Μάκβεθ
Ουίλλιαμ Σαίξπηρ, 1623
A brave man hears a promise that he will be king, and discovers how quickly the wish becomes the plan. Betrayal, and the restlessness comes from within. The speech that will never leave your head.
Books about ambition
Ambition in these books is rarely a straight line: it is a promise whispered to a soldier, a party thrown for one person, a scientist who makes life and then cannot look at it. You might start with «Μάκβεθ» or The Great Gatsby, where wanting something turns out to cost more than the wanter expected.
A page that shows it
A promise is made whose origin you cannot name, and it hooks your body before your mind agrees.
Ω! η προειδοποίησις αυτή η παρά φύσινδεν ημπορεί να είν’ κακή, ούτε καλή να είναι.Κακή αν είναι, διατί μ’ αλήθειαν αρχίζει,κ’ ευθύς ευθύς ενέχυρον του μέλλοντος μου δίδει;Έγεινα Θάνης Καουδώρ· ιδού! — Καλή αν είναι,ω, διατί ο πειρασμός αυτός με κυριεύει,που μου ορθόνει τα μαλλιά της φρίκης του η σκέψις,και κάμνει ώστε η καρδιά κτυπά εις τα πλευρά μου;σαν να θα ’βγή; Καλλίτερα ο φόβος του παρόντος,παρά διανοήματα απαίσια! Ο νους μου,με μόνον τώρα μέσα του το φάντασμα του φόνου,πόσον πολύ κλονίζεται, ώστ’ η ενέργειά του,παρέλυσε κ’ η σκέψις μου ’ς τ’ ανύπαρκτα πλανάται! -
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Macbeth
William Shakespeare, 1606
A soldier is greeted by three strangers who promise him a crown, and we watch, line by line, how quickly a decent man can argue himself into murder.
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Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir, 2021
A science teacher wakes on a spacecraft with no memory of how he got there and a solar system to save.
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The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
A short, dazzling novel about a summer of parties on Long Island and the man who throws them for one reason. Every sentence is built to be reread, and the ending is hard to shake.
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Μαθήματα χημείας
Bonnie Garmus, 2022
A chemist with a fierce mind and no patience for being underestimated becomes the unlikely star of a 1960s cooking show, and refuses to shrink.
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Το κάστρο της Θυραμιάς
Ερη Ριτσου, 2008
A girl nicknamed Antelope is sent into service in a grand house, and learns what it costs to want a better life. A warm, sharp-eyed novel about class, shame and appetite.
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Julius Caesar
William Shakespeare, 1599
Power, friendship, and the arguments clever men use to justify what they want: Shakespeare's Rome is a room full of people talking themselves into disaster.
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Frankenstein
Mary Shelley, 1818
A young scientist makes life and then cannot face what he has made. Told in nested voices, it asks who owes what to whom, and why ambition so often ends in solitude.
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Paradise Lost
John Milton, 1667
A blind poet turns the fall of Adam and Eve into an epic of free will, ambition, and married love, and gives the devil its most persuasive voice.
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Lessons in Chemistry
Bonnie Garmus, 2022
A 1960s chemist is pushed out of the lab, becomes an unlikely television cook, and refuses — flatly, unsmilingly — to be diminished.
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Ο αρχοντοχωριάτης
Μολιέρος, 1670
Monsieur Jourdain wants nothing more than to be a gentleman. He hires tutors in music, dancing, philosophy and fencing — and every lesson proves the opposite. A comedy about the gap between wanting to rise and the small matter of knowing how.
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Ανάλυση, τόμ. 1
Jon Rogawski, 2007
A calculus textbook, not a literary one: its best pages are small, self-contained curiosities about numbers, notation and the people who fixed them.
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Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin, 1791
A Boston printer's son explains how he taught himself to write, argue and get things done, with a candor and self-mockery rare in memoirs of his era.
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Great Expectations
Charles Dickens, 1861
A blacksmith's orphan is made rich by a stranger, and finds out what money does to love, friendship and memory.
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November 9
Colleen Hoover, 2015
A scarred former teen actress and a stranger who poses as her boyfriend make a pact to meet every year on the same date.
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Daisy Jones & The Six
Taylor Jenkins Reid, 2019
A rock band's rise, told as an oral history by everyone who lived it—and the singer at the center no one can agree on.
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Short Fiction
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920
Fitzgerald's short stories are where he tried everything — jazz-age comedy, a man born old, first love, a girl who bobs her hair — in twenty pages or less.
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A Man in Full
Tom Wolfe, 1998
Atlanta in the 1990s: a debt-laden developer, a Black lawyer nicknamed Too White, and a city where status is everything. Wolfe's comic anatomy of money, race and self-invention.
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Ἡ Τρίχα
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1830
Ο εθνικός ποιητής γράφει σάτιρα: ένας ζυγιαστής ζυγίζει ανθρώπους, πουλιά και πολιτικούς, κι ένα ποίημα βγαίνει από ένα όνειρο και μια τρίχα.
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Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848
A penniless governess with endless nerve climbs through Regency society, and the narrator cheerfully informs you that everyone is a fool — including you.
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
J. K. Rowling, 1997
A boy who has never been loved learns he is a wizard, enters a castle school of moving staircases, and finds the first friends who choose him.
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In Search of Excellence
Thomas J. Peters, 1982
A field guide to why the best-run companies obsess over values as much as strategy—still useful for anyone building a team, a brand, or a career.
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The Song of the Lark
Willa Cather, 1915
A Colorado minister's daughter with a voice too big for her town spends twenty years getting out — and finding out what the leaving costs.
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Yesteryear
Caro Claire Burke, 2026
A sharp, funny novel about the performances women give—at church, online, in marriage—and what it costs to keep the smile in place.
A taste of the feed
What she must empty out of herself before she can do it.
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood; Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry “Hold, hold!”
Macbeth · William Shakespeare
A knock at the door, twelve light-years from home.
Knock-knock-knock No, that’s not creepy at all. Being in a spaceship twelve light-years from home and having someone knock on the door is totally normal.
Project Hail Mary · Andy Weir
What if a child's gift is the one nobody knows how to name?
Όμως εκείνη άρχισε να διαβάζει από τριών ετών και τώρα, κοντεύοντας τα έξι πια, είχε τελειώσει σχεδόν όλον τον Ντίκενς. Τέτοιο παιδί ήταν η Μάντλεν, ένα παιδί που μπορούσε να σιγομουρμουρίσει κάποιο κονσέρτο του Μπαχ αλλά δεν μπορούσε να δέσει τα κορδόνια του, που μπορούσε να εξηγήσει την περιστροφή της Γης αλλά μπερδευόταν στην τρίλιζα. Και αυτό ήταν το πρόβλημα. Διότι, ενώ οι μουσι κές ιδιοφυΐες πάντα αναγνωρίζονται, δεν ισχύει το ίδιο για τους πρώιμους αναγνώστες. Κάτι που συμβαίνει επειδή οι πρώιμοι αναγνώστες είναι απλώς καλοί σε κάτι στο οποίο τελικά θα γίνουν καλοί και όλοι οι υπόλοιποι. Συνεπώς η πρωτιά τους δεν θεωρείται ξεχωριστή, απλώς ενοχλητική. Και αυτό η Μάντλεν το αντιλαμβανόταν.
Μαθήματα χημείας · Bonnie Garmus
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