英文
Piranesi 豆瓣
9.3 (14 个评分) 作者: Susanna Clarke Bloomsbury Publishing 2020 - 9
The long-awaited return from the author of the multi-million copy bestselling Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Beautiful Orderliness of the House is what gives us Life.
Piranesi has always lived in the House; or, for as long as he can remember.
Day after day, Piranesi records in his notebooks with precision and carefulness the House's endless halls, their great and strange statues, the ebb and flow of the tides within its walls. He speaks to the birds; and brings tributes of food and waterlilies to the House's Dead. Once in a while, he sees his friend the Other. But mostly, he is alone.
Then messages begin to appear, scratched out in chalk and spelled out in pebbles. A new person has come to the House, and there is something they are trying to tell Piranesi.
But another story is unfolding, within the pages of Piranesi's own journal. A story written in his own hand, that he cannot remember writing; a story of a group of strangers, in an unfamiliar world.
The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
2020年10月25日 已读
非常喜欢。精巧。并不是Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell 的续集续集了!但是构造完美,而且很短,一天就读完了!
小说 英文 魔幻
The Mirror & the Light 豆瓣
作者: Hilary Mantel Henry Holt and Co. 2020 - 3
“If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?”
England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen before Jane dies giving birth to the male heir he most craves.
Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to the breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?
With The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion, and courage.
2020年12月1日 已读
听的有声书。期待BBC的电视剧集。。。
历史小说 英文
Avenue of Mysteries 豆瓣
作者: John Irving Simon & Schuster 2015 - 11
2021年6月15日 已读
难得看到欧文回归旧日的写法,跟以往相似的元素放在新罕布什尔旅馆之后就没出现过的异国背景板。欧文化的香港,墨西哥,马尼拉十分绚丽。
约翰·欧文 英文
The Testaments: A Novel (Audiobook) 豆瓣
作者: Margaret Atwood / Ann Dowd (narrator) Random House Audio Publishing Group 2019 - 9
In this brilliant sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalized readers for decades.When the van door slammed on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her—freedom, prison or death.   With The Testaments, the wait is over.   Margaret Atwood's sequel picks up the story fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.  "Dear Readers: Everything you've ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we've been living in." —Margaret Atwood
Dune 豆瓣
7.9 (17 个评分) 作者: Frank Herbert ACE Charter; 25th Anniv edition 1996
This Hugo and Nebula Award winner tells the sweeping tale of a desert planet called Arrakis, the focus of an intricate power struggle in a byzantine interstellar empire. Dune is one of the most famous science fiction novels ever written, and deservedly so. The setting is elaborate and ornate, the plot labyrinthine, the adventures exciting.
(from Amazon.com)
2022年2月15日 已读
虎头蛇尾//刚到第四章,很有意思
科幻 英文
The Song of Achilles 豆瓣
7.7 (20 个评分) 作者: Madeline Miller Ecco 2012 - 3
Greece in the age of Heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the kingdom of Phthia. Here he is nobody, just another unwanted boy living in the shadow of King Peleus and his golden son, Achilles. Achilles, 'best of all the Greeks', is everything Patroclus is not - strong, beautiful, the child of a goddess - and by all rights their paths should never cross. Yet one day, Achilles takes the shamed prince under his wing and soon their tentative companionship gives way to a steadfast friendship. As they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something far deeper - despite the displeasure of Achilles's mother Thetis, a cruel and deathly pale sea goddess with a hatred of mortals. Fate is never far from the heels of Achilles. When word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, the men of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows Achilles into war, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they have learned, everything they hold dear. And that, before he is ready, he will be forced to surrender his friend to the hands of Fate. Profoundly moving and breathtakingly original, this rendering of the epic Trojan War is a dazzling feat of the imagination, a devastating love story, and an almighty battle between gods and kings, peace and glory, immortal fame and the human heart.
2021年12月23日 已读
很喜欢后半部,从rage of achiles部分开始。感谢作者给了Braises和Patroclus 声音和故事。
历史 英文
Never Let Me Go 豆瓣
8.6 (17 个评分) 作者: [英] 石黑一雄 Vintage 2006 - 4
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day comes a devastating new novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss. As children Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.
Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special–and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is another classic by the author of The Remains of the Day
2022年1月31日 已读
心碎💔石黑一雄的文笔简直太好了。干净内敛于无声处起惊雷。。。
小说 英文
84, Charing Cross Road 豆瓣
9.2 (5 个评分) 作者: Helene Hanff Moyer Bell Ltd. 1991 - 9
84, Charing Cross Road is a charming record of bibliophilia, cultural difference, and imaginative sympathy. For 20 years, an outspoken New York writer and a rather more restrained London bookseller carried on an increasingly touching correspondence.
In her first letter to Marks & Co., Helene Hanff encloses a wish list, but warns, "The phrase 'antiquarian booksellers' scares me somewhat, as I equate 'antique' with expensive." Twenty days later, on October 25, 1949, a correspondent identified only as FPD let Hanff know that works by Hazlitt and Robert Louis Stevenson would be coming under separate cover.
When they arrive, Hanff is ecstatic -- but unsure she'll ever conquer "bilingual arithmetic." By early December 1949, Hanff is suddenly worried that the six-pound ham she's sent off to augment British rations will arrive in a kosher office. But only when FPD turns out to have an actual name, Frank Doel, does the real fun begin.
Two years later, Hanff is outraged that Marks & Co. has dared to send an abridged Pepys diary. "i enclose two limp singles, i will make do with this thing till you find me a real Pepys. THEN i will rip up this ersatz book, page by page, AND WRAP THINGS IN IT." Nonetheless, her postscript asks whether they want fresh or powdered eggs for Christmas. Soon they're sharing news of Frank's family and Hanff's career. No doubt their letters would have continued, but in 1969, the firm's secretary informed her that Frank Doel had died. In the collection's penultimate entry, Helene Hanff urges a tourist friend, "If you happen to pass by 84, Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me. I owe it so much."
Bel Canto 豆瓣
作者: Ann Patchett Harper Perennial 2005 - 8
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening -- until a band of gunwielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers. </p>
2022年2月8日 已读
笔调幽默,复杂的多线都循序渐进编织成一个很好的故事。结局华丽哀而不伤,很干脆。全篇读完非常满意。
小说 英文
Commonwealth 豆瓣
作者: Ann Patchett Harper 2016 - 9
The acclaimed, bestselling author—winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize—tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families’ lives.
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.
Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.
When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.
Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.
2022年2月12日 已读
真喜欢ann patchett的文字。惟妙惟肖的群像,性格各异,情节精巧,丰富的细节却一点都不臃肿不堆砌,干净利落。
小说 英文
Hamnet 豆瓣
作者: Maggie O'Farrell Tinder Press 2019 - 3
A stunning new departure for Maggie O'Farrell's fiction, HAMNET is the heart-stopping story behind Shakespeare's most famous play.
On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?
Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week.
Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright. It is a story of the bond between twins, and of a marriage pushed to the brink by grief. It is also the story of a flea that boards a ship in Alexandria; a kestrel and its mistress; and a glovemaker's son who flouts convention in pursuit of the woman he loves. Above all, it is a tender and unforgettable reimagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.
Utopia Avenue 豆瓣
作者: David Mitchell Sceptre 2020 - 6
CLOCKS, 'one of the most brilliantly inventive writers of this, or any country' (Independent).
Utopia Avenue are the strangest British band you've never heard of. Emerging from London's psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folksinger Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief and blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and draughty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the cusp of chart success, to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968.
David Mitchell's new novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue; of riots in the streets and revolutions in the head; of drugs, thugs, madness, love, sex, death, art; of the families we choose and the ones we don't; of fame's Faustian pact and stardom's wobbly ladder. Can we change the world in turbulent times, or does the world change us? Utopia means 'nowhere' but could a shinier world be within grasp, if only we had a map?
2022年3月24日 已读
一日既往的的中间有些啰嗦但是结尾超级感人。听的有声书,朗诵者也有点太吵让我想起喜欢叫喊的Al Pacino,但是瑕不掩瑜,确实是DM又一力作,以往小说的人物也继续出现cloud atlas, bone clock, the thousand autumns of jacob de zoet
小说 英文
The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth #1) 豆瓣
6.8 (6 个评分) 作者: N. K. Jemisin Orbit 2015 - 8
Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze -- the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years -- collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.
Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She'll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.
The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth #2) 豆瓣
作者: N. K. Jemisin Orbit 2016 - 8
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS... FOR THE LAST TIME.
The season of endings grows darker as civilization fades into the long cold night. Alabaster Tenring – madman, world-crusher, savior – has returned with a mission: to train his successor, Essun, and thus seal the fate of the Stillness forever.
It continues with a lost daughter, found by the enemy.
It continues with the obelisks, and an ancient mystery converging on answers at last.
The Stillness is the wall which stands against the flow of tradition, the spark of hope long buried under the thickening ashfall. And it will not be broken.
Lectures on Russian Literature 豆瓣 Goodreads
作者: Vladimir Nabokov Mariner Books 2002 - 12
The author's observations on the great nineteenth-century Russian writers-Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. "This volume... never once fails to instruct and stimulate. This is a great Russian talking of great Russians" (Anthony Burgess). Edited and with an Introduction by Fredson Bowers; illustrations.
The Life of Graham Greene 豆瓣
作者: Norman Sherry Penguin (Non-Classics) 2004 - 4
The first volume of the authorized biography of Graham Greene, reconstructs the first 35 years of Greene's life. The author has also written biographies of Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen and Charlotte and Emily Bronte. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
A Writer's People 豆瓣
作者: V.S.Naipaul Pan Macmillan 2007
Over the course of his astonishing fifty-year career, V.S. Naipaul's writing has been characterized by a commitment to truth that gives his work a unique luminosity and brilliance. In "A Writer's People" he brings unmatched clarity and rich experience to an exploration of the ways we think, see and feel. The range of this extraordinary book reflects an intellect deeply engaged with the challenges of assimilation faced by the 'serious traveller', one for whom there can be no single world view. Naipaul writes about the classical world what we have retained from it, what we have forgotten and the more recent past. Figures as diverse as Mahatma Gandhi, Derek Walcott and Gustave Flaubert come under his compassionate scrutiny, as do his own early years in Trinidad, the silences in his family history and the roles played by Anthony Powell and Francis Wyndham in his first encounters with literary culture. Part meditation, part remembrance, as elegant as it is revelatory, "A Writer's People" is a privileged insight, full of gentleness, humour and feeling, into the mind of one of our greatest writers.
A Place of My Own 豆瓣
作者: Michael Pollan Penguin Books 2008
Michael Pollan's unmatched ability to draw lines of connection between our everyday experiences - whether eating, gardening, or building - and the natural world has been the basis for the popular success of his many works of nonfiction, including the genre-defining bestsellers The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. With this updated edition of his earlier book A Place of My Own, readers can revisit the inspired, intelligent, and often hilarious story of Pollan's realization of a room of his own - a small, wooden hut, his "shelter for daydreams" - built with his admittedly unhandy hands. Inspired by both Thoreau and Mr. Blandings, A Place of My Own not only works to convey the history and meaning of all human building, it also marks the connections between our bodies, our minds, and the natural world.