12 must-read classics books like The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread by Harold Bloom

If you liked the classics plot in The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread by Harold Bloom , here is a list of 12 books like this:

Similar categories in M.R. James's Collected Ghost Stories book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• classics

"The door was opening again. The seer does not like to dwell upon what he saw entering the room: he says it might be described as a frog - the size of a man - but it had scanty white hair about its he…"

-M.R. James, Collected Ghost Stories

"Those that spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pa…"

-M.R. James, Collected Ghost Stories

"But it was in the life-saving competition that Stanley Judkins's conduct was most blameable and had the most far-reaching effects. The practice, as you know, was to throw a selected lower boy, of sui…"

-M.R. James, Collected Ghost Stories

Similar categories in François-René de Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• literature
• classics
• nonfiction

"It is a long way from these strict parents to the child-spoilers of today."

-François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe

"Purgatory surpasses heaven and hell in poetry, because it represents a future and the others do not."

-François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe

"There are only two true things: intelligent religion and youthful love, which is to say the future and the present. The rest is not worth the trouble"

-François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe

"Life is spent hovering round our tomb. Our various sicknesses are but the winds which carry us more or less near to the haven. … Death is our friend, nevertheless we do not recognise it as such, beca…"

-François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe

Similar categories in Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• literature
• classics

"Now there was no sign of any foul weather, but when one wishes to do a thing . . . one finds no lack of reasons for the doing."

-Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

"So passed the seasons then, so they pass now, and so they will pass in time to come, while we come and go like leaves of the tree that fall and are soon forgotten."

-Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

"I had to pay a ransom of six hundred pounds in gold. All might have gone well even yet, only that, by ins and outs and crookedness of laws, I was shorn like a sheep that is clipped to the quick."

-Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

"Let us e'er be merry while we may, for man is but dust, and he hath but a span to live here till the worm getteth him, as our good gossip Swanthold sayeth; so let life be merry while it lasts, say I."

-Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

Similar categories in Robert L. Mack's The Vicar of Wakefield book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• literature
• classics

Similar categories in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: A Life book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• nonfiction

Similar categories in Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murad book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• literature
• classics

Similar categories in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• literature
• classics

Similar categories in Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• literature
• classics

Similar categories in William Shakespeare's Richard III book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• classics

Similar categories in Robert Andrew Parker's The Charterhouse of Parma book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• literature
• classics

"Mutluluğu uzaklarda aramaya kalkmanın ne anlamı var, işte burada, elimin altında!"

-Robert Andrew Parker, The Charterhouse of Parma

"Hay que confesar que había días en que la condesa no dirigía la palabra a nadie; era vista paseando bajo los altos castaños, hundida en sombríos ensueños; era demasiado inteligente para no sentir a v…"

-Robert Andrew Parker, The Charterhouse of Parma

"Men siden året 1635, da Milano-provinsen ble underlagt spanjolene, disse tause, mistenksomme, hovmodige herrer som alltid fryktet opprør, hadde livsgleden vært borte. Folk tok etter herskernes livsfo…"

-Robert Andrew Parker, The Charterhouse of Parma

"El lejano sonido de la campana de un pueblecito escondido bajo los árboles conmueve nuestra imaginación. Estos sones que las aguas transportan dulcificándolos adquieren un tinte de dulce melancolía y…"

-Robert Andrew Parker, The Charterhouse of Parma

Similar categories in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• literature
• classics

"While there’s death there’s hope"

-Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

"Cambiare tutto perché niente cambi."

-Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

"La eternidad amorosa dura pocos años."

-Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

"Nothing could be decently hated except eternity."

-Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

Similar categories in Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

Similar categories in Ian Morris's Why the West Rules—for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

Similar categories in Julia Child's French Provincial Cooking book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

Similar categories in Michael Hulse's The Rings of Saturn book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

Similar categories in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

Similar categories in William Shakespeare's King John book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

Similar categories in William Faulkner's The Unvanquished book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

Similar categories in Anthony Trollope's The Warden (Chronicles of Barsetshire, #1) book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• literature
• classics

"It is much less difficult for the sufferer to be generous than for the oppressor."

-Anthony Trollope, The Warden (Chronicles of Barsetshire, #1)

"... In what I do I may appear to be interfering with you, and I hope you will forgive me for doing so."

-Anthony Trollope, The Warden (Chronicles of Barsetshire, #1)

"He never quarreled with his wife, but he never talked to her;--he never had time to talk, he was so taken up with speaking."

-Anthony Trollope, The Warden (Chronicles of Barsetshire, #1)

"They say that faint heart never won fair lady. It is amazing to me how fair ladies are won, so faint are often men's hearts!"

-Anthony Trollope, The Warden (Chronicles of Barsetshire, #1)

Similar categories in Colin Barrett's Wild Houses book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

"What you are in, Dev, is a holding pattern, only you're not holding out for anything."

-Colin Barrett, Wild Houses

"All boys, all children, are capable of cruelty at the right juncture of opportunity and circumstance, but only a few become committed prodigies of sadism..."

-Colin Barrett, Wild Houses

"In the dream, exactly as he had in real life, he sensed the slow, inexorable approach of the shapeless, prospectless days to come, days when there would be no need to get out of bed or brush his teet…"

-Colin Barrett, Wild Houses

"He looked around the empty kitchen. A part of him wanted this of course. A part of him had always wanted this, to be alone, away from even the prospect of any demand upon him to talk, to interact, to…"

-Colin Barrett, Wild Houses

Similar categories in Judi Dench's Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• nonfiction

"There's magic to be mined in mistakes."

-Judi Dench, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent

"[Judi Dench, referring to departed colleagues] Where are all those people? Can't believe it. How can it happen? They were so alive and -- so present, so vital. That's why we have to love the now, hav…"

-Judi Dench, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent

Similar categories in Beverly Gage's G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• nonfiction

Similar categories in Claire Messud's This Strange Eventful History book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

"Family life, like playing chess, involved always thinking several steps ahead."

-Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History

"Literature... Now, that's a religion I can believe in. That is perhaps my God."

-Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History

"... she'd been a fool, enamored of a figment, had created the soul of a man who never existed -"

-Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History

"All-U-Can Hi-way 4-Sale Thru. This American English thrilled him - its energy, its freedom, its carelessness."

-Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History

Similar categories in Samantha Harvey's Orbital book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

"Maybe we're the new dinosaurs and need to watch out."

-Samantha Harvey, Orbital

"The past comes, the future, the past, the future. It's always now, it's never now."

-Samantha Harvey, Orbital

"Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters."

-Samantha Harvey, Orbital

"That's all this great human endeavor of space exploration really is, he thinks, an animal migration, a bid for survival. A looping song sent into the open, a territorial animal song."

-Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Similar categories in Hisham Matar's My Friends book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• literature

"A vast distance exists between a protester and his slogan; the entire history of politics exists in that gap."

-Hisham Matar, My Friends

"For a writer, exile is prison, a severing from the source, and so, courageous or not, he dies in front of our eyes."

-Hisham Matar, My Friends

"She was older and all the more beautiful, had the weary tiredness of one who, in surrendering to her life, was ennobled by it."

-Hisham Matar, My Friends

"I walked off feeling an emptiness well up inside me. It seemed, for all the emptiness that it was, a presence. It made me want to run away, dive deeper into myself, into that cold desolation, to the …"

-Hisham Matar, My Friends

Similar categories in Anne Michaels's Held book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• literature

"Who can say what happens when we are remembered?"

-Anne Michaels, Held

"Do we really need our own misery to teach us to be kind?"

-Anne Michaels, Held

"We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?"

-Anne Michaels, Held

"Would he know the moment of his death or would it be like night falling."

-Anne Michaels, Held

Similar categories in Diana B. Henriques's Taming the Street: The Old Guard, the New Deal, and FDR's Fight to Regulate American Capitalism book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• american
• nonfiction

Similar categories in David S. Tatel's Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• nonfiction

Similar categories in Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• classics
• american
• literature
• nonfiction
• criticism
• essays
• reference
• 21st century
• books about books
• literary criticism

"The subtlest element in this subtlest of novels is the call upon the reader’s own power of memory to match the persistence and intensity of the yearning that Anne Elliot is too stoical to express dir…"

-Harold Bloom, The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

"Dr. Samuel Johnson, who admired the novel with absolute conviction, famously remarked to Boswell, “Why, sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story…you would hang yourself….You must read him fo…"

-Harold Bloom, The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

Similar categories in Jeffrey Rosen's The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

• american
• nonfiction

"If you had to sum it up in one sentence, the classical definition of the pursuit of happiness meant being a lifelong learner, with a commitment to practicing the daily habits that lead to character i…"

-Jeffrey Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America

Similar categories in Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake book and Harold Bloom's The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread

"Charisma does not originate inside the person called "charismatic." It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist."

-Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake

"Plus, Lucien said, a lot of them had come from other social milieus and had tattoos from earlier lives, since people who change affinities are the same kinds of people who are attracted to the perman…"

-Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake

"My biker and these tramps, as people who organize their life around some subculture or other: People can sometimes pretend so thoroughly that they forget they are pretending. At which point, it could…"

-Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake

"I could sense him gathering a false hindsight that afternoon in the Place des Vosges, shaping a retrospective narrative, the thing a person tells himself about fate, about how everything had seemed f…"

-Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake