Donna Tartt - Donna Tartt Questions

Question: Good summer reading... suggestions?

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Answer #1:

Chronicals of acient darkness, first book wolf brother.
Set in the time after ice age when all england was forest, and humans all live in clans.
a young boy, about 12, lives with his father and at the start his father is killed by a bear. He then befriends an orphaned wolf cub.
It is an amazing series please read.
Also the chapters are only a few pages, so if you wanted to put it down quickly you don't have to wait ages until the end of the chapter :D

Answer #2:

Have you read The Unbearable Lightness of Being? It's a philosophical novel with a political backdrop, and it takes place in Prague. Here's the synopsis from wikipedia:

"Set in Prague in 1968, the novel details the circumstances of the lives of artists and intellectuals in Communist Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Prague Spring, and the subsequent invasion by the USSR. The major protagonists include: Tomáš, a well-known, successful surgeon; his wife Tereza, a photographer in anguish over her husband's many infidelities; Tomáš's lover Sabina; and Sabina's lover, Franz.

The book centers on Nietzsche's idea of eternal return - that is, the idea that the universe and all the events therein have all happened before, and will continue to recur ad infinitum. Kundera challenges this idea, offering an alternative: each of us has only one life to live, and what happens once will never occur again. He calls this idea "lightness", and refers to the concept of eternal return as "heaviness" or "weight".

In describing the effect his idea of "lightness" has on a person's life, Kundera says Einmal ist keinmal ("what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all"). By this logic life is ultimately insignificant; in an ultimate sense, no single decision matters. Since decisions do not matter, they are light — that is, they don't cause us suffering. Yet simultaneously, the insignificance of our decisions — our lives, our being — causes us great suffering. Hence the phenomenon Kundera terms the unbearable lightness of being: because life occurs only once and never returns, no one's actions have any universal significance. This idea is deemed unbearable because as humans we want our lives to mean something, for their importance to extend beyond just our immediate surroundings."

The book is wonderful, but I wouldn't recommend the movie.

I'm not sure of your political leanings, so I'm not sure what to recommend in that area (though if you want to add additional details I'll check back and see if I can recommend anything for you), but in my opinion, George Orwell and Erich Maria Remarque are two authors to consider. Orwell's fiction is awe-inspiring, as I'm sure you're already aware, but he's also an intriguing non-fiction writer (I don't recommend starting with The Road to Wigan Pier though . . . just a bit of advice), and Remarque is probably the best historical fiction writer I've come across so far (if you're into that sort of thing). All Quiet on the Western Front is probably his most well-known, but there are two other books that follow chronologically (The Road Back and Three Comrades). I recently finished The Night In Lisbon and I thought that was fantastic as well. The first three are about WWI and the second is about WWII.

Have a great summer! I hope you find what you're looking for.

Answer #3:

Uf...
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
Cyrano of Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand
Kill a mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Narciss and Goldmund, by Hermann Hesse
The phantom of the opera, by Gaston Leroux
The Miserables, by Victor Hugo
The Shipping News, by Annie Prouxl
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
The tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë
Silas Marner, by George Elliot.

Answer #4:

I couldn't put it down...

The Alienist - Caleb Carr

The year is 1896, the place, New York City. On a cold March night New York Times reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned to the East River by his friend and former Harvard classmate Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist, or "alienist." On the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, they view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy, a prostitute from one of Manhattan's infamous brothels.

The newly appointed police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, in a highly unorthodox move, enlists the two men in the murder investigation, counting on the reserved Kreizler's intellect and Moore's knowledge of New York's vast criminal underworld. They are joined by Sara Howard, a brave and determined woman who works as a secretary in the police department. Laboring in secret (for alienists, and the emerging discipline of psychology, are viewed by the public with skepticism at best), the unlikely team embarks on what is a revolutionary effort in criminology-- amassing a psychological profile of the man they're looking for based on the details of his crimes. Their dangerous quest takes them into the tortured past and twisted mind of a murderer who has killed before. and will kill again before the hunt is over.

Fast-paced and gripping, infused with a historian's exactitude, The Alienist conjures up the Gilded Age and its untarnished underside: verminous tenements and opulent mansions, corrupt cops and flamboyant gangsters, shining opera houses and seamy gin mills. Here is a New York during an age when questioning society's belief that all killers are born, not made, could have unexpected and mortal consequences.





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