📚Hard Times
✍🏻Author: Charles Dickens
💬Language: English
🗓DOP: 1854
🌬Genre: #realism

📝Summary:
"My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else," proclaimed Charles Dickens in explaining the theme of this classic novel. The story concerns one Thomas Gradgrind, a "fanatic of the demonstrable fact," who raises his children, Tom and Louisa, in a stifling and arid atmosphere of grim practicality.

🔮Interesting Facts:
It is by far the shortest of Dickens's novels, barely a quarter of the length of those written immediately before and after it. Also, unlike all but one of his other novels, Hard Times has neither a preface nor illustrations. Moreover, it is his only novel not to have scenes set in London.

🔎Background:
One of his reasons for writing it was that sales of his weekly periodical "Household Words" were low, and it was hoped the novel's publication in instalments would boost circulation – as indeed proved to be the case.

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📚The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Russian: Смерть Ивана Ильича)
✍🏻Author: Leo Tolstoy
💬Language: Russian
🗓DOP: 1886
🌬Genre: #fiction #philosophy #novella

📝Summary:
Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality.

🔮Interesting Facts:
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is considered one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s Widely considered to be one of the finest novellas ever written.

🔎Background:
This short novel was an artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction.

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📚The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
✍🏻Author: Mark Twain
💬Language: English
🗓DOP: 1876
🌬Genre: #realism #adventure #fiction

📝Summary:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer revolves around the youthful adventures of the novel's schoolboy protagonist, Thomas Sawyer, whose reputation precedes him for causing mischief and strife. In the novel, Tom Sawyer has several adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn.

🔮Interesting Facts:
Originally a commercial failure, the book ended up being the best selling of any of Twain's works during his lifetime. Though overshadowed by its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book is considered by many to be a masterpiece of American literature. It was one of the first novels to be written on a typewriter.

🔎Background:
Mark Twain describes some autobiographical events in the book. The novel is set around Twain's actual boyhood home of Hannibal, near St. Louis, and many of the places in it are real and today support a tourist industry as a result.

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📚What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Japanese: 走ることについて語るときに僕の語ること)
✍🏻Author: Haruki Murakami
💬Language: Japanese
🗓DOP: 2007
🌬Genre: #memoir #biography #auto_biography

📝Summary:
Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and takes us to places ranging from Tokyo's Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him.

🔮Interesting Facts:
In this book, Murakami writes about his interest and participation in long distance running. He started running in the early 1980s and since then has competed in over twenty marathons and an ultramarathon.

🔎Background:
The book's noscript was inspired by Raymond Carver's collection of short stories ennoscriptd What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

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📚The Call of the Wild
✍🏻Author: Jack London
💬Language: English
🗓DOP: 1903
🌬Genre: #adventure_fiction #novel

📝Summary:
The story follows a dog named Buck, a 140 pound Saint Bernard and Scotch Shepherd mix. Buck is abducted from a comfortable life as a pet and tossed into the chaos of the Klondike Gold Rush and the brutal realities of frontier life.

🔮Interesting Facts:
At the time, London was criticized for attributing "unnatural" human thoughts and insights to a dog, so much so that he was accused of being a nature faker. London further responded that he had set out to portray nature more accurately than his predecessors.

🔎Background:
In Alaska, London found the material that inspired him to write this work. Dyea Beach was the primary point of arrival for miners when London traveled through there. He was friends with Marshall Latham Bond and his brother Louis Whitford Bond, the owners of a mixed St. Bernard-Scotch Collie dog.

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