Here is a 10 The Great American Read Book List. The Great American Read is an eight-part series that explores and celebrates the power of reading.
Author : Larry McMurtry
Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove is a book to make us laugh, weep, dream, and remember.
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Author : Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is set in the United States in an unspecified time in the future. Dagny Taggart is the vice president and responsible for the operations for the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. She seeks to rebuild the deteriorating track located on the Rio Norte Line that helps service Ellis Wyatt's oil fields, as well as the striving industrial sectors of Colorado. The entire country is undergoing a serious economic meltdown.The remaining countries around the globe have adopted a socialist approach and are destitute. Wyatt has invented an innovative way to extract oil from shale and as a result, Colorado has become the greatest and largest industrial center in the world. Dagny intends to provide Wyatt and Colorado with the railway service it needs, but is faced with a gruelling obstacle.
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Author : Agatha Christie
The book that topped the international online poll held in Agatha Christie’s 125th birthday year to discover which of her 80 crime books was the world’s favourite.
1939. Europe teeters on the brink of war. Ten strangers are invited to Soldier Island, an isolated rock near the Devon coast. Cut off from the mainland, with their generous hosts Mr and Mrs U.N. Owen mysteriously absent, they are each accused of a terrible crime. When one of the party dies suddenly they realise they may be harbouring a murderer among their number.
The 10 strangers include a reckless playboy, a troubled Harley Street doctor, a formidable judge, an uncouth detective, an unscrupulous mercenary, a God-fearing spinster, two restless servants, a highly decorated general and an anxious secretary. One by one they are picked off. Who will survive? And who is the killer? Copies of an ominous nursery rhyme hang in each room, the murders mimicking the awful fates of its ‘Ten Little Soldier Boys’.
Author : George Orwell
Published in the summer of 1949, George Orwell’s nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the most definitive texts of modern literature. Set in Oceania, one of the three inter-continental superstate that divided the world among themselves after a global war, Orwell’s masterful critique of the political structures of the time, works itself out through the story of Winston Smith, a man caught in the webs of a dystopian future, and his clandestine love affair with Julia, a young woman he meets during the course of his work for the government. As much as it is an entertaining read, nineteen Eighty-Four is also a brilliant, and more importantly, a timeless satirical attack on the social and political structures of the world.
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Author : F. Scott Fitzgerald
It’s the Roaring twenties, and new York City is the place to be. Everything can be purchased, everyone can be bought. But, can you make money erase your past? It’s the Roaring twenties, and it is the time of over-indulgence. As far as the eyes can see and the mind can perceive, there are ostentatious displays of wealth and even more lavish displays of decadency. Unapologetic decadency. But, does it ever stop? It’s the Roaring twenties, and the great American dream has been perverted...
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Author : Leo Tolstoy
An explosive tale of epic proportions, War and Peace, one of the best known Russian historical novels, is as much a story of love and adultery as it is of war and death. with a deep insight into the war-stricken Russia, it underlines the irrational motives of human behavior in both war and peace.
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Author : MARTIN GEORGE R R
A Game of Thrones During 2011, the first volume of George R R Martin's glorious high fantasy will be aired as an HBO series on Foxtel. Martin unfolds with astonishing skill a tale of truly epic dimensions, thronged with memorable characters, a story of treachery and ambition, love and magic. Set in a fabulous world scarred by battle and catastrophe over 8000 years of recorded history, it tells of the deeds of men and women locked in the deadliest of conflicts and the terrible legacy they will leave their children. In the game of thrones, you win or you die.
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Author : Joseph Heller
Discover Joseph Heller's hilarious and tragic satire on military madness, and the tale of one man's efforts to survive it.
It’s the closing months of World War II and Yossarian has never been closer to death. Stationed in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, each flight mission introduces him to thousands of people determined to kill him.
But the enemy above is not Yossarian’s problem – it is his own army intent on keeping him airborne, and the maddening ‘Catch-22’ that allows for no possibility of escape.
Author : Arthur Golden
This is a seductive and evocative epic on an intimate scale, which tells the extraordinary story of a geisha girl. Summoning up more than twenty years of Japan's most dramatic history, it uncovers a hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degredation. From a small fishing village in 1929, the tale moves to the glamorous and decadent heart of Kyoto in the 1930s, where a young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York; it exquisitely evokes another culture, a different time and the details of an extraordinary way of life.
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Author : Lewis Carroll
Written in 1865 by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is among the best-known works of fiction. Original and brimming with mystery, this book went on to inspire legions of works, in both popular culture as well as classic literature. Full of the unexpected, the book charts the topsy-turvy world of Alice’s dreams. A talking White Rabbit leads her to a tea-party where time stands still and further, into a world of vanishing cats and an ill-tempered Queen. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a magical tale in which nothing but only the extraordinary happens.
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