2020 Book List

azureji

azureji @azureji

13 本书  

Books I read in 2020.

Midnight's Children [图书] 豆瓣 Goodreads Goodreads
Midnight's Children
作者: Salman Rushdie Vintage 1995 - 5
Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and found himself mysteriously 'handcuffed to history' by the coincidence. He is one of 1,001 children born at the midnight hour, each of them endowed with an extraordinary talent - and whose privilege and curse it is to be both master and victims of their times. Through Saleem's gifts - inner ear and wildly sensitive sense of smell - we are drawn into a fascinating family saga set against the vast, colourful background of the India of the 20th century.
Mexican Gothic [图书] 豆瓣 Goodreads Goodreads
Mexican Gothic
5.0 (6 个评分) 作者: Silvia Moreno-Garcia Del Rey 2020 - 6
After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She’s not sure what she will find—her cousin’s husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.
Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She’s a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi’s dreams with visions of blood and doom.
Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family’s once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.
And Noemí, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.
The Graveyard Book [图书] 豆瓣 Goodreads Goodreads
The Graveyard Book
8.8 (19 个评分) 作者: [英国] 尼尔·盖曼 HarperCollins 2008 - 1
Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy-an ancient Indigo Man beneath the hill, a gateway to a desert leading to an abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack--who has already killed Bod's family. . . . Beloved master storyteller Neil Gaiman returns with a luminous new novel for the audience that embraced his "New York Times" bestselling modern classic "Coraline." Magical, terrifying, and filled with breathtaking adventures, the graveyard book is sure to enthrall readers of all ages.
Orlando: A Biography [图书] Goodreads
Orlando, A Biography
作者: Virginia Woolf Vintage Digital 2012 - 7
WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY PETER ACKROYD AND MARGARET REYNOLDS
As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will not only witness the making of history from its edge, but will find that his unique position as a woman who knows what it is to be a man will give him insight into matters of the heart.
The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Reynolds, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
Circe [图书] 豆瓣 Goodreads Goodreads
Circe
6.9 (16 个评分) 作者: Madeline Miller Little, Brown and Company 2018 - 4
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child--not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power--the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.
Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.
But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.
Piranesi [图书] Goodreads 豆瓣 Goodreads
Piranesi
8.0 (5 个评分) 作者: Susanna Clarke Bloomsbury Publishing 2020 - 9
Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
For readers of Neil Gaiman’s
and fans of Madeline Miller’s
,
introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.
A General Theory of Oblivion [图书] Goodreads Goodreads
Teoria Geral do Esquecimento
作者: José Eduardo Agualusa 译者: Daniel Hahn Archipelago 2015 - 12
As the country goes through various political upheavals from colony to socialist republic to civil war to peace and capitalism, the world outside seeps into Ludo's life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of someone peeing on a balcony, or a man fleeing his pursuers.
is a perfectly crafted, wild patchwork of a novel, playing on a love of storytelling and fable.
Light Years [图书] 豆瓣 Goodreads
Light Years
作者: James Salter Vintage 1995 - 1
This exquisite, resonant novel is a brilliant portrait of marriage by a contemporary American master. Even as he lingers over the lustrous surface of Viri and Nedra's marriage, James Salter makes us see the cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will in time mar it beyond repair. "An unexpectedly moving ode to beautiful lives frayed by time."
Marcovaldo: or the Seasons in the City [图书] Goodreads
Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in città
作者: Italo Calvino 译者: William Weaver Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012 - 10
In this enchanting book of linked stories, Italo Calvino charts the disastrous schemes of an Italian peasant, an unskilled worker in a drab northern industrial city in the 1950s and ’60s, struggling to reconcile his old country habits with his current urban life.

Marcovaldo has a practiced eye for spotting natural beauty and an unquenchable longing for the unspoiled rural world of his imagination. Much to the continuing puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams and gives rein to his fantasies, whether it’s sleeping in the great outdoors on a park bench, following a stray cat, or trying to catch wasps. Unfortunately, the results are never quite what he anticipates.

Spanning from the 1950s to the 1960s, the twenty stories in
are alternately comic and melancholy, farce and fantasy. Throughout, Calvino’s unassuming masterpiece “conveys the sensuous, tangible qualities of life”
.
Rebecca [图书] Goodreads Goodreads Goodreads
Rebecca
作者: Daphne du Maurier Little, Brown and Company 2013 - 12
The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady's maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at his massive country estate that she realizes how large a shadow his late wife will cast over their lives--presenting her with a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their marriage from beyond the grave.
First published in 1938, this classic gothic novel is such a compelling read that it won the Anthony Award for Best Novel of the Century.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space [图书]
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
作者: Carl Sagan / Ann Druyan Ballantine Books 1997 - 9
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Sagan traces our exploration of space and suggests that our very survival may depend on the wise use of other worlds. This stirring book reveals how scientific discovery has altered our perception of who we are and where we stand, and challenges us to weigh what we will do with that knowledge. Photos, many in color.
The Volcano Lover: A Romance [图书] Goodreads
The Volcano Lover
作者: Susan Sontag Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013 - 10
Nápoles, 1772. A segunda cidade da Europa, magnífica, encimada pelas constantes erupções do seu famoso vulcão. Um nobre inglês, o embaixador britânico no Reino das Duas Sicílias, regressa à sua cidade adoptiva acompanhado pela mulher. Cavaliere, como todos o conhecem, é um coleccionador de arte, de antiguidades, de pessoas - um temperamento erudito e ávido, mas desapaixonado. Quando a mulher morre, Cavaliere vive pela primeira vez um sentimento profundo. E quando a antiga amante do sobrinho entra na sua vida é possuído por uma intensa paixão.
A Gentleman in Moscow [图书] Goodreads
A Gentleman in Moscow
作者: Amor Towles Penguin Books 2016 - 9
In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.
创建日期: 2022年4月29日