It’s a sweltering summer day in England, 1935, and the teetering Tallis family drape themselves across their upper-class country house. Like dolls being perfectly positioned throughout the home, we meet the Tallis children—Leon, Celia, and Briony—from oldest to youngest as they linger between a misspent summer and a scandal that will alter their lives and scatter their bonds forever.
Posts published in “Book of the Week”
Book of the Week is an Opinion culture column created by Keenan Yates ‘23 used to give weekly book recommendations in the form of short blurbs and reviews.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas is a classic. A story about a man, Edmond Dantes, who was falsely accused of treason by his “friends,” Danglars and Fernand Mondego.
Often overshadowed by J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, the equally provocative but more developed counterpart novel Franny and Zooey was published in 1961, about 10 years after Catcher.
Usually, I gravitate towards all different kinds of thrillers and mysteries. The first time I laid eyes on A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J.
Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, published in 2015, is a plotless, sporadic, existential narrative that manages to be both shocking and beautiful, but never at the same time.
Stephen King is a master of horror and thriller, so I never expected that he would turn to the genre of fantasy in his new book Fairy Tale.
The bright, entrancing cover of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho will never be enough to capture the beauty lying within its pages.
“Survival is insufficient.” Station Eleven, Emily St. Mandel’s 2014 dystopian novel, followed by the HBO series released in 2021, is a case study on how people change, perpetuate, and internalize the art they love.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, time and youth seem desirable yet prove to be destructive. The gothic novel begins by introducing Lord Henry Wotton and his friend Basil Hallward conversing while Basil paints one of his masterpieces.
Karl Marx and Irish novelist Sally Rooney walk into a bar and discuss the terms of love and labor, perhaps how they’re one and the same.