Mini classic review: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Controversial and compelling, In Cold Blood reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Truman Capote's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved. At the centre of his study are the amoral young killers …

Mini classic review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them …

Mini classic review: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A pilot stranded in the desert awakes one morning to see, standing before him, the most extraordinary little fellow. "Please," asks the stranger, "draw me a sheep." And the pilot realizes that when life's events are too difficult to understand, there is no choice but to succumb to their mysteries. He pulls out pencil and …

Mini classic review: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

To bitter, miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, Christmas is just another day. But all that changes when the ghost of his long-dead business partner appears, warning Scrooge to change his ways before it's too late. Then on Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by three different ghosts of Christmas, who show him his past, his present, and his future, …

Mini classic review: Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx

Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer.  Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because …

Mini classic review: Beowulf by Unknown

A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all.  Beowulf is a major epic of Anglo-Saxon literature, probably composed between the first half of the seventh century and the end of the first millennium. The …

Mini Classic Review: It by Stephen King

Welcome to Derry, Maine ... It’s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real ... They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success …

Mini Classic Review: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

The first part of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic adventure THE LORD OF THE RINGS In a sleepy village in the Shire, a young hobbit is entrusted with an immense task. He must make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ruling Ring of Power — the only thing that …

Mini Classic Review: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Scarlett O'Hara, the beautiful, spoiled daughter of a well-to-do Georgia plantation owner, must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of the poverty she finds herself in after Sherman's March to the Sea. Perhaps - I want the old days back again and they'll never come back, and I am haunted …

Mini Classic Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to …