Book Lust Quotes

“One of my top ten favorite novels in any category is Stephanie Plowman’s The Road to Sardis, a heartbreaking retelling of the events of the Peloponnesian War, which broke out in 431 B.C. between longtime rivals Athens and Sparta, and lasted for twenty-seven years.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“If you read no other work of what’s known as “cyberpunk” (which looks at the ever-thinner line between humans and machines), at least read the novel that began it all: William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which won every major science fiction award (the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick award) in 1984, the year it was published. Gibson introduced words (including “cyberpunk” itself), themes, and a dystopic vision of the future that have been liberally reworked in the writings of many other authors.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“One of the most intricate Cold War spy novels I’ve ever read is David Quammen’s The Soul of Viktor Tronko, based on the real-life case of a Cold War–era Russian defector who tells his debriefers that a Russian agent has infiltrated the upper echelons of the CIA.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“The Last Canyon by John Vernon is a beautiful retelling of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 exploration of the Grand Canyon and his and his men’s inevitable and tragic clash with a tribe of Paiute Indians who lived on the canyon’s northern edge.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“...somehow, even the most dedicated romance reader sometimes feels a need to quality her love of the romance genre by saying, "Well, I know it's not good literature, but..." or some such. Nonsense. Romance novels, like mysteries, westerns, and science fiction quality as perfect escapist brew.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust

“There are also some moving sections about World War II in Anthony Burgess’s Any Old Iron, Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, Kit Reed’s At War As Children, Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, and Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Before David McCullough went on to fame, fortune, and literary awards with books like John Adams and Mornings on Horseback, he wrote a tragic and riveting account of the great 1889 flood in Pennsylvania, The Johnstown Flood. Kathleen Cambor describes the same disaster in a novel, In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In Breaking Clean, Judy Blunt looks back on her childhood and early married life in the 1950s and ’60s on cattle ranches in northeastern Montana, and explores what it meant to be female in that place and time.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Pueblo, Colorado, a corrupt and decaying mining town high in the Rockies, is the setting for Heidi Julavits’s The Mineral Palace, a story of motherhood, a troubled marriage, and the unveiling of long-held secrets.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“A. B. Guthrie’s 1947 novel The Big Sky (even better than its sequel, The Way West, which won the Pulitzer Prize), The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1940), and Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949) were all made into well-regarded movies, but these three classics of Western fiction continue to make for wonderful reading.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Amy Wilentz’s Martyrs’ Crossing is set against the ongoing tension of Israeli-Palestinian relations. When a Palestinian woman is turned back at the checkpoint at Ramallah as she attempts to take her sick child to an Israeli hospital, she and the young Israeli soldier who’s guarding the crossing find their lives altered forever.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“James Buchan’s The Persian Bride combines a moving love story, a political thriller, and a history of modern Iran in a beautiful novel about the relationship of two people caught up in the Iranian revolution: John Pitt, a young man from England who arrives in Isfahan, Iran, in 1974, and seventeen-year-old Shirin, one of John’s students, whose father is a general in the shah’s army.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa reveals the upheaval of partition through the eyes of a child, “Lame Lenny,” a young Parsi girl crippled from polio. Lenny’s world is her beloved and beautiful Hindu ayah and her ayah’s many Muslim admirers, the cook Imam Din, and the Untouchable gardener.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, the bloody violence sweeping India after partition has not yet touched Mano Majra, a small village of Muslims and Sikhs on the India-Pakistan border. But in the summer of 1947, the murder of a Hindu moneylender and the arrival of a trainful of dead Sikhs set off a tragic chain of events.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Some of my favorite contemporary Montana writers and their books include Annick Smith’s Homestead, a memoir of her experiences, along with her husband and four children, homesteading in the Blackfoot Valley on 163 acres in the 1960s; Deirdre”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Montserrat Fontes’s disturbing novel of a family trying to survive the brutal Porfirio Díaz regime at the turn of the twentieth century, Dreams of the Centaur, is followed by First Confession.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Chaim Potok wrote two novels that I think are indispensable to understanding the Hasidic and Orthodox American Jewish communities following the Holocaust: The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward, edited by Isaac Metzker.)”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Other good reading from Japan includes Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, with its heroine who finds whatever comfort she can in food; Miyuki”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In its descriptions of a family trying to find suitable mates for three sisters, The Makioka Sisters by Junichir ō Tanizaki brings to mind the novels of Jane Austen and Anton Chekhov.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata, the first of Japan’s two Nobel laureates, describes the sad and sorry love affair of a geisha from the country and an intellectual from the city. It’s”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Amitav Ghosh’s multigenerational saga The Glass Palace, set in colonial Burma, India, and Malaya, tells the story of Rajkumar, once a poor Indian boy, who becomes a wealthy teak trader in Burma, and lovely Dolly, former child-maid to the queen and second princess of Burma.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“English Passengers, a first novel by Matthew Kneale, relates what follows when a group of Englishmen arrive in mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania with different purposes: to find the Garden of Eden, to prove the natives are less intelligent than the British, and to escape from British law. Kneale also describes the tragic life of a young Aboriginal whose experiences are shaped by the arrival of the British.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In his dark story collection Poachers, Tom Franklin, who once worked in a grit factory, offers the sad and sorry lives of people stuck in the back-waters of the Alabama River, who tend to subsist on a steady diet of moon-shine and stale crackers.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina is a coming-of-age novel about Ruth Ann (Bone) Boatwright and a difficult childhood made even harder by her violent and predatory stepfather.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Erskine Caldwell’s stories of rural poverty (Tobacco Road) and”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“In The Jew of New York, Ben Katchor draws on a historical event—the early-nineteenth-century plan to set up a Jewish homeland in upstate New York—to create a weirdly real world of make-believe. Or”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Daddy Was a Numbers Runner by Louise Meriwether is the story of Francie Coffin, who is growing up in the spirit-deadening ghettos of Harlem in the 1930s, in a family struggling to survive intact.”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“Food played a major role in the lives of both Ruth Reichl (longtime New York Times restaurant critic and editor-in-chief of Gourmet, who wrote about her lifelong interest in food in two memoirs, the best of which is the first, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table) and Patricia Volk (who wrote about her life in Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family).”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

“The three grand old men of Cuban literature are Alejo Carpentier (his masterpiece is The Lost Steps); José Lezama Lima (whose autobiographical novel Paradiso infuriated Castro); and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (the setting of his novel Three Trapped Tigers—pre-Castro Havana—reminded me of Oscar Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody From When the World Was Good).”
― Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason