Ultimate Best Books
Ranked by points from the world's most prestigious book lists. How many have you read?
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to and FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's <i>The Thieving Magpie</i>, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
The Bean Trees
I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbines's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.
The Colour of Magic
In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part...
Lord Jim
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular.
The Thirty-Nine Steps
I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life.
The Magus
I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf, Queen Victoria.
Ragtime
In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle.
The Moonstone
In the first part of Robinson Crusoe, at page one hundred and twenty-nine, you will find it thus written: 'Now I saw, though too late, The Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it.'
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