While different editions have different page counts, Lily and Jen are right: it’s between 1000 and 1400 pages in print. A famously long novel filled with historical detail.
The musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 is based on a small 70 page section of this 1400 page book, if that gives any idea of its density.
This is a literary classic about the sexual abuse of a child — it has been controversial since its publication and remains a topic of debate.
Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is notable for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, a French middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with an American 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, whom he sexually molests after he becomes her stepfather. “Lolita” is his private nickname for Dolores. The novel was originally written in English and first published in Paris in 1955 by Olympia Press. Later it was translated into Russian by Nabokov himself and published in New York City in 1967 by Phaedra Publishers.
Lolita quickly attained a classic status. The novel was adapted into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and another film by Adrian Lyne in 1997. It has also been adapted several times for the stage and has been the subject of two operas, two ballets, and an acclaimed, but commercially unsuccessful, Broadway musical. Many authors consider it the greatest work of the 20th century, and it has been included in several lists of best books, such as Time’s List of the 100 Best Novels, Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century, Bokklubben World Library, Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels, and The Big Read.
The novel is prefaced by a fictitious foreword by John Ray Jr., an editor of psychology books. Ray states that he is presenting a memoir written by a man using the pseudonym “Humbert Humbert,” who had recently died of heart disease while awaiting a murder trial in jail. The memoir begins with Humbert’s birth in Paris in 1910. He spends his childhood on the French Riviera, where he falls in love with his friend Annabel Leigh. This youthful and physically unfulfilled love is interrupted by Annabel’s premature death from typhus, which causes Humbert to become sexually obsessed with a specific type of girl, aged 9 to 14, whom he refers to as “nymphets.”
After graduation, Humbert works as an English teacher and begins editing an academic literary textbook. Before the outbreak of World War II, Humbert moves to New York. In 1947, he moves to Ramsdale, a small town in New England, where he can calmly continue working on his book. The house that he intends to live in is destroyed in a fire, and in his search for a new home, he meets the widow Charlotte Haze, who is accepting tenants. Humbert visits Charlotte’s residence out of politeness and initially intends to decline her offer. However, Charlotte leads Humbert to her garden, where her 12-year-old daughter Dolores (also variably known as Dolly, Dolita, Lo, Lola, and Lolita) is sunbathing. Humbert sees in Dolores the perfect nymphet, the embodiment of his old love Annabel, and quickly decides to move in.
The impassioned Humbert constantly searches for discreet forms of fulfilling his sexual urges, usually via the smallest physical contact with Dolores. When Dolores is sent to summer camp, Humbert receives a letter from Charlotte, who confesses her love for him and gives him an ultimatum – he is to either marry her or move out immediately. Initially terrified, Humbert then begins to see the charm in the situation of being Dolores’ stepfather, and so marries Charlotte for instrumental reasons. Charlotte later discovers Humbert’s diary, in which she learns of his desire for her daughter and the disgust Charlotte arouses in him. Shocked and humiliated, Charlotte decides to flee with Dolores and writes letters addressed to her friends warning them of Humbert. Disbelieving Humbert’s false assurance that the diary is a sketch for a future novel, Charlotte runs out of the house to send the letters but is killed by a swerving car.
Humbert destroys the letters and retrieves Dolores from camp, claiming that her mother has fallen seriously ill and has been hospitalized. He then takes her to a high-end hotel that Charlotte had earlier recommended. Humbert knows he will feel guilty raping Dolores while she is conscious so tricks her into taking a sedative by saying it is a vitamin. As he waits for the pill to take effect, he wanders through the hotel and meets a mysterious man who seems to be aware of Humbert’s plan for Dolores.
Humbert excuses himself from the conversation and returns to the hotel room. There, he discovers that he had been fobbed with a milder drug, as Dolores is merely drowsy and wakes up frequently, drifting in and out of sleep. He dares not rape her that night. In the morning, Dolores reveals to Humbert that she actually has already lost her virginity, having engaged in sexual activity with an older boy at a different camp a year ago. He begins sexually abusing her. After leaving the hotel, Humbert reveals to Dolores that her mother is dead.
Humbert and Dolores travel across the country, driving all day and staying in motels. Humbert desperately tries to maintain Dolores’ interest in travel and himself, and increasingly bribes her in exchange for sexual favors. They finally settle in Beardsley, a small New England town. Humbert adopts the role of Dolores’ father and enrolls her in a local private school for girls.
Humbert jealously and strictly controls all of Dolores’ social gatherings and forbids her from dating and attending parties. It is only at the instigation of the school headmaster, who regards Humbert as a strict and conservative European parent, that he agrees to Dolores’ participation in the school play, the title of which is the same as the hotel in which Humbert met the mysterious man. The day before the premiere of the performance, a serious quarrel breaks out between Dolores and Humbert, and Dolores runs out of the house. When Humbert finds her a few moments later, she tells him that she wants to leave town and continue traveling. Humbert is initially delighted, but as he travels, he becomes increasingly suspicious – he feels that he is being followed by someone Dolores is familiar with.
The man following them is Clare Quilty – a friend of Charlotte and a famous playwright who wrote the play that Dolores was to participate in. In the Colorado mountains, Dolores falls ill. Humbert checks her into a local hospital, from where she is discharged one night by her “uncle.” Humbert knows she has no living relatives and he immediately embarks on a frantic search to find Dolores and her abductor, but initially fails. For the next two years, Humbert barely sustains himself in a moderately functional relationship with a young alcoholic named Rita.
Deeply depressed, Humbert unexpectedly receives a letter from a 17-year-old Dolores (signing as “Dolly (Mrs. Richard F. Schiller)”), telling him that she is married, pregnant, and in desperate need of money. Humbert, armed with a pistol, tracks down Dolores’ address and gives her the money, which was due as an inheritance from her mother.
Humbert learns that Dolores’ husband, a deaf mechanic, is not her abductor. Dolores reveals to Humbert that Quilty took her from the hospital: she was in love with Quilty, but he rejected her when she refused to star in one of his pornographic films. Humbert implores Dolores to leave with him, but she refuses. Humbert then goes to the drug-addled Quilty’s mansion and shoots him several times.
Shortly afterward, Humbert is arrested, and in his closing thoughts, he reaffirms his love for Dolores and asks for his memoir to be withheld from public release until after her death. Dolores dies in childbirth on Christmas Day in 1952, disappointing Humbert’s prediction that “Dolly Schiller will probably survive me by many years.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita
This is a series of self-help books, composed of inspirational true stories.
There are over 250 books in the series.
A series of fantasy books by noted TERF Activist J.K. Rowling
(I’m assuming you are all generally familiar with the general synopsis.)
I expect you are familiar with this one …
Popular thriller by Dan Brown
The novel explores an alternative religious history, whose central plot point is that the Merovingian kings of France were descended from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, ideas derived from Clive Prince’s The Templar Revelation (1997) and books by Margaret Starbird. The book also refers to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) though Dan Brown has stated that it was not used as research material.
The Da Vinci Code provoked a popular interest in speculation concerning the Holy Grail legend and Mary Magdalene’s role in the history of Christianity. The book has, however, been extensively denounced by many Christian denominations as an attack on the Catholic Church, and consistently criticized for its historical and scientific inaccuracies. The novel nonetheless became a massive worldwide bestseller that sold 80 million copies as of 2009 and has been translated into 44 languages. In November 2004, Random House published a Special Illustrated Edition with 160 illustrations. In 2006, a film adaptation was released by Columbia Pictures.
Louvre curator and Priory of Sion grand master Jacques Saunière is fatally shot one night at the museum by an albino Catholic monk named Silas, who is working on behalf of someone he knows only as the Teacher, who wishes to discover the location of the “keystone,” an item crucial in the search for the Holy Grail.
After Saunière’s body is discovered in the pose of the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, the police summon Harvard professor Robert Langdon, who is in town on business. Police captain Bezu Fache tells him that he was summoned to help the police decode the cryptic message Saunière left during the final minutes of his life. The message includes a Fibonacci sequence out of order and an anagram ‘O, draconian devil Oh, lame saint’.
Langdon explains to Fache that Saunière was a leading authority on the subject of goddess artwork and that the pentacle Saunière drew on his chest in his own blood represents an allusion to the goddess and not devil worship, as Fache believes.
Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer, secretly explains to Langdon that she is Saunière’s estranged granddaughter, and that Fache thinks Langdon is the murderer because the last line in her grandfather’s message, which was meant for Neveu, said “P.S. Find Robert Langdon,” which Fache had erased prior to Langdon’s arrival. However, “P.S.” does not refer to “postscript”, but rather to Sophie — the nickname given to her by her grandfather was “Princess Sophie”. Neveu is troubled by memories of her grandfather’s involvement in a secret pagan group. However, she understands that her grandfather intended Langdon to decipher the code, which leads to da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which in turn leads to his painting Madonna of the Rocks. They find a pendant which holds the address of the Paris branch of the Depository Bank of Zurich.
Neveu and Langdon escape from the police and visit the bank. In the safe deposit box they find a box containing the keystone: a cryptex, a cylindrical, hand-held vault with five concentric, rotating dials labeled with letters. When these are lined up correctly, they unlock the device. If the cryptex is forced open, an enclosed vial of vinegar breaks and dissolves the message inside the cryptex, which was written on papyrus. The box containing the cryptex contains clues to its password.
Langdon and Neveu take the keystone to the home of Langdon’s friend, Sir Leigh Teabing, an expert on the Holy Grail, the legend of which is heavily connected to the Priory. There, Teabing explains that the Grail is not a cup, but connected to Mary Magdalene and Royal blood.
The trio then flees the country on Teabing’s private plane, on which they conclude that the proper combination of letters spell out Neveu’s given name, Sofia. Opening the cryptex, they discover a smaller cryptex inside it, along with another riddle that ultimately leads the group to the tomb of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.
During the flight to Britain, Neveu reveals the source of her estrangement from her grandfather ten years earlier: arriving home unexpectedly from university, Neveu secretly witnessed a spring fertility rite conducted in the secret basement of her grandfather’s country estate. From her hiding place, she was shocked to see her grandfather with a woman at the center of a ritual attended by men and women who were wearing masks and chanting praise to the goddess. She fled the house and broke off all contact with Saunière. Langdon explains that what she witnessed was an ancient ceremony known as hieros gamos or “sacred marriage.”
By the time they arrive at Westminster Abbey, Teabing is revealed to be the Teacher for whom Silas is working. Teabing wishes to use the Holy Grail, which he believes is a series of documents establishing that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and bore children, in order to ruin the Vatican. He compels Langdon at gunpoint to solve the second cryptex’s password, which Langdon realizes is “apple.” Langdon secretly opens the cryptex and removes its contents before tossing the empty cryptex in the air.
Teabing is arrested by Fache, who by now realizes that Langdon is innocent. Bishop Aringarosa, head of religious sect Opus Dei and Silas’ mentor, realizing that Silas has been used to murder innocent people, rushes to help the police find him. When the police find Silas hiding in an Opus Dei Center, he assumes that they are there to kill him and he rushes out, accidentally shooting Bishop Aringarosa. Bishop Aringarosa survives but is informed that Silas was found dead later from a gunshot wound.
The final message inside the second keystone leads Neveu and Langdon to Rosslyn Chapel, whose docent turns out to be Neveu’s long-lost brother, whom Neveu had been told died as a child in the car accident that killed her parents. The guardian of Rosslyn Chapel, Marie Chauvel Saint Clair, is Neveu’s long-lost grandmother. It is revealed that Neveu and her brother are descendants of Merovingian bloodline. The Priory of Sion hid her identity to protect her from possible threats to her life.
The real meaning of the last message is that the Grail is buried beneath the small pyramid directly below the La Pyramide Inversée, the inverted glass pyramid of the Louvre. It also lies beneath the “Rose Line,” an allusion to “Rosslyn.” Langdon figures out this final piece to the puzzle; he follows the Rose Line to La Pyramide Inversée, where he kneels to pray before the hidden sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene, as the Templar knights did before him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Da_Vinci_Code
(Dramaturg’s Note: This book is the most glorious piece of addictive trash ever written, IMHO. — MAF)
This is a paperback romance, and not a particularly famous or acclaimed one. Nora Roberts is an acclaimed romance writer, with over 255 books — almost all are bestsellers on release. The audience may not know the specific book, but the name Nora Roberts is recognizable
From #1 New York Times bestselling “consistently entertaining writer” (USA Today) Nora Roberts, Search for Love takes a woman on a journey to meet a family she never knew she had—and a future she never imagined.
When Serenity Smith’s parents passed away, she presumed she lost her only family. Then she receives word from a relative far from Washington D.C.—her grandmother, living on an estate in the beautiful Brittany region of France. But the hard-hearted Comtesse de Kergallen doesn’t welcome Serenity with open arms. Neither does her arrogant yet undeniably charming cousin Christophe. Both harbor resentments against the Smiths, believing they damaged the family’s aristocratic reputation. As Serenity sets out to clear her parents’ names, tension mounts between her and Christophe—escalating from adversarial to passionate…
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250775634/searchforlove
Considered by many to be the greatest novel ever written, and possibly the most highbrow contrast to Harry Potter books. It is notoriously a book that people claim to have read, but never have.
Ulysses, novel by Irish writer James Joyce, first published in book form in 1922. Stylistically dense and exhilarating, it is generally regarded as a masterpiece and has been the subject of numerous volumes of commentary and analysis. The novel is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey.
All the action of Ulysses takes place in and immediately around Dublin on a single day (June 16, 1904). The three central characters—Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce’s earlier Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man); Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser; and his wife, Molly—are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses (Odysseus), and Penelope, respectively, and the events of the novel loosely parallel the major events in Odysseus’s journey home after the Trojan War.
The book begins at 8:00 in the morning in a Martello tower (a Napoleonic-era defensive structure), where Stephen lives with medical student Buck Mulligan and his English friend Haines. They prepare for the day and head out. After teaching at a boys’ school, Stephen receives his pay from the ignorant and anti-Semitic headmaster, Mr. Deasy, and takes a letter from Deasy that he wants to have published in two newspapers. Afterward Stephen wanders along a beach, lost in thought.
Also that morning, Bloom brings breakfast and the mail to Molly, who remains in bed; her concert tour manager, Blazes Boylan, is to see her at 4:00 that afternoon. Bloom goes to the post office to pick up a letter from a woman with whom he has an illicit correspondence and then to the pharmacist to order lotion for Molly. At 11:00 AM Bloom attends the funeral of Paddy Dignam with Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and Jack Power.
Bloom goes to a newspaper office to negotiate the placement of an advertisement, which the foreman agrees to as long as it is to run for three months. Bloom leaves to talk with the merchant placing the ad. Stephen arrives with Deasy’s letter, and the editor agrees to publish it. When Bloom returns with an agreement to place the ad for two months, the editor rejects it. Bloom walks through Dublin for a while, stopping to chat with Mrs. Breen, who mentions that Mina Purefoy is in labour. He later has a cheese sandwich and a glass of wine at a pub. On his way to the National Library afterward, he spots Boylan and ducks into the National Museum.
In the National Library, Stephen discusses his theories about Shakespeare and Hamlet with the poet AE, the essayist and librarian John Eglinton, and the librarians Richard Best and Thomas Lyster. Bloom arrives, looking for a copy of an advertisement he had placed, and Buck shows up. Stephen and Buck leave to go to a pub as Bloom also departs.
Simon and Matt Lenehan meet in the bar of the Ormond Hotel, and later Boylan arrives. Leopold had earlier seen Boylan’s car and followed it to the hotel, where he then dines with Richie Goulding. Boylan leaves with Lenehan, on his way to his assignation with Molly. Later, Bloom goes to Barney Kiernan’s boisterous pub, where he is to meet Cunningham in order to help with the Dignam family’s finances. Bloom finds himself being cruelly mocked, largely for his Jewishness. He defends himself, and Cunningham rushes him out of the bar.
After the visit to the Dignam family, Bloom, after a brief dalliance at the beach, goes to the National Maternity Hospital to check in on Mina. He finds Stephen and several of his friends, all somewhat drunk. He joins them, accompanying them when they repair to Burke’s pub. After the bar closes, Stephen and a friend head to Bella Cohen’s brothel. Bloom later finds him there. Stephen, very drunk by now, breaks a chandelier, and, while Bella threatens to call the police, he rushes out and gets into an altercation with a British soldier, who knocks him to the ground. Bloom takes Stephen to a cabman’s shelter for food and talk, and then, long after midnight, the two head for Bloom’s home. There Bloom makes hot cocoa, and they talk. When Bloom suggests that Stephen stay the night, Stephen declines, and Bloom sees him out. Bloom then goes to bed with Molly; he describes his day to her and requests breakfast in bed.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ulysses-novel-by-Joyce
The Book Club Play 