My list, and yours too - of the best 'modern classics.' Best written books and the most enjoyed
Modern Classics from Amazon
Love in the Time of Cholera (Vintage International)
A captivating miracle of love and live. Full of tangible but dream-like text, Marquez draws you in to his special world of smells & personalities. His prose has a poetic quality punctuated by astonishing and captivating realities. At once ephemeral, magical, heart-breaking and rejoicing - possibly the finest novel of the 20th century.
Amazon Price: $10.17 (as of 11/11/2009) 
The Raj Quartet: The Jewel in the Crown/the Day of the Scorpion/the Towers of Silence/a Division of the Spoils
A big read, these four books tell a tale of flagging British rule in India and the metaphor for the breakdown of culture and inter-racial relationships on this astonishing continent. Evoking what was splendid, false, ridiculous and corrupt about the administration and also shining a light in the best and worst of 'acceptable' behviours in the ruling classes, including the general demeaning of women and the corrupt use of power. The Raj sucks the reader into this rich tapestry of life, land and love.
Amazon Price: (as of 11/11/2009)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
At several levels this is a work of brilliance. Whether one reads it simply as a hopeless tale of passion and love or as a philosophical treatise on the psyche of love, this is a story to captivate.
Amazon Price: (as of 11/11/2009)
Of Love and Shadows
Allende writes superbly and has grown over some years from a talented wordsmith: from brilliant to supreme in her genre. She weaves magic in her novels and this, so closely coupled (as very often with Allende) with aweful horrors of life. Like Marquez, she spins the bizarre into her text, drawing the reader totally into her world and pitching emotions with the gift of her genius.
Amazon Price: $10.20 (as of 11/11/2009)
The God of Small Things
More of India: a tale of evocation, heat, smells, real tangible life complete with all of our own emotions, drawing us in and spitting us out in tears. Truly wonderful.
Amazon Price: (as of 11/11/2009)
Another Five Modern 'Classic' Novels
Daughter of Fortune
Allende spins her tales so plausibly that one is drawn into her story by this chantress. A foundling is taken in by a well-off family. She falls in love with an unsuitable man and when he disappears, she sets off alone to another continent and another disturbing world to seek him out. Furnished by truth and excellent research, her backgound is a masterful and delicately formed web in which we are trapped, ever moving towards the centre of her tale. Superb, Allende at her best.
Amazon Price: (as of 11/11/2009)
The Way of the Wizard: 20 Lessons for Living a Magical Life
Chopra's finest book? A story for adults and children alike, this book sets out both a jolly good story of adventure and a series of magical metaphor for the development of the human spirit.
Amazon Price: (as of 11/11/2009)
The Map of Love: A Novel
Mixed reviews, but this book, sometimes over-wordy, but well-enough written to draw you in. Once hooked, the text flows more easily and the quality of her writing triumphs.
Amazon Price: $10.88 (as of 11/11/2009)
Perfume
Atrue classic, Perfume tells the story of a man with a fine nose and a taste for the sordid and dreadful. His writing evokes the time, eighteenth century France made rich. A tour de force.
Amazon Price: (as of 11/11/2009)
ROADS TO FREEDOM - TRILOGY
Here is a novel of pre second-world war France. Mathieu is a teacher and the books, the Age of Reason, the Reprieve and Iron in the Soul are a sometimes heady, sometimes philosphical metaphoric journey of human development and chaos. The thread of hope and persistence also tells its tale for all ives are touched by both grace and by pain - it is what we do with our heads that makes the difference between a poor life and a good one, not so much the journey itself. A masterful work for the intellectual reader.
Amazon Price: (as of 11/11/2009)
More Great Modern 'Classics'
The Alchemist
I am totally sold on Coelho, even when he begins, sometimes, to be over-commercial. Here he is at his finest, expressing his story from the depth of his heart, bringing humanity and the human condition into sharp focus. His story is classic and delightful.
Amazon Price: $8.97 (as of 11/11/2009)
The Piano Tuner: A Novel
An astonishing first novel by a young man who by all expectation should not be so gifted with experience and sensitivity to his genre as he is. Truly captivating, the source of the tale is the delivery of a piano to a distant land and the journey and experience of the man who must tune the instrument when he finally arrives. Evocative, believable, rich and beautiful, a woven masterpiece.
Amazon Price: $10.17 (as of 11/11/2009)
The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) (Penguin Classics)
Not to everyone's taste, but again, an early talent (first published in 1913) showing that great lierature, again and again, has the ability to draw the reader in and tell a story - however logically implausible it would be if set down in abstract. A delightful classic evocative of 1890's France at its most rural and most extraordinary.
Amazon Price: $10.08 (as of 11/11/2009)
Even More Modern 'Classics'!
The Catcher in the Rye
The student's choice. Great American literature rich in meaning and unfolding awareness of growing up. Unmissable.
Amazon Price: $10.07 (as of 11/11/2009)
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
True Adams, fresh, brilliant, mad, the normal and the very odd woven together delightfully. A story of relationships, an electric monk and a settee, an implausible story of death and bungling police mixed with sci-fi fun.
Amazon Price: $7.99 (as of 11/11/2009)
The Bridges of Madison County
Romance, love, culturally acceptable and unacceptable behaviours, woven in Madison County, Ohio. So good I went to Madison and visited the bridges.
Amazon Price: $6.99 (as of 11/11/2009)
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
The ending is not as good somehow as the film, but in all other respects, the book is finer than the film for those with imagination. A great story set in a very real historical period before, during and after the second world world, in Greece. Set in Kefalonia (also a fabulous place worth visiting, along with its next-door isle Ithica) it tells the story of love in the backdrop of impending doom, invasion, recrimminations and murderous intent. Poetic, gritty, enthralling, a masterpiece.
Amazon Price: $14.82 (as of 11/11/2009)
Word of the Day
- forfend: Dictionary.com Word of the Day
- forfend: to avert; also, to protect or preserve.
Homer Simpson Quotes
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Robert Kincaid (Clint Eastwood), Bridges of Madison County, Warner Bros, 1995.
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