Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. Woolf’s well-known 1929 essay about women and fiction. This is the May book for discussion at Feminist Classics. You are invited to join the discussion there.
Pat Barker, The Ghost Road. This is the third of the trilogy of novels set during World War I. The other two are Regeneration and The Eye in the Door.
P. J. O’Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations. P.J.’s take on Adam Smith’s great work. You receive a good summary of the basics of Smith’s book and of classic economy if you don’t let O’Rourke’s snide comments get in the way. I read this book, along with the Karl Marx book listed below for a course, Smith Vs. Marx, where we looked at what these two giants of economic analysis actually said, versus what people think they said.
Albert Camus, The Stranger. Translation by Matthew Ward. Meursault is a murderer; he also tells the truth.
Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life. A well-written biography of the author of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.
Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth. Short stories by the Canadian writer.
Jane Gardam, The Flight of the Maidens. An earlier novel by the author of Old Filth. Three provincial English girls win scholarships to prestigious universities. Their flight is both a flight from — leaving a life that could not
be sufficient for them — and a flight up — a reaching for something higher, and perhaps better, but certainly different.
Looks like you had a wonderful reading month in May, Nancy! Congratulations! The P.J.O’Rourke book ‘On the Wealth of Nations’ looks quite interesting! I also liked very much what you did in your ‘Smith Vs Marx’ course where you looked at what these two said and what other people thought what they said. Sometimes what other people think is very different from what the original writer said.
Thank you for your comment. My entry is slightly misleading. I didn’t give the course — instead, I was a student in it. As the teacher said, Das Kapital and The Wealth of Nations are like the Bible, books everybody talks about but nobody reads.