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Gwyneth Paltrow recommended Crime and Punishment in Books (curated)

 
Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky | 1866 | Crime
7.5 (13 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"One of my all-time favorite novels is Crime And Punishment. I read it in high school, and for some terrifying reason, I really identified with Raskolnikov. It's so funny, because he sort of behaves amorally, but he has an incredible sense of right and wrong. Obviously, I couldn't identify with him as a killer, but I could understand what it means to know that something's wrong but do it anyway. I was 17 when I read it, and the feeling of having betrayed one's sense of right and wrong — and then living with the consequences — was something that I could completely identify with."

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Julia Roberts recommended The Wild Palms in Books (curated)

 
The Wild Palms
The Wild Palms
William Faulkner | 2000 | Contemporary, Fiction & Poetry
(0 Ratings)
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"This would have to be my favorite classic novel. It’s such a beautiful, tragic love story—a book that will just destroy you. And Faulkner’s language is so utterly descriptive. He can write an entire page that consists of only adjectives and two commas. Actually, he’s the reason I ended up passing high school English, because my punctuation was always kind of…eccentric. I would say to my teacher, ‘Well, you know, William Faulkner—he doesn’t use proper punctuation.’ And one of my teachers ended up devising a system with two grades, where you were graded on content and then on whether it was properly written."

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Terrence McNally recommended Lolita in Books (curated)

 
Lolita
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov | 2011 | Fiction & Poetry
3.5 (2 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"I read this book in high school when it was first published. It had the reputation of being “dirty.” It did not disappoint: I was all of 14. It was also deliciously funny. It still is. Its status is secure and I doubt there’s a “Best” list it’s not on. It’s wildly romantic, scathingly satiric of middle-class Americans as only a European aristocrat can see us, and ultimately deeply moving. Lolita is the light of everyone’s loins. Humbert Humbert’s despair is anyone’s who has loved and lost in vain. Nabokov “gets” America and Americans. He is one of the great writers in English and it wasn’t even his first language."

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