French novelist Albert Camus wrote a novella in 1942 titled The Stranger, which was also released in English as The Outsider. Although Camus expressly disliked the term “existentialism,” its theme and attitude are sometimes regarded as instances of his philosophy, absurdism combined with existentialism.
Camus investigated what he called “the nudeness of man confronted with the ludicrous” through the tale of a regular man who unknowingly becomes involved in a senseless killing on a beach in Algeria. Published for the first time in English in 1946; a new translation by Matthew Ward.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”
“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
“I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.”
“Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.”
“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
Niccol Machiavelli, an Italian diplomat, and political theorist, wrote The Prince in the 16th century as a manual for aspiring princes and kings. Machiavelli emphasises the value of allying with the helpless and putting a stop to anyone who might grow strong enough to revolt when ruling a mixed principality. A prince would need to be extremely foresighted to pull this out. Before they become too obvious, he must spot issues and evils, and he must act quickly to eliminate them.
Lords, strong men, and assistants all require close supervision. As stated earlier, everyone who has the strength or ambition to start a rebellion must be put down. A prince will have been chosen to lead a new principality either by good fortune, bad fortune, or both. It is forceful to assume authority by virtue. A prince needs to establish himself as a leader as soon as possible.
When a prince gains power through luck or through the efforts of others, he is in a risky situation because people can start to doubt his authority. He must therefore act swiftly to engender love and fear in the populace. Machiavelli does not denounce using evil to gain control. Instead, he advises carrying out immoral deeds swiftly and all at once. A prince must also devise strategies for permanently enslaving the populace.
According to Machiavelli, a principality’s military power is a good indicator of its might. A principality must always be armed to the teeth and capable of defending itself. A mercenary’s primary motivation is money, hence they shouldn’t be trusted.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”
“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”
“There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you.”
“Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.”
Animal Farm, a satirical allegorical novella by George Orwell about a farm, was first released in England on August 17, 1945. It depicts the tale of a band of farm animals who rise up to confront their man farmer in an effort to establish an animal-friendly society.
Animals that have been abused and overworked on a farm take over. They went out to construct a paradise of advancement, fairness, and equality with fiery idealism and passionate slogans. The setting is therefore set for one of the most incisive satiric tales ever written—a sharp-edged fairy tale for adults that charts the progression from the revolt against oppression to totalitarianism that is just as dreadful. As Animal Farm was initially published, it was thought to be directed toward Stalinist Russia. Today, it is glaringly obvious that George Orwell’s masterpiece has a meaning and a message that are still fiercely relevant wherever and whenever liberty is attacked, regardless of the cause.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a unique masterpiece that ranks among the 20th century’s most influential books; as its dystopian purgatory becomes more real, it gets more menacing. The dystopian social science fiction book Nineteen Eighty-Four by English author George Orwell serves as a warning. It was Orwell’s ninth and last book that he finished during his lifetime, and Secker & Warburg released it on June 8, 1949.
The 1949 publication of the book features political satirist George Orwell’s terrifying portrayal of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff’s quest for identity. The novel’s genius lies in Orwell’s prescience of contemporary life—the pervasiveness of television, the linguistic distortion—and his capacity to provide such an in-depth depiction of hell. It has been compulsory reading for students from the moment it was published and is one of the scariest books ever.
A true-life political thriller about a wealthy American investor in Russia’s Wild East, the death of his upright young tax attorney, and his perilous mission to reveal the corruption in the Kremlin. The path of Bill Browder began in the South Side of Chicago and continued through Stanford Business School to the cutthroat 1990s world of hedge fund investment. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it proceeded in Moscow, where Browder made a fortune as the manager of the biggest investment fund in Russia. However, once he exposed the dishonest oligarchs plundering the businesses which he was financing, Vladimir Putin turned against him and ordered his expulsion from Russia in 2005.
Browder’s offices in Moscow were searched by law authorities in 2007, and $230 million in taxes that his fund’s firms had paid to the Russian government were taken. Sergei Magnitsky, the attorney for Browder, looked into the incident and found a vast criminal business. Sergei was detained and tortured for a year in pre-trial detention after testifying against the involved officials for a month. On November 16, 2009, eight guards wearing full riot gear beat him to death in an isolation chamber after handcuffing him to a bed rail.
When Browder caught sight of the core of evil, it completely changed his life. He started a relentless search for justice in Sergei’s honor and exposed the massive cover-up that goes all the way to Putin.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Seventy years of communism had destroyed the work ethic of an entire nation. Millions of Russians had been sent to the gulags for showing the slightest hint of personal initiative. The Soviets severely penalized independent thinkers, so the natural self-preservation reaction was to do as little as possible and hope that nobody would notice you.”
“The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at night.”
“Russian stories never have happy endings.”
“If I’m killed, you will know who did it. When my enemies read this book, they will know that you know.”
“For the previous few years, Putin had sat comfortably in the Kremlin, knowing that whatever happened in the US Congress, President Obama opposed the Magnitsky Act. In Putin’s totalitarian mind, this was an ironclad guarantee that it would never become law. But what Putin overlooked was that the United States was not Russia.”
The author of Space Invaders has written an intriguing, incantatory book about the legacy of historical crimes. In the midst of the Pinochet dictatorship, it is 1984 in Chile. A reporter who works for a dissident magazine encounters a member of the secret police and captures his statement. The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández has a compelling and horrifying narrator who first sees this man’s face on the cover of a magazine with the words “I Tortured People” when she is a young girl. The narrator’s involvement in the darkest crimes of the regime and his dedication to speaking about them follow her into adulthood and throughout her career as a writer and documentary filmmaker.
Like a secret service agent from the future, Fernández uses extraordinary feats of imagination to follow the “man who tortured people” into dark corners of history where Yuri Gagarin, chess games, morning routines, and the eponymous TV program from the title of the book coexist with the brutal yet routine schemes of the regime.
How do crimes that are obvious disappear? How does one fight against an oppressive system? Who decides how the realities we adhere to and take for granted are to be shaped? The Twilight Zone draws us into the shadowy portals of the past and serves as a constant reminder that, in the face of historical erasure, the writer’s task is to conceive deeply enough to make these gaps temporarily magnificently lit.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Empathy and compassion are traits of lucidity, the possibility of putting oneself in another’s shoes, of transmuting the skin and masking oneself with a foreign face is an exercise in pure intelligence.”
“It was lost as memories are lost in memory.”
“Being stupid is a personal choice and you don’t necessarily have to wear a uniform to exercise that evil talent.”
“It doesn’t matter what you see, it matters what you think you see.”
“Or better, a piece of outer space in which they shipwrecked lost, like astronauts without connection, all these faces that were swallowed by an unknown dimension.”
It Can’t Happen Here is a warning on the frailty of democracy and a terrifying, unsettlingly ageless look at how fascism could take root in America. It is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later books to match the force of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. It juxtaposes scathing political satire with the terrifyingly realistic ascension of a President who becomes a tyrant to “rescue the nation” since it was written during the Great Depression when America was mainly unaware of Hitler’s aggression. It Can’t Happen Here, which is at last back in print, continues to be a particularly significant work of fiction and is as current and fresh as the news today.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.”
“He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.”
“It isn’t what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.”
“So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.”
“NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.”
This breathtakingly beautiful and powerful book is a heartfelt drama about individuals, relationships, and the limits of love. With the help of a young woman named Ayla, Jean M. Auel transports us back to the beginning of modern humans and the brutal yet breathtaking Ice Age planet they lived with the people who called themselves The Clan of the Cave Bear.
A woman from the Clan, who are considerably different from her own kind, finds the young girl traveling alone in an unknown and frightening region after a natural calamity. They think Ayla, who is blonde and has blue eyes, is odd and unattractive since she is one of the Others, those who have migrated into their ancestral territory. However, Iza is unable to let the girl die and takes her with them. As Ayla learns the customs of the Clan and Iza’s method of healing, the old Mog-ur Creb and Iza grow to adore her, and the majority accept her. However, the ruthless and arrogant young man who will take over as their next leader sees her peculiarities as a threat to his power. He grows to hate the odd girl of the Others who lives among them and is resolved to exact revenge on her.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The earth we leave is beautiful and rich; it gave us all we needed for all the generations we have lived. How will you leave it when it is your turn? What can you do?”
“The difference in the brains of men and women was imposed by nature, and only cemented by culture.”
“As Creb looked at the peaceful, trusting face of the strange girl in his lap, he felt a deep love flowering in his soul for her. He couldn’t have loved her more if she were his own.”
“He’s part me and part Clan, and so is Ura. Or rather, she’s part Oda and part that man who killed her baby.”
“The little girl’s gentle touch struck an inner chord in his lonely old heart.”
The third book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy and Pulitzer Prize winner by Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove, is the biggest book ever written about the last resolute wilderness of America. It is a love tale, an adventure, and an epic of the frontier.
Visit the dusty, small Texas town of Lonesome Dove to encounter a memorable cast of heroes, outlaws, whores, ladies, and natives as well as settlers. A book that makes us laugh, cry, dream, and remember, Lonesome Dove is richly authentic, exquisitely written, and always dramatic.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk—and feisty gentlemen.”
“Yesterday’s gone on down the river and you can’t get it back.”
“The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”
“It’s a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.”
“It’s like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight, he added”
American author Ernest Hemingway created the novella The Old Man and the Sea in Cayo Blanco in 1951. It was later published in 1952. It was Hemingway’s final significant piece of published fiction during his lifetime. This brief book, which is already a modern classic, tells the heartbreaking tale of a Cuban fisherman who perishes while pursuing a massive marlin in the Gulf Stream; it is expressly mentioned in the citation that accompanied the author’s 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
“Now is no time to think of what you do not have.
Think of what you can do with that there is”
“Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.”
“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
Cormac McCarthy return to the Texas-Mexico border, the scene of his acclaimed Border Trilogy, in his fiery new book. We live in an era where drug dealers have replaced cattle rustlers and little towns are now open-fire zones. Llewellyn Moss one day discovers a pickup truck encircled by a bodyguard of dead men. Two million dollars in cash and a shipment of heroin are still in the rear. When Moss steals the money, he starts a domino effect of catastrophic brutality that neither the law, represented by the seasoned and disheartened Sheriff Bell nor Moss can stop. McCarthy concurrently strips down the American crime thriller and broadens its concerns to cover issues as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily present as this morning’s headlines as Moss seeks to elude his pursuers, including a mystery mastermind who tosses coins for human lives. A victory, No Country for Old Men.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don’t count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
“The point is there ain’t no point.”
“How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?”
“People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don’t deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things”
East of Eden, which was dubbed “the first book” by Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck in his journal, does certainly have mythic simplicity and primal intensity. This expansive and frequently cruel book is set in the fertile Salinas Valley of California and chronicles the connected fates of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose descendants helplessly recreate the fall of Adam and Eve and the toxic rivalry of Cain and Abel.
To cultivate and nurture his family on the new, lush land, Adam Trask migrated from the East to California. However, the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, drives his wife to the verge of insanity, leaving Adam to raise his boys by himself until they are men. The love of everyone surrounding one youngster helps him develop, whereas the other boy grows up alone and surrounded by enigmatic darkness.
East of Eden, first published in 1952, is Steinbeck’s most famous book. It explores his most persistent themes, including the enigma of identification, the inexplicability of passion, and the terrible effects of love’s absence. East of Eden, a literary classic from Steinbeck’s latter years, is both a family drama and a contemporary retelling of the Book of Genesis.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“All great and precious things are lonely.”
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
“My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.”
“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”
The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta), the classic novel of the Lost Generation, is one of Ernest Hemingway’s greatest works and a prime illustration of his restrained yet effective writing style. Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, two of Hemingway’s most iconic characters, are introduced in this work, which takes a moving glimpse at the disillusion and angst of the post-World War I age. The story follows the flashy Brett and the foolish Jake as they travel with a ragtag gang of foreigners from the raucous nightlife of 1920s Paris to the bloody bullrings of Spain. It is a time of moral decay, spiritual decay, unfulfilled love, and dissipating illusions. The Sun Also Rises, which was first published in 1926, contributed to Hemingway’s reputation as one of the best authors of the twentieth century.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”
“Isn’t it pretty to think so.”
“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
“Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”
Yann Martel wrote the fantasy adventure book Life of Pi, which was released in 2001. Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, the main character and a Tamil child from Pondicherry, begins to investigate moral and practical questions at a young age. After being stuck on a ship in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days following a shipwreck, he makes it alive alongside Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.”
“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
“When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.”
“You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.”
“I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.”
Ella Rubenstein accepts a position as a reader for a literary agent at the age of forty and in an unhappy marriage. Her first task is to read and analyze the book Sweet Blasphemy, which was authored by Aziz Zahara. Ella is captivated by his account of Shams’s quest for Rumi and the dervish’s contribution to the prosperous but dissatisfied cleric’s transformation into a dedicated mystic, passionate poet, and proponent of love. Shams’s teachings, or rules, which provide insight into an antiquated philosophy based on the equality of all people and religions and the existence of love in every single one of us, also capture her attention. As she continues to read, she comes to understand that Zahara, like Shams, has come to set her free and that Rumi’s story mirrors her own.
Elif Shafak, a renowned Turkish author, presents two enticing parallel narratives in this lyrical, vivacious sequel to her 2007 book The Bastard of Istanbul—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century when Rumi met his spiritual guide, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz—that together embodied the poet’s eternal message of love.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love
“Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighborhood of despair. Even when all doors remain closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful!”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love
“If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough.”
― Elif Şafak, The Forty Rules of Love
“How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love
“Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love