James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain”

James Baldwin is one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century, across several genres, but perhaps most importantly in his fiction. His work deals with themes of sexuality, race, and class, and are vivid contributions to the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement. His 1962 novel Another Country is, perhaps, his most… Continue reading James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain”

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Jane Austen’s “Emma”

Just in case you thought I was going to be ignoring the classics in my list of “The 100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language,” think again: my novel #7 (alphabetically) is Jane Austen’s Emma, her final novel published during her lifetime (Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1818). Austen has long been recognized as one… Continue reading Jane Austen’s “Emma”

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Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”

The second book (alphabetically) on “The Ruud List of the 100 Best Books to Love in the English Language” is Douglas Adams’ sci-fi romp The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which I am counting the entire five-book “trilogy” including the original Hitchhiker’s Guide (1979) and its sequels: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe, and… Continue reading Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”

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Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land”

Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, his 2021 follow-up to his 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See, is a spectacularly wide-ranging novel that alternates between contemporary thriller, historical novel, and speculative science fiction, that takes readers from fifteenth-century Constantinople to twentieth- and then twenty-first century America and then to a twenty-second century generational… Continue reading Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land”

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