Shelfology Book Pairing

A Novel

by Mohsin Hamid

One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century FINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE & WINNER OF THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE “It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America and the world, and gave us a road map to our future… At once terrifying and … oddly hopeful.” —Ayelet Waldman, The New York Times Book Review “Moving, audacious, and indelibly human.” —Entertainment Weekly, “A” rating The New York Times bestselling novel: an astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands, from the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the forthcoming The Last White Man. In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . . Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

By James Joyce

by James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's first novel, published after the previous success of his short story collection Dubliners. The novel is written in a modernist style, with dialog and narration blending together in a kind of stream-of-consciousness meant to invoke the blurriness of memory.Joyce originally planned writing a realist autobiographical novel of 63 chapters titled Stephen Hero. He abandoned the attempt halfway through, and refocused his efforts on Portrait, a shorter, sharper work in the modernist style. His alter-ego remained Stephen Dedalus, named after Daedalus, the mythological Greek craftsman and father of Icarus. Portrait was written while he was waiting for Dubliners to be published, a process that took eight years and so frustrated Joyce that he once threw the manuscript of Portrait into a fire, causing his family to run to save it.The novel closely traces Joyce's early years. Like his alter-ego Stephen, Joyce was born into a middle-class family and lived in Dublin as they descended into poverty; he rebelled against his Irish Catholic upbringing to become a star student at Dublin University, and put aside thoughts of priesthood or medicine, the other careers offered him, to become a writer. Joyce doesn't shy away from sensitive topics, presenting the discoveries of youth in all of their physical detail, including Stephen's teenage visits to prostitutes (which also mirror Joyce's youth, and were how he probably contracted the suspected syphilis that plagued his vision and tortured his health for the rest of his life), and the homosexual explorations of children at a Jesuit school.The writing is in the free indirect style, allowing the narrator to both focus on Stephen and present characters and events through his eyes, until the last chapter, where Stephen's first-person diary entries suggest he's finally found his voice. As the novel progresses, the syntax and vocabulary also grow in complexity, reflecting Stephen's own developmen