You don t need to leave home to travel the world & what better guide than Patricia Schultz, author of the 1 New York Times bestseller
...
Get lost in a thousand great books. Fourteen years in the making & fifth in the series that has over 4.4 million copies in print, 1, 000 Books to Read Before You Die is an eclectic & extraordinary book about books, as compulsively readable, entertaining, surprising, & enlightening as the 1, 000-plus volumes it recommends. The author, James Mustich, has been a bookseller for decades, including two running the acclaimed independent book catalog A Common Reader, & 1, 000 Books is like his personal store, where every book is excellent. Mustich`s incomparable writing
- lively, informed, erudite yet with an undisguised enthusiasm
- not only reveals why the particular title you`re reading about is vital but also gives you the urgent feeling that you need to drop everything, right now, & read that book. The expected pillars are here
- Dante, Proust, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka
- but made completely fresh in these animated essays. & in between, the unexpected titles
- from Harold & the violet Crayon to Fun Home, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to Tell Me a Riddle
- are made completely essential. Aeschylus is here, & so is Nancy Drew, Herman Melville, & Edwidge Danticat. The alphabetical listing by last name results in the joy of juxtaposition
- Grimm next to Grisham, Clarice Lispector followed by Hugh Lofting
- prompting a rich appreciation for the gorgeous mosaic that is our literary heritage, whether poetry, science fiction, memoir, travel writing, biography, children`s literature, the novel. Because ultimately what this book is not is a canon. It is, rather, an uncommon celebration of the best that our authors have put into words
- &, as one of the entrants, the critic David Denby, put it, that ”special character of solitude & rapture” that is the act of reading.