Nancy Pearl QUOTES

1 " Undoubtedly, the place to start with Chinese fiction is with Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century classic, A Dream of Red Mansions, a sweeping epic about family life and Confucian practices in feudal China, including numerous subplots, a gazillion characters, and a touching love story. "

― Nancy Pearl , Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

2 " 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

3 " Both Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae and Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War are well-told accounts of crucial events in Greek history. "

― Nancy Pearl , Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

4 " Three books set in Iran—first a novel about two lovers caught up in the Iranian Revolution, then two books about Iran since the Revolution: The Persian Bride by James Buchan The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran by Robin B. Wright Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Elaine Sciolino "

― Nancy Pearl , Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

5 " Wild Life by Molly Gloss Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle "

― Nancy Pearl , Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

6 " Paul Cain is an early, influential figure in this genre, who is now quite hard to find even in used bookstores and libraries. His 1932 Fast One was a noir landmark; it "

― Nancy Pearl , Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

7 " The Killer Inside Me is a chilling first-person story of an evil lawman, while Pop. 1280 is a strangely funny version of the same plot. Of all the noir writers, Thompson is the most popular today, in part because several of his novels, including The Grifters, were successfully adapted for film. "

― Nancy Pearl , Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " Erskine Caldwell’s stories of rural poverty (Tobacco Road) and "

― Nancy Pearl , Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " The so-called “scar literature” first appeared in China in the late 1970s, when the men and women who survived the turmoil of Mao’s Cultural Revolution began writing about their experiences in both fiction and nonfiction. Two of the best novels are Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, the story of two young boys—children of the hated intelligentsia—who are sent to a remote mountain village to be reeducated, and Dai Houying’s Stones of the Wall, one of the earliest (and still one of the best) novels about the effects of the Cultural Revolution, which is set in the late 1970s around a group of college professors who are trying to rebuild lives thrown into despair and uncertainty by the cataclysm. (This is a novel I’ve remembered vividly since I first read it in 1985.) "

― Nancy Pearl , Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

18 " memoir A Ride in the Neon Sun. Here’s what she says about traveling: Some people travel with firm ideas for a journey, following in the footsteps of an intrepid ancestor whose exotic exploits were happened upon in a dusty, cobweb-laced attic containing immovable trunks full of sepia-curled daguerreotypes and age-discoloured letters redolent of bygone days. Others travel for anthropological, botanical, archaeological, geological, and other logical reasons. Some are smitten by a specific country brewed from childhood dreams. For others, travel is a challenge, a release, an escape, a shaking off of the shackles, and even if they don’t know where they will end up they usually know where they will begin. The very hardest part of writing this book was that I was unable to stop working on it. I kept reading even after the initial manuscript was turned in, discovering new titles and authors whose works I just couldn’t bear to leave out. I even envisioned myself watching the book being printed and shouting periodically, “Stop the presses!” so that I could add yet another section or title. But of course the day actually came when I knew I had to stop or there would never be an end to the project.And here is the result, in your hands right now. So, before your next trip—either virtual or actual—grab a pen and begin making notes about the titles that sound good to you. And enjoy the journeys. I’d love to hear from you. My email address is nancy@nancypearl .com. "

― Nancy Pearl , Book Lust to Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers

19 " 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

20 " 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