Title Recommendations based on George Smiley
Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it's only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is. Never Let Me Go is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.
Max Fischer, a precocious and eccentric 15 year-old, who is both Rushmore's most extracurricular and least scholarly student; Herman Blume, a disillusioned industrialist who comes to admire Max; and Rosemary Cross, a widowed first grade teacher who becomes the object of both Max's and Herman's affection.
Lyra is rushing to the cold, far North, where witch clans and armored bears rule. North, where the Gobblers take the children they steal—including her friend Roger. North, where her fearsome uncle Asriel is trying to build a bridge to a parallel world. Can one small girl make a difference in such great and terrible endeavors? This is Lyra: a savage, a schemer, a liar, and as fierce and true a champion as Roger or Asriel could want. But what Lyra doesn't know is that to help on of them will be to betray the other.
Written when landing on the moon was still a dream, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a science-fiction classic that has changed the way we look at the stars—and ourselves. On the moon, an enigma is uncovered. So great are the implications that, for the first time, men are sent deep into our solar system. But before they can reach their destination, things begin to go very wrong. From the savannas of Africa at the dawn of mankind to the rings of Saturn at the turn of the 21st century, Arthur C. Clarke takes us on a journey unlike any other. Brilliant, compulsive, and prophetic, and the basis for the immensely influential Stanley Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey tackles the enduring theme of man's—and technology's—place in the universe and lives on as a landmark achievement in storytelling.
Thomas Angelo, a taxi driver living in the 1930s in Lost Heaven (based on San Francisco and Chicago), enters a mafia gang led by Don Salieri and gets mixed up in a storyline including many plots, robberies and assassinations, later deciding to become an informant against the mob. Driven by third-person gunplay, realistic driving mechanics and advanced graphics, Mafia immerses the player into a real-world mobster story.
Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane's puts together a baseball team on a budget by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his players.
Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
Boyz n the Hood is the popular and successful film and social criticism from John Singleton about the conditions in South Central Los Angeles where teenagers are involved in gun fights and drug dealing on a daily basis.
Set in 1982 in the suburb of Blackeberg, Stockholm, twelve-year-old Oskar is a lonely outsider, bullied at school by his classmates. At home, Oskar dreams of revenge against a trio of bullies. He befriends his twelve-year-old, next-door neighbor Eli, who only appears at night in the snow-covered playground outside their building.
Leon, the top hit man in New York, has earned a rep as an effective "cleaner". But when his next-door neighbors are wiped out by a loose-cannon DEA agent, he becomes the unwilling custodian of 12-year-old Mathilda. Before long, Mathilda's thoughts turn to revenge, and she considers following in Leon's footsteps.
Tony Soprano has everything he ever wanted. At home he has a beautiful wife, his high school sweetheart Carmela, and two kids: daughter Meadow and son A.J. In business, he is really the capo of the DiMeo organized crime family with loyal associates like Silvio, Paulie and his nephew Christopher. But even with all his success, Tony is as unhappy as he's ever been.
The Battlestar Galactica is one of the few spaceships to survive a massive nuclear attack led by a race of artificial intelligence known as the Cylons. Luckly, the ship's passengers are in good hands with an ace pilot named Kara Starbuck who can often be found chomping on cigars, throwing back booze, betting on card games, or competing at Pyramid.
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
In World War II Casablanca, Rick Blaine, exiled American and former freedom fighter, runs the most popular nightspot in town. The cynical lone wolf Blaine comes into the possession of two valuable letters of transit. When Nazi Major Strasser arrives in Casablanca, the sycophantic police Captain Renault does what he can to please him, including detaining a Czechoslovak underground leader Victor Laszlo. Much to Rick's surprise, Lazslo arrives with Ilsa, Rick's one time love. Rick is very bitter towards Ilsa, who ran out on him in Paris. But when he learns she had good reason to leave, they plan to run off together again using the letters of transit. Well, that was their original plan.
In the pre-Civil War United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery. Facing cruelty as well as unexpected kindnesses Solomon struggles not only to stay alive—but to retain his dignity. In the twelfth year of his unforgettable odyssey, Solomon's chance meeting with a Canadian abolitionist will forever alter his life.
