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Oprah's Top Five BooksOprah recently announced the top five books that she feels everyone must read at least once in their life. Have you read any of these books? What is your favorite Oprah Book Club pick? Discuss in our Community Forum. |
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A Selection of Oprah’s Book Club® Picks
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Chinua Achebe's first novel portrays the collision of African and European cultures in people's lives. Okonkwo, a great man in Igbo traditional society, cannot adapt to the profound changes brought about by British colonial rule. Yet, as in classic tragedy, Okonkwo's downfall results from his own character as well as from external forces.
Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation. Copies From: $1.00 - $45,000.00
In the fourth century, the wilderness of Egypt and Palestine were inhabited by a strange breed of spiritual nonconformists: the first Christian hermits. Thomas Merton's affection for these "Desert Fathers" shines in this much-loved treasury of their acts and words of wisdom. His free translation from the Latin illuminates their radical lives with insight and humor and sets them in close relation to Zen recluses, Hindu renunciants, and all those who have ever fled conventional life in search of higher wisdom. |
A classic of modern theatre and perennial favorite of colleges and high schools. "One of the most noble and moving plays of our generation . . . suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity . . . like a sharp stab of beauty and pain".--The London Times. Copies From: $1.00 - $4,000.00
The last major verse written by Eliot and what Eliot himself considered his finest work, Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision brought out in The Waste Land. Here, in four linked poems, spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. Four Quartets is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism. |
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