Study guides: books, letter t - Page 4 | Just Great DataBase

A legendary sequel written by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is now one of the most read and best sold books of all times. It’s hard to believe that such rich concepts were developed in 1937 and 1949 when Internet and cinematography wasn’t as much of an influence. It’s a mere product of imagination of a man who has always been fond of ancient history, philology, comparison studies...

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is a philosophical novel that features a surrealistic setting of a sanatorium far away in Swiss mountains that, considering that the pace of time there isn’t constant at all, can be called magical. The protagonist, a man in his twenties named Hans Castorp, goes there to visit his relative, who has tuberculosis, but falls ill himself during the visit and...

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy is a social novel that shows the life and death of the aforementioned Mayor who managed to turn from a drunkard to a decent man, but still had to constantly face the consequences of his past deeds. At the beginning of the novel we see him as the poor and embittered man, who gets so drunk that he puts his wife and baby daughter to the auction. This...

“The Maze Runner” is the first of a series of dystopian books written by James Dasher in 2009. Despite being so young in age, the novel’s plot has become so popular that it was turned into a movie and is now one of the most popular books among young people around the world. The protagonist of the book, Thomas, wakes up to find himself in a metal box without any recollections of...

Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare is often classified as a romantic comedy, but it can’t clearly be defined as comedy due to its piercing dramatic scenes, especially with the character of the Jewish moneylender Shylock and Portia’s fiery speech about mercy. The other deep topics that are mentioned in the play are the value of friendship (the male friendship bordering with...

Franz Kafka wrote the “Metamorphosis” in 1915 and together with his other works it was supposed to be destroyed after his death. Luckily his wife and friends didn’t obey the orders of the writer and the world still praises him as a great modernist and master of the words.  The protagonist of the story, Gregor Samsa is a provider for his family of four. After his father...

The Mill of the Floss is the family drama novel written by George Eliot. Some of the parts of the story are considered autobiographical, but the plot shows us the relationships that can happen in every rural patriarchal family of that times. The story starts from the family that lives on the mill and consists of the miller, his wife and two children. From the very beginning we see that the...

The Misanthrope is a comedy of manners by Moliere that, as do his previous works, mocks the habits of the upper-class French society, so bright and magnificent at the first glance and so shallow inside. Because his previous works were already banned in France, the author had to tone down some accents in the story to the extent that we can’t understand if the main character, Alceste is a...

“The Natural” is a novel about baseball and suddenly it is a novel about almost paranormal mystery. The author brilliantly merges so familiar and close-to-earth game with all the typical struggles and rivalry in the team with something much, much more subtle, that gives the book the fleur of Gothic mystery. The story tells us the biography of a young rising star of baseball that...

The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks is a simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking romantic story that has inspired lots of movie directors and given hope to countless people who don’t believe in lifelong love. The story is quite trivial: an old man reads to a lady in the nursing home. What he reads seems to be a diary of a romantic relationship: from the very first acquaintance through...

The symbol of a long return home, “The Odyssey” written by Homer, is a true literature classic. The story is as old as the world, no wonder that its authorship is widely questioned. One thing is for sure – the greatness of “The Odyssey” is due not to a single individual’s talents, but is a result of a whole century oral heritage and cultural tradition once put...

While “The Old Man and the Sea” closes Ernest Hemingway writing career, it also opens his talents from other perspectives and was one of the reasons for him being awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature.  To put it in a nutshell, this short novel is about an old Cuban fisherman. Santiago didn’t have luck with fishing for many days. After eighty-four days of failure, he finally...

If you think that nothing new can be said about King Arthur, try this book by T. H. White. More than six thousand pages are dedicated to carefully dismantling everything you knew before about the King Arthur and his knights and rebuilding this knowledge in the new, unusual but brilliant shape. To fully understand the book, we should know the time when it was written - right after the World War...

Susan Eloine Hinton started writing early. At the age of fifteen she already had a first draft of “The Outsiders” and it took her another year and a half to send it to publishing. The book was intended to be read by her young counterparts and is now considered a great example of the adult fiction genre. “The Outsiders” vividly show how young generations give into social...

John Steinbeck wrote his book “The Pearl” in 1947. It is a story about family, dreams, and human greed. The writer managed to write a strong novel using very simple text. The protagonists of the story are Kino, the pearl diver, his wife Juana and their baby Coyotito. One day, when a scorpion bites the boy, the whole family and a couple of curious villagers take off to see the doctor...

Oscar Wilde is a well-known Irish writer who published only one novel during his life. That novel was “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. During his life Wilde was very famous for his plays, but the first publisher of his novel initially cut the text by 500 words due to his skepticism of its success. After a great deal of criticism the author revised the novel and added seven new parts...

Pilgrim Progress by John Bunyan is one of the most famous religious allegories in the Christian world. Once its popularity was second only to the Bible. The book is written in two parts, the first one was finished in 1678 and it took the author several years to finish the second part in 1684. The book is dedicated to the metaphorical journey of a person throughout their life. The symbolic...

The Plague by Albert Camus may be called a great-grandparent of an “apocalyptic log” genre. The main storyline is simple and horrifying: there is a plague outbreak in the city, soon the city is put to quarantine and all the communication with the rest of the world stops. The narrative style is often called similar to Kafka’s: the characters are shown facing something...

“The Poisonwood Bible” offers a different outlook on migration literature. Barbara Kingsolver talks about an American family who relocated to Africa. The text has made a powerful impact on the Western readers who often find themselves entrapped in the bubble of their smooth everyday life. The story takes place at the end of the 1950s. The protagonists are the Prince family: a father...

The Prelude by William Wordsworth is an epic autobiographical poem the author dedicated all his life to. What is interesting is that The Prelude was meant to be only the first part, the introduction of a philosophical trilogy of poems that reflects Woodsworth’s worldview. But, unfortunately, the poet passed away in his eighties, leaving only The Prelude completed. The literature critics...