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Book Selection For This Year:
(Book Summaries from
Amazon.Com)
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Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet is the perfect Austen
heroine: intelligent, generous, sensible, incapable of jealousy
or any other major sin. That makes her sound like an
insufferable goody-goody, but the truth is she's a completely
hip character, who if provoked is not above skewering her
antagonist with a piece of her exceptionally sharp -- but always
polite -- 18th century wit. The point is, you spend the whole
book absolutely fixated on the critical question: will Elizabeth
and Mr. Darcy hook up? |
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Beowulf
The epic poem of war and adventure.
Beowulf is the earliest extant poem in a modern European
language. It was composed in England four centuries before the
Norman Conquest. But no one knows exactly when it was composed,
or by whom, or why. As a social document this great epic
reflects a feudal, newly Christian world of heroes and monsters,
blood and victory and death. |
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Canterbury Tales
One of the greatest and most ambitious
works in English literature, The Canterbury Tales depicts a
storytelling competition between pilgrims drawn from all ranks
of society.
The tales are as various as the pilgrims
themselves, encompassing comedy, pathos, tragedy, and cynicism.
In these twenty-four tales, Chaucer displays a dazzling range of
literary styles and conjures up a wonderfully vivid picture of
medieval life. |
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Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight
King Arthur's Knights of the Round
Table are in the middle of a Christmas feast when a
green-skinned knight offers them a simple but deadly challenge.
A challenge the brave Sir Gawain quickly-and fatefully-accepts. |
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Jekyll and Hyde
Spawned by a nightmare that Stevenson
had, this classic tale of the dark, primordial night of the soul
remains a masterpiece of the duality of good and evil within us
all. |
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Macbeth
This tragedy tells of a power-hungry
Scottish nobleman and his lady, and the price they pay for
violently seizing the royal throne. Perhaps no other
Shakespearean drama so engulfs its readers in the ruinous
journey of surrender to evil as does Macbeth. A timeless tragedy
about the nature of ambition, conscience, and the human heart,
the play holds a profound grip on the Western imagination. |
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A Tale of Two Cities
With dramatic eloquence, this story of
the French Revolution brings to life a time of terror and
treason, and a starving people rising in frenzy and hate to
overthrow a corrupt and decadent regime. |
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