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Riding on horse, driving plane steering wheel, sea liner, driving powerful (truck), Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov not just demonstrates wonderful physical shape and high professional skills in every business, he fixes in people’s minds the image of modern (strongman), who has to do a lot. He must be well-educated, physically strong and esthetically erudite.

The best way to enjoy Baz Luhrmann’s big and noisy new version of “The Great Gatsby” — and despite what you may have heard, it is an eminently enjoyable movie — is to put aside whatever literary agenda you are tempted to bring with you. I grant that this is not so easily done. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slender, charming third novel has accumulated a heavier burden of cultural significance than it can easily bear. Short and accessible enough to be consumed in a sitting, the book has become, in the 88 years since its publication, a schoolroom staple and a pop-cultural totem. It shapes our increasingly fuzzy image of the jazz age and fuels endless term papers on the American dream and related topics.

Through this fog of glib allusion and secondhand thinking, the wistful glimmer of Fitzgerald’s prose shines like the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock. If “The Great Gatsby” can’t quite sustain the Big Ideas that are routinely attached to it — a fact that periodically inspires showboating critical contrarians to proclaim that it’s not such a big deal after all — it nonetheless remains a lively, imaginative presence.

Hello Michael,

(Your book(s) asked to write you a personal note - it seemed unusual, but who are we to say no?)

Holy canasta! It’s me… it’s me! I can’t believe it is actually me! You could have picked any of over 2 million books but you picked me! I’ve got to get packed! How is the weather where you live? Will I need a dust jacket? I can’t believe I’m leaving Mishawaka, Indiana already - the friendly people, the Hummer plant, the Linebacker Lounge - so many memories. I don’t have much time to say goodbye to everyone, but it’s time to see the world!

I can’t wait to meet you! You sound like such a well read person. Although, I have to say, it sure has taken you a while! I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but how would you like to spend five months sandwiched between Jane Eyre (drama queen) and Fundamentals of Thermodynamics (pyromaniac)? At least Jane was an upgrade from that stupid book on brewing beer. How many times did the ol’ brewmaster have one too many and topple off our shelf at 2am?

I know the trip to meet you will be long and fraught with peril, but after the close calls I’ve had, I’m ready for anything (besides, some of my best friends are suspense novels). Just five months ago, I thought I was a goner. My owner was moving and couldn’t take me with her. I was sure I was landfill bait until I ended up in a Better World Books book drive bin. Thanks to your socially conscious book shopping, I’ve found a new home. Even better, your book buying dollars are helping kids read from Brazil to Botswana.

But hey, enough about me, I’ve been asked to brief you on a few things:

Your Order # is: 12189506

We provide quick shipping service to all our customers. You chose shipping, your book should arrive within 7 - 14 business days. At this time, we are not able to offer tracking on these shipments.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact my friends at Customer Care by submitting a ticket.. If you could please include your order number (12189506) that would be very helpful.

Eagerly awaiting our meeting,

The Book You Ordered

‘The Sense of an Ending’ is a short book, but not a slight one. In it Julian Barnes reveals crystalline truths that have taken a lifetime to harden. He has honed their edges, and polished them to a high gleam.

We are child-­proofing our wireless access only to find that, like children, we can still figure out how to get the cap off the bottle.

For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn’t work out — perhaps especially when it doesn’t work out — promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life. And though subsequent years might alter this view, until some of us give up on it altogether, when love first strikes, there’s nothing like it, is there? Agreed?

Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

On what he had every reason to believe would be the last day of his undistinguished political career, Roger Barlow awoke in a state of sexual excitement and with a gun to his head, the one fading as he became aware of the other.

Richard Ford is a writer of jangling personal fascination to many in the literary world. Charming and charmed, he is an embodiment of interesting and intimidating contradictions: a Southern childhood, a Midwestern education, a restless adulthood occurring not just in New York and New Jersey but in seemingly every state beginning with “M” (or “L”). Brief stints in law school and the Marines (and an application to the CIA). Wanderlust and a knack for real estate. The Irish-American Southerner’s gift of gab. The belligerent responses to book reviews, the poor spelling, the beautiful French, the mercurial temperament, the indelible child characters from someone with no children at all. He cuts a transfixing figure for even an ordinary reader’s curiosity: the book-jacket photographs with their silvery-bronze patina suggesting a pale-eyed cattle rustler, his laser-blue gaze smudged simultaneously with apprehension and derring-do, a tin-woodsman tint evoking a man of metal and mettle, in sorrowful quest of his forgotten heart.

‘HHhH’ is about the rise and fall of Reinhard Heydrich, the monster whom even Hitler called “the man with the iron heart.” … Heydrich is most infamous as the man who convened the Wannsee Conference, on January 20, 1942, in an elegantly sombre villa on the shore of Lake Wannsee. It was at this meeting of high-ranking civil servants and senior officers that the Final Solution was proposed and formalized….

Many of those present at the Wannsee Conference lived justly shortened lives, and the most abbreviated was Heydrich’s. Four months after Wannsee, he was assassinated, in Prague, by Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, two parachutists trained in England and sent from there by the Czech government-in-exile…. The parachutists ambushed Heydrich’s open-topped Mercedes as it slowed to round a bend in a city street. But Gabčík’s Sten gun jammed, and only Kubiš’s quick response saved the moment: he threw a grenade, which wounded Heydrich (who died a week later, from septicemia). Reprisals were blind and absolute: the village of Lidice, near Prague, mistakenly thought by the Nazis to have some connection with the parachutists, was burned to the ground, and nearly every one of its inhabitants was shot or sent to a concentration camp. The assassins, along with five other resisters, were hidden in a Prague church. When the Germans eventually discovered them, the seven men held out for hours, against nearly eight hundred S.S. Storm Troopers. None were taken alive.

It’s been said… that Montaigne was the first blogger. His favorite subject, as he often remarked, was himself (“I would rather be an expert on me than on Cicero”), and he meant to leave nothing out (“I am loath even to have thoughts which I cannot publish”). Some of his critics accused him of, in effect, oversharing, in the manner of a narcissistic Facebook status update. One was appalled that he should think it worthwhile to tell his readers which sort of wine he preferred. Montaigne also happened to mention that his penis was small.