# Reading > General Literature >  Books about books.

## Nightshade

Im trying to make a list of books as in novels, about books, writing bookshops or reading.
84, Charing cross road
Possession As byatt
The reading Group
Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach 


Id be exctremly grateful for any more ideas thanks 


 :Biggrin:  :Biggrin:

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## Wild Apple

Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi

This is a very enjoyable book. It's about a group of young women in Iran who got together to read some of the great classics of western literature that were banned under the oppressive regime, at the risk of their lives and freedom. They met in secrecy at a former mutual professor of theirs (Azar Nafisi), who quit/was fired from a university in Tehran for not wearing a veil and insiting to teach books that were conisdered criminal to read, such as Nabokov's Lolita.

It's non-fiction but I think you'd still enjoy it.

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## Whifflingpin

Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco

Cakes and Ale - Somerset Maugham

.

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## Charles Darnay

If on a winter's night a traveller - italo calvino

Northanger Abby - Jane Austen (I haven't read it but I think it is)

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## Pensive

Fahrenheit 451.

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## mono

_The Hours_ by Michael Cunningham, _The Professor And The Madman_ by Simon Winchester, and an unmentionable number of Greek and Roman plays continue off each other's stories (Homer's _The Iliad_ --> Virgil's _The &#198;neid_, for one example).

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## Bastet

The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl

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## Bookworm Cris

The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, a short story by Stephen King, it&#180;s a tale told by the narrator about a writer who became mad, and started to see and listen to "small creatures" who lived inside his typewriter. A very interesting story, that&#180;s what I could remember by now. If I remember other stories, I&#180;ll come back

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## Nightshade

Thankyou everyone, this is all great stuff!
thanks again :Biggrin:

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## subterranean

> The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl


I have this at home, but I have only read until second chapter. Perhaps, you could give a brief review that would encourage me to restart and finish it ?  :Smile:

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## vili

I think your list will end up being rather long, Nightshade.  :Smile:  Sometimes I feel that just about every novel is about writing at least on some conscious level.

However, having just read a Philip K. Dick biography, the first novel to come to my mind was Dick's _The Man in the High Castle_. Without giving too much away, it is set in the early 1960s in a world where the Axis have won the Second World War. One of the central themes of the novel is a novel-within-a-novel called _The Grasshopper Lies Heavy_, which depicts a fictional world of the early 1960s where in fact the Allies won the Second World War.

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## Nightwalk

Check out _Auto-da-Fe_ by Elias Canetti. It's about a reclusive man who lives for his books and has his world shattered by his inability to balance the mode of his existence and fend off the negative aspects of the everyday world.

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## Nightshade

> I think your list will end up being rather long, Nightshade.


Thats ok Im making up a list for the reading group I used to manage as well as a library service.

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## aeroport

The only thing I can think of is this fictional biography I read recently about Henry James called "The Master" by Colm Toibin. It was a quick and enjoyable read, but I really am no authority on whether it had any sort of accuracy to it or not.

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## Whifflingpin

Jasper FForde's series about Thursday Next

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## mono

Though not exactly a book about a book, _The Metamorphosis_ by Franz Kafka has many unmistakable allusions to _The Metamorphoses_ by Ovid. How I forgot this, I have no idea - perhaps by how obvious the fact seems.  :Rolleyes:

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## Moosecreek

_The Pale Blue Eye_ by Louis Bayard
_The Poe Shadow_ by Matthew Pearl
_The Dante Club_ by Matthew Pearl
_The Thirteenth Tale_ by Diane Setterfield
_The Club Dumas_ by Arturo Perez-Reverte
The _Tuesday Next_ Series by Jasper Fforde
_The Case of the Missing Books_ by Ian Sansom
_The Jane Austen Book Club_ by Karen Joy Fowler
_Arthur & George_ by Julian Barnes


Of the adult books I have read and enjoyed, the above titles come to mind.

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## NickAdams

The Club Dumas, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Tl&#246;n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges; A lot of his stories are about books- fictional books.

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## Nightshade

humm Thanks :Biggrin:

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## Nebula

"The twelfth dialogue" - Tom Petsinis
"The Shadow of the Wind" - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
"The Book Thief" - Markus Zusak

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## Niamh

_Murder at the Abbey Theatre_- Its a novel about the playboy of the western world and the riots it cause in the Abbey theatre in 1907

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## Set of Keys

'Old School' by Tobias Wolff. 

'Concrete' by Thomas Bernhard.

'Double or Nothing' by Raymond Federman.

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## Toryssa

The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova, about the discovery of a book and its secrets.

A Wedding in December - Anita Shreve, has snippets of a book that one of the characters is writing.

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James, the entire story is being read out loud from a manuscript.

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## Nightshade

> The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova, about the discovery of a book and its secrets.


Oh God dont remind of that nightmare  :Sick:   :Cold:  Ok Im sorry if you liked it alot of people did/do apparntly, but Im not onw of them... we read it in my book club ( well ok I gave up about 200 words in when they started "quoting" from the koran, and making things up. 

Other than that thanks everyone  :Biggrin:  :Nod:

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## malwethien

> Oh God dont remind of that nightmare   Ok Im sorry if you liked it alot of people did/do apparntly, but Im not onw of them... we read it in my book club ( well ok I gave up about 200 words in when they started "quoting" from the koran, and making things up. 
> 
> Other than that thanks everyone


I agree...I hated THE HISTORIAN....too ambitious for the writer I thought.

I also didn't like THE DANTE CLUB either...

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## malwethien

> I have this at home, but I have only read until second chapter. Perhaps, you could give a brief review that would encourage me to restart and finish it ?


Oh, don't bother reading it...it's terrible!!

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