Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood Quotes.

1. "One of the most intricate Cold War spy novels I’ve ever read is David Quammen’s The Soul of Viktor Tronko, based on the real-life case of a Cold War–era Russian defector who tells his debriefers that a Russian agent has infiltrated the upper echelons of the CIA."
- Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood

2. "The Last Canyon by John Vernon is a beautiful retelling of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 exploration of the Grand Canyon and his and his men’s inevitable and tragic clash with a tribe of Paiute Indians who lived on the canyon’s northern edge."
- Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood

3. "If you read no other work of what’s known as cyberpunk (which looks at the ever-thinner line between humans and machines), at least read the novel that began it all: William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which won every major science fiction award (the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick award) in 1984, the year it was published. Gibson introduced words (including cyberpunk itself), themes, and a dystopic vision of the future that have been liberally reworked in the writings of many other authors."
- Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood

4. "Richard Rhodes’s exceptionally readable The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the place to start. This sweeping chronicle of the difficult and sobering history of the endeavor called the Manhattan Project is marked by Rhodes’s insightful studies of the complicated people who were most involved in the creation of the bomb, from Niels Bohr to Robert Oppenheimer. Rhodes followed this book with Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb."
- Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood

5. "Undoubtedly, the place to start with Chinese fiction is with Cao Xueqin’s eighteenth-century classic, A Dream of Red Mansions, a sweeping epic about family life and Confucian practices in feudal China, including numerous subplots, a gazillion characters, and a touching love story."
- Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood

6. "The so-called scar literature first appeared in China in the late 1970s, when the men and women who survived the turmoil of Mao’s Cultural Revolution began writing about their experiences in both fiction and nonfiction. Two of the best novels are Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, the story of two young boys—children of the hated intelligentsia—who are sent to a remote mountain village to be reeducated, and Dai Houying’s Stones of the Wall, one of the earliest (and still one of the best) novels about the effects of the Cultural Revolution, which is set in the late 1970s around a group of college professors who are trying to rebuild lives thrown into despair and uncertainty by the cataclysm. (This is a novel I’ve remembered vividly since I first read it in 1985.)"
- Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood

7. "One of my top ten favorite novels in any category is Stephanie Plowman’s The Road to Sardis, a heartbreaking retelling of the events of the Peloponnesian War, which broke out in 431 B.C. between longtime rivals Athens and Sparta, and lasted for twenty-seven years."
- Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood

8. "Both Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae and Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War are well-told accounts of crucial events in Greek history."
- Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood

9. "John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in many ways defines the spy genre; it introduces the grand theme of ferreting out the Russian agent high up in British intelligence."
- Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood

10. "Three books set in Iran—first a novel about two lovers caught up in the Iranian Revolution, then two books about Iran since the Revolution: The Persian Bride by James Buchan The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran by Robin B. Wright Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Elaine Sciolino"
- Nancy Pearl, Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood