a charming companion... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

St. Petersburg Times, December 2, 2003
Book clubs...will find this...memoir a handy reading guide, while...book junkies will devour every page. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

People, November 24, 2003
[Nelson's] passion for the page shines throughout. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Ben Izzy is a storyteller who one day awoke from surgery for thyroid cancer unable to speak. This book tells that story in a way that both harnesses his storytelling gifts and movingly (and humorously, and enchantingly) conveys the grim reality of that turn of events. With a thousand opportunities for sappiness, it isn't sappy. Nor is it reductionist. It's a unique book, and quite wonderful.

“...He began to read… He could think of nothing else. He forgot the life about him. He had to be called two or three times before he would come to his dinner. Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
From “Of Human Bondage”

It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.
From LORD JIM

‘Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.”
From “Later the Same Day”