Like many Italian authors, Eco shows a joy in experimenting with form and meaning. Ostensibly a murder mystery, this book is really a story about stories, a book about puzzles and truth and conspiracies. Also, our narrator, arrives at an abbey with his master, William of Baskerville, to find that a monk has been killed, seemingly falling from the upper windows of the library. As the newcomers investigate the death, the secrets of the abbey are slowly revealed to them. As more deaths occur, they stand on the edge of a great conspiracy. Or do they? A lyrical, intelligent reinvention of the detective novel.
Added by: JustGoodNews | Karma: 4306.24 | Fiction literature | 20 November 2010
7
The Cobra by Frederick Forsyth
The stunning new thriller from the grandmaster of international intrigue. The Cocaine industry is worth billions of dollars a year to the drug cartels who spread their evil seed across Western society. Its usage causes incalculable misery, poverty and death. Slowly, gradually, inexorably it is spreading...it is a blight which must be stopped.
I have had pleasure in editing this little book, not only because it is the work of my youngest son, but also because it contains the results of a good deal of experience of life under novel aspects, as seen by young, fresh, and observant eyes. How the book came to be written is as follows: The boy, whose two years' narrative forms the subject of these pages, was at the age of sixteen seized with inflammation of the lungs, from which he was recovering so slowly and unsatisfactorily, that I was advised by London physicians to take him from the business he was then learning in Yorkshire, and send him on a long sea voyage.
ON THE BEACH  Structural Readers stage 5
There has been a nuclear war. People not killed by bombs are now being killed by nuclear radiation, which will remain in the world for many years. The story is set in Melbourne, Australia. People are still alive there because the radiation has not yet reached the city. It is mostly in the north. But it is slowly coming south.
Velvet is odd. Instead of dolls that talk and cry, Velvet brings a milkweed pod for show and tell. She wins the class art contest using only an eight-pack of crayons. She likes to collect rocks. Even her name is strange - Velvet! But as the school year unfolds, the things Velvet does and the things that Velvet says slowly begin to make sense. And, in the end, Velvet's classmates discover that being different is what makes Velvet so much fun.
