Author: Sherry Helms

Do you have irresistible desire for books? Do you feel passionate about reading or has the book changed your life? If yes then read about some interesting plots that revolve around books or book connoisseurs resembling you.  Here goes a list of top 5 well-received titles that celebrate books as the main theme, and that can best demonstrate to the readers what difference books can make in one’s life. Take a look:

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak – Set during World War II in Germany, this groundbreaking novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist – books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.

This is an unforgettable story about the ability of books to feed the soul.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield - Biographer Margaret Lea receives a letter from one of Britain’s most prolific and well-loved novelists, Vida Winter. Old and gravely ill, Vida wants to recount her life story in the words of Margaret.

 As Margaret doesn’t know the author, nor has she read any of Miss Winter’s dozens of novels, she begins to read her father’s rare copy of Miss Winter’s Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation.. She is spellbound by the stories and confused when she realizes the book only contains twelve stories. Where is the thirteenth tale? Intrigued, Margaret agrees to meet Miss Winter and act as her biographer. This leads both the women into their pasts and makes them confront the long hidden family secrets, as well as the ghosts that haunt them still.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – First published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 is a classic novel set in the future when books forbidden by a totalitarian regime are burned. The hero, a book burner, suddenly discovers that books are flesh and blood ideas that cry out silently when put to the torch.

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, keeping on his duty every day. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear, and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde - Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality, and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Brontë’s novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke – Twelve-year-old Meggie learns that her father, who repairs and binds books for a living, can “read” fictional characters to life. Characters from books literally leap off the page in this engrossing fantasy. When Meggie was three, her father read aloud from a book called Inkheart and released characters into the real world. At the same time, Meggie’s mother disappeared into the story. After her mother, Meggie only has her father, Mo, to herself. The two share a mutual love of books.

This “story within a story” will delight not just fantasy fans, but all readers who like an exciting plot with larger-than-life characters.

Tags: 0006546064, 0142001805, 0375842209, 0439709105, 0743298039, Books on Books, Stories on Books

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2012 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.