"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."

His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature , April 1, 1995
Novel by J.D. Salinger, published in 1951. The influential and widely acclaimed story details the two days in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield after he has been expelled from prep school. Confused and disillusioned, he searches for truth and rails against the "phoniness" of the adult world. He ends up exhausted and emotionally ill, in a psychiatrist's office. After he recovers from his breakdown, Holden relates his experiences to the reader. 

Synopsis
Includes a brief biography of the author, thematic and structural analysis of the work, critical views, and an index of themes and ideas. 

Synopsis
Holden, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

From AudioFile
Christopher Reeve's smooth rhythm and soft-spoken tone accentuate Fitzgerald's flowing, elegant style. Since his character is an onlooker to events which take place in Gatsby's glittering but superficial world, Reeve also projects an appropriate distant quality. However, his vocal attempts to make each character well-defined seem to be an overwhelming task for one reader. Occasionally, it is hard to tell which character is speaking. Nonetheless, Reeve's ability to accurately evoke the emotions... read more

Midwest Book Review, August, 1997
"Under [Alexander Scourby's] distinguished tones the story of a youth influenced by a neighbor achieves newfound meaning."

A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise--but Beloved is arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so familiar that it is almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery's many cruelties into one apt symbol--a device that deprives its wearer of speech. "Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye." Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without being overemotional: "Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen.... And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now." Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby," comments Sethe's mother-in-law.

 Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by. --Alix Wilber

 As with the ghost at its center, Beloved has taken many forms--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to Oprah Winfrey's decade-in-the-making movie to this challenging audiobook read by Lynn Whitfield. Whitfield, who won an Emmy Award playing the title role in The Josephine Baker Story, has a tough assignment as she guides us back and forth in time with Sethe, an escaped slave who's still shackled by memories of her murdered child.

 Another triumph. . . . Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds . . . If you can believe page one--and Ms. Morrison's verbal authority compels belief--you're hooked on the rest of the book. 

"Easily she stepped into the told story that lay before her." Toni Morrison's reading of Beloved is a stirring experience. She transports you to the dooryard, to Sweet Home plantation, to 124 Bluestone Road as she weaves in and out of the story of Sethe, a runaway slave, and her daughters. Morrison is there with you, speaking slowly, making each image live in your imagination.

 Never once does he lose the listener as the author moves between the past and present, commenting on Victorian customs, politics and morals. And never once does he give away the novel's surprise ending. Enthusiastically recommended 

About the audio-cassette edition:

"The Victorian story of The French Lieutenant's Woman is probably even more believable on audio than it is on screen...Jeremy Irons-who also acted in the film-is a master reader." 

"Who better to read this acclaimed novel of Victorian mores than Jeremy Irons? His diction, his tone, his accent-all suit the subject, and his talent for reading as well as acting gives life and undeniable poignancy to Fowles' story. Through only a spoken word, listeners will be haunted by Sarah Woodruff's eyes and tormented by Charles' struggles. Credit for the accomplishment goes to both author and reader."

Book Description

Well-known as an international bestseller and award-winning film, The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles is magnificent entertainment. This virtuoso reading by Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons is storytelling at its best. Fowles' intricate portrait of Victorian relationships and love, brought to life by Irons' artistry, will haunt you long after the story ends.

It's not as funny or as well-plotted as "Changing Places" or "Therapy", his two greats, but then again that's hardly much of a condemnation. The man's only mortal, after all---and this novel, while not his best, is still a brilliant read and an essential conclusion to the Rummidge Campus trilogy. Read it!

This book is a masterly exploration of how insular people become living their lives in one culture (in this case, industry or academia) . When Robyn, highly successful in academia, meets Vic, highly successful in industry, the suspicion, culture shock and new insights on both sides are glorious to watch. I was also impressed by his skill at characterisation - Vic and his family are very well-drawn, and Robyn is marvellous... I know Lodge is an English Lit. lecturer himself, but to portray an idealistic, brilliant, female lecturer so convincingly takes talent. Funny and perceptive. Nice work, David.

I think too many readers & reviewers have overlooked the sheer scope of Ms. Weldon's attack in this, my favorite novel. More than just a roadmap to the vengeance of one woman against the man and mistress that cause the disintegration of her life, Ruth by the end, becomes the avenging angel of all who have ever felt unwanted by a world consumed with the transient virtues of beauty, taste and wealth. She decimates, with the depraved passion of a Bosch-like demon, all of the "sensible" notions of love, mother-hood, respect for beauty and humanity that society foists upon the less attractive of its people, specifically its women. By the end of this novel her attack broadens beyond the simply banal cruelties of man and begins to rattle the very gates of heaven itself to force a confrontation with Nature and God. Ruth's gripe is with God and not man, for she sees Him as the real culprit behind the suffering she, and all women, must endure. Her ultimate victory, and the perversity of its coming is summated in the last line of this book (In my opinion, one of the best final lines ever written). One of the sharpest minds writing today, Ms. Weldon brings a lucidity and vigor to her portrait of the modern beauty-obssessed culture, that is by turns bitingly humorous and strangely touching; for all of the bile that she unleashes throughout the novel, Ruth is a character that we can fundamentally claim as one of "our" own. I think that this "our" goes way beyond the small group of feminist women who have had Weldon claimed as one of their own. For me she is the truest torch-bearer for anyone who has ever felt not beautiful, intelligent, graceful or genteel enough to earn respect in our culture. A true masterpiece, this novel is Weldon at her delicious best and is worthy of any comparison to that other great novel of revenge, "Moby Dick". Is Ruth Patchett the modern-day equivalent of Ahab? You decide.