Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
Titles often tempt me to try a book. I do think authors should remember that their title is important. Tempting, teasing, testing-the-waters type of titles. Thought-provoking, tumbling over rocks titles.
On my list of Unusual Valiant Ventures would be Homer’s Odyssey. Ordinary men and a superhero go up against Poseidon while trying to reach home. Riches!
What titles have tempted you? What stories have unusual valiant ventures?
My T, U, V authors all mixed together:
NON-FICTION
Tademy, Lalita
(Based on family stories and newspaper articles)
Cane River
Red River
Tammet, Daniel
Born on a Blue Day
Taylor, Jill Bolte
My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey
Theroux, Paul
Dark Star Safari
The Pillars of Hercules
Thoreau, Henry David
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
Walden
Tuchman, Barbara
A Distant Mirror
Guns of August
The Proud Tower
Uchida, Yoshiko
Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family
FICTION
Tan, Amy
Joy Luck Club
Kitchen God’s Wife
Hundred Secret Senses
Tartt, Donna
The Little Friend
The Goldfinch
Thomas, Dylan (poet)
Fern Hill
http://www.poemhunter.com/...
Under Milkwood
A fragment of my favorite prose poem:
A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas
http://www.poemhunter.com/...
… Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."
"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."
… "Go on the Useless Presents."
"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds.
Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons."
Thurber, James
The Thurber Carnival
13 Clocks
Tolstoy, Leo
Anna Karenina
War and Peace
(Limelite says the best translators are Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
My favorite movies:
War and Peace 2007 with Clemence Poesy, Alexander Beyer and Alessio Boni. (425 minutes).
And the one with Henry Fonda, Mel Ferrer, Audrey Hepburn
Toomer, Jean
Cane
Trollope, Anthony
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
Chronicles of Barsetshire
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
Tsukiyama, Gail
The Street of a Thousand Blossoms
The Samurai’s Garden
Tyler, Anne
The Accidental Tourist
The Clockwinder
Digging to America
Patchwork Planet
Amateur Marriage
Back When We Were Grownups
Umrigar, Thrity
The Space between Us
Virgil
The Aeneid
Voltaire
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
Slaughterhouse-Five
MYSTERY
Tey, Josephine
Daughter of Time
Thurlo, Aimee Thurlo, David Thurlo
Death Walker
Blackening Song
Bad Medicine
Shooting Chant
Red Mesa
Changing Woman
Todd, Charles and Caroline (Inspector Ian Rutledge and Bess Crawford series)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjmURuPJeh4
The Murder Stone
Test of Wills
Wings of Fire
Search the Dark
Legacy of the Dead
Watchers of Time
A Fearsome Doubt
A Cold Treachery
A Long Shadow
A False Mirror
A Pale Horse
A Matter of Justice
The Red Door
A Lonely Death
The Confession
Proof of Guilt
A Lonely Death
Hunting Shadows
Bess Crawford series
A Duty to the Dead
An Impartial Witness
A Bitter Truth
An Unmarked Grave
A Question of Honor
Unwilling Accomplice
A Pattern of Lies
CHILDREN’S/YA
Taylor, Mildred
Song of the Trees
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
Let the Circle Be Unbroken
The Road to Memphis
The Land
The Friendship
The Gold Cadillac
Mississippi Bridge
The Well
Twain, Mark
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Vanderpool, Clare
Moon Over Manifest
Navigating Early
Voigt, Cynthia
Izzy, Willy-Nilly
Homecoming
Dicey’s Song
Seventeen Against the Dealer
Sons from Afar
Wings of a Falcon
On Fortune’s Wheel
SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY
Tarr, Judith
Dagger and the Cross
The Hound and the Falcon
The Isle of Glass
The Golden Horn
The Hounds of God
Tepper, Sheri
The Family Tree
Tiptree, James, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Tolkien, J.R.R.
The Hobbit
The Lord of the Rings
Fellowship of the Ring
Two Towers
Return of the King
The Silmarillion
Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth (J. R. R. says he is most like Faramir)
Urrea, Luis Alberto
The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Vance, Jack
Demon Princes series
The Star King (1964)
The Killing Machine (1964)
The Palace of Love (1967)
The Face (1979)
The Book of Dreams (1981)
Verne, Jules
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
Vinge, Joan D.
Dreamfall
List of T Authors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
List of U Authors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
List of V Authors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
Diaries of the Week:
Write On! You're likeable enough, Hamilton...
by SensibleShoes
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Contemporary Fiction Views: Sisterhood
by bookgirl
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Kathmandu Siege One Week anniversary Sept 30th - Welcome to the post-petroleum apocalypse
by guavaboy
http://www.dailykos.com/...
POLL...Please don't worry if you don't approve or know all the authors in one line. Please just go ahead and vote for your favorite despite that. No one will know or you can explain it in comments.