en-US Tue, 09 Feb 2021 08:59:15 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 8663600 288 Suzanne Collins 0545317800 Ashley 5 3.95 2010
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2010
rating: 5
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date added: 2021/02/09
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Fantastic ending to a great series!
]]> 11910983 The secret behind France's astonishingly well-behaved children. When American journalist Pamela Druckerman has a baby in Paris, she doesn't aspire to become a "French parent." French parenting isn't a known thing, like French fashion or French cheese. Even French parents themselves insist they aren't doing anything special.

Yet, the French children Druckerman knows sleep through the night at two or three months old while those of her American friends take a year or more. French kids eat well-rounded meals that are more likely to include braised leeks than chicken nuggets. And while her American friends spend their visits resolving spats between their kids, her French friends sip coffee while the kids play.

Motherhood itself is a whole different experience in France. There's no role model, as there is in America, for the harried new mom with no life of her own. French mothers assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children and that there's no need to feel guilty about this. They have an easy, calm authority with their kids that Druckerman can only envy.

Of course, French parenting wouldn't be worth talking about if it produced robotic, joyless children. In fact, French kids are just as boisterous, curious, and creative as Americans. They're just far better behaved and more in command of themselves. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are- by design-toddling around and discovering the world at their own pace.

With a notebook stashed in her diaper bag, Druckerman-a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal-sets out to learn the secrets to raising a society of good little sleepers, gourmet eaters, and reasonably relaxed parents. She discovers that French parents are extremely strict about some things and strikingly permissive about others. And she realizes that to be a different kind of parent, you don't just need a different parenting philosophy. You need a very different view of what a child actually is.

While finding her own firm non, Druckerman discovers that children-including her own-are capable of feats she'd never imagined.]]> 284 Pamela Druckerman 1594203334 Ashley 5 3.98 2012
author: Pamela Druckerman
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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date added: 2017/03/13
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]]> 175343
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie comes a novel that explores unexpected connections and the idea that heaven is more than a place: it's an answer.]]> 196 Mitch Albom Ashley 0 to-read 3.75 2003
author: Mitch Albom
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2016/08/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 10428902 352 Ransom Riggs Ashley 0 to-read 3.96 2011
author: Ransom Riggs
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/05/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6984466 513 Stephenie Meyer 0316007455 Ashley 4 3.83 2005
author: Stephenie Meyer
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/08/15
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]]> 17383921 Thousands of books have examined the effects of parents on their children. Award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior now asks: what are the effects of children on their parents?

"All Joy and No Fun is an indispensable map for a journey that most of us take without one. Brilliant, funny, and brimming with insight, this is an important book that every parent should read, and then read again. Jennifer Senior is surely one of the best writers on the planet."-Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness

In All Joy and No Fun, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior isolates and analyzes the many ways in which children reshape their parents' lives, whether it's their marriages, their jobs, their habits, their hobbies, their friendships, or their internal senses of self. She argues that changes in the last half century have radically altered the roles of today's mothers and fathers, making their mandates at once more complex and far less clear. Recruiting from a wide variety of sources-in history, sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology-she dissects both the timeless strains of parenting and the ones that are brand new, and then brings her research to life in the homes of ordinary parents around the country. The result is an unforgettable series of family portraits, starting with parents of young children and progressing to parents of teens. Through lively and accessible storytelling, Senior follows these mothers and fathers as they wrestle with some of parenthood's deepest vexations-and luxuriate in some of its finest rewards.

Meticulously researched yet imbued with emotional intelligence, All Joy and No Fun makes us reconsider some of our culture's most basic beliefs about parenthood, all while illuminating the profound ways children deepen and add purpose to our lives. By focusing on parenthood, rather than parenting, the book is original and essential reading for mothers and fathers of today-and tomorrow.]]> 320 Jennifer Senior 0062072226 Ashley 0 to-read 3.88 2014
author: Jennifer Senior
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2014/06/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 29488
He met Candy amid a lush Sydney summer. Gorgeous, sexy, free-spirited Candy. They fell in love fast, lots of laughter and lust, the days melting warmly into each other. He never planned to give her a habit. But she wanted a taste. And wasn't love, after all, about sharing lives? Candy had a bit of money and in the beginning, everything was beautiful. Heady, heroin-hazed days, the world open and inviting. But when the money ran out, the craving remained, and the days ceased their luxurious stretch.

But there was still love. Only now, it was a threesome. Heroin had its own demands, its own timetable, and thoughts of nabbing the next fix hurled them into each day. Then, when desperation sets in, Candy will stop at nothing to secure a blast, as she and her lover become hostage to the nightmarish world of addiction.

Painful, sexy, tender, and charged with dark humor, Candy provocatively charts the daily rituals of two lovers maintaining a long-term junk habit. Told in stunningly vivid prose and set against the backdrop of suburban and urban Australia, Candy is both an electrifying and frightening glimpse of contemporary life and love.]]> 304 Luke Davies 0345423879 Ashley 0 to-read 4.13 1997
author: Luke Davies
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2014/06/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 96647 New York Times bestseller by one of rock's most provocative figures Scar Tissue is Anthony Kiedis's searingly honest memoir of a life spent in the fast lane.

In 1983, four self-described "knuckleheads" burst out of the mosh-pitted mosaic of the neo-punk rock scene in L.A. with their own unique brand of cosmic hardcore mayhem funk. Over twenty years later, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, against all odds, have become one of the most successful bands in the world. Though the band has gone through many incarnations, Anthony Kiedis, the group's lyricist and dynamic lead singer, has been there for the whole roller-coaster ride. Whether he's recollecting the influence of the beautiful, strong women who have been his muses, or retracing a journey that has included appearances as diverse as a performance before half a million people at Woodstock or an audience of one at the humble compound of the exiled Dalai Lama, Kiedis shares a compelling story about the price of success and excess.

Scar Tissue is a story of dedication and debauchery, of intrigue and integrity, of recklessness and redemption--a story that could only have come out of the world of rock.]]> 465 Anthony Kiedis 1401307450 Ashley 0 to-read 4.11 2004
author: Anthony Kiedis
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2014/06/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 1883838 413 Nikki Sixx 1847371663 Ashley 0 to-read 4.12 2007
author: Nikki Sixx
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2014/06/10
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]]> 764347 Connor, Risa, and Lev are running for their lives.

The Second Civil War was fought over reproductive rights. The chilling resolution: Life is inviolable from the moment of conception until age thirteen. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, however, parents can have their child "unwound," whereby all of the child's organs are transplanted into different donors, so life doesn't technically end. Connor is too difficult for his parents to control. Risa, a ward of the state, is not enough to be kept alive. And Lev is a tithe, a child conceived and raised to be unwound. Together, they may have a chance to escape and to survive.]]> 337 Neal Shusterman Ashley 3 4.17 2007
author: Neal Shusterman
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2007
rating: 3
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date added: 2014/06/05
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]]> 7655158 The Last Living Slut is the salaciously literary and sexually liberated account of one young woman’s transition from traditionally-raised Iranian to rock and roll groupie for Guns N Roses, Motley Crew, and many others. Paired with a powerful introduction by New York Times bestselling authors Neil Strauss and Anthony Bozza, Roxana Shirazi’s The Last Living Slut is a passionate tale of jilted love, brutal revenge, and backstage encounters that make Pamela Des Barres’s I’m With The Band read like the diary of a nun.]]> 336 Roxana Shirazi 0061931357 Ashley 1 3.34 2010
author: Roxana Shirazi
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2010
rating: 1
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date added: 2014/06/02
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review:
I went into this book with high hopes. Certainly a well-educated woman that publicly speaks on the topic of feminism at universities throughout Europe wouldn't fulfill every stereotype, right? What a let down. After reading this, I truly fill sorry for Roxana Shirazi and her warped sense of love and friendship. I hope she one day gets the help she so desperately needs.
]]> 410619 379 Frances Farmer 0440190681 Ashley 4 4.12 1972
author: Frances Farmer
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1972
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/06/02
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]]> 207035 (back cover)]]> 546 Audrey Niffenegger Ashley 0 3.98 2003
author: Audrey Niffenegger
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/07/31
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]]> 10357575 The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.�� A world that bears a question.�� Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s �� 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.]]> 944 Haruki Murakami 0307593312 Ashley 0 to-read 3.94 2009
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/06/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 132900
No wonder pediatricians across the country are praising him and thousands of Los Angeles parents, from working moms to superstars like Madonna and Pierce Brosnan, have turned to him to learn the secrets for making babies happy.

Never again will parents have to stand by helpless and frazzled while their poor baby cries and cries. Dr. Karp has found there is a remedy for colic. “I share with parents techniques known only to the most gifted baby soothers throughout history …and I explain exactly how they work.��

In an innovative and thought-provoking reevaluation of early infancy, Dr. Karp blends modern science and ancient wisdom to prove that newborns are not fully ready for the world when they are born. Through his research and experience, he has developed four basic principles that are crucial for understanding babies as well as improving their sleep and soothing their senses. ·The Missing Fourth Trimester: as odd as it may sound, one of the main reasons babies cry is because they are born three months too soon.

·The Calming Reflex: the automatic reset switch to stop crying of any baby in the first few months of life.

·The 5 “S’s��: the simple steps (swaddling, side/stomach position, shushing, swinging and sucking) that trigger the calming reflex. For centuries, parents have tried these methods only to fail because, as with a knee reflex, the calming reflex only works when it is triggered in precisely the right way. Unlike other books that merely list these techniques Dr. Karp teaches parents exactly how to do them, to guide cranky infants to calm and easy babies to serenity in minutes…and help them sleep longer too.

·The Cuddle Cure: the perfect mix the 5 “S’s�� that can soothe even the most colicky of infants.

In the book, Dr. Karp also explains:

What is colic?

Why do most babies get much more upset in the evening?

How can a parent calm a baby--in mere minutes?

Can babies be spoiled?

When should a parent of a crying baby call the doctor?

How can a parent get their baby to sleep a few hours longer?

Even the most loving moms and dads sometimes feel pushed to the breaking point by their infant’s persistent cries. Coming to the rescue, however, Dr. Karp places in the hands of parents, grandparents, and all childcare givers the tools they need to be able to calm their babies almost as easily as…turning off a light.]]> 336 Harvey Karp 0553588729 Ashley 4 3.86 2002
author: Harvey Karp
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2002
rating: 4
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date added: 2013/05/12
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My baby hasn't arrived yet, so I guess time will tell if these techniques actually work. The advice given does seem to make sense and it certainly wasn't as dry of a read as other baby books I've read in the last few months.
]]> 851678 264 Carole Radziwill 0743276949 Ashley 5 4.16 2005
author: Carole Radziwill
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2005
rating: 5
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date added: 2013/05/12
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A sad and beautiful story, incredibly well written.
]]> 10374 Lord Jim.

Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following. Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.]]> 400 Haruki Murakami Ashley 0 to-read 4.14 1985
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/11/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 11297
A magnificent blending of the music, the mood, and the ethos that was the sixties with the story of one college student's romantic coming of age, Norwegian Wood brilliantly recaptures a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.]]> 296 Haruki Murakami 0375704027 Ashley 0 to-read 4.01 1987
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/11/07
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]]> 4929 Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle—yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.]]> 467 Haruki Murakami 1400079276 Ashley 0 to-read 4.14 2002
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/11/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6493208
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored�� ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia �� a land of wooden quarters for enslaved people, faith healings, and voodoo �� to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality�� until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family �� past and present �� is inextricably connected to the history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.]]> 370 Rebecca Skloot 1400052173 Ashley 5 4.12 2010
author: Rebecca Skloot
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2010
rating: 5
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date added: 2012/11/07
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]]> 53101
The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions.

Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it."

Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.]]> 182 Djuna Barnes 0811216713 Ashley 0 to-read 3.66 1936
author: Djuna Barnes
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1936
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/08/14
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]]> 765172 Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.
]]> 116 Jean Toomer 0871401517 Ashley 0 to-read 3.86 1923
author: Jean Toomer
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1923
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/08/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 361400
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along with Callie's failure to develop--leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly a hermaphrodite.

Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker .]]> 529 Jeffrey Eugenides 0374199698 Ashley 5 4.10 2002
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2012/07/21
date added: 2012/07/21
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]]> 6749
Mister squishy --
The soul is not a smithy --
Incarnations of burned children --
Another pioneer --
Good old neon --
Philosophy and the mirror of nature --
Oblivion --
The suffering channel]]> 329 David Foster Wallace 0316010766 Ashley 0 to-read 4.09 2004
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/07/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 152808 A sinisterly funny modern-day Through the Looking Glass that begins with cyanide poisoning and ends in strawberry ice cream.

"My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention.

A few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life, and the importance of literature.]]> 117 César Aira 0811216314 Ashley 0 to-read 3.76 1993
author: César Aira
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/07/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 24481 210 John Hawkes 0811216446 Ashley 0 to-read 3.85 1964
author: John Hawkes
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1964
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/07/18
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]]> 1247446 Jeffrey Eugenides, from the introduction to My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead

All proceeds from My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead will go directly to fund the free youth writing programs offered by 826 Chicago. 826 Chicago is part of the network of seven writing centers across the United States affiliated with 826 National, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.]]> 587 Jeffrey Eugenides 0061240370 Ashley 0 to-read 3.92 2009
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/07/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 10956 250 Jeffrey Eugenides 0747560595 Ashley 0 to-read 3.81 1993
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/07/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 12953517 From the best-selling author of The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White, a daring reimagining of one of the most tumultuous moments in our nation’s past
��
Stephen L. Carter’s thrilling new novel takes as its starting point an alternate history: President Abraham Lincoln survives the assassination attempt at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. Two years later he is charged with overstepping his constitutional authority, both during and after the Civil War, and faces an impeachment trial . . .

Twenty-one-year-old Abigail Canner is a young black woman with a degree from Oberlin, a letter of employment from the law firm that has undertaken Lincoln’s defense, and the iron-strong conviction, learned from her late mother, that “whatever limitations society might place on ordinary negroes, they would never apply to her.�� And so Abigail embarks on a life that defies the norms of every stratum of Washington society: working side by side with a white clerk, meeting the great and powerful of the nation, including the president himself.�� But when Lincoln’s lead counsel is found brutally murdered on the eve of the trial, Abigail is plunged into a treacherous web of intrigue and conspiracy reaching the highest levels of the divided government.

Here is a vividly imagined work of historical fiction that captures the emotional tenor of post–Civil War America, a brilliantly realized courtroom drama that explores the always contentious question of the nature of presidential authority, and a galvanizing story of political suspense.]]> 516 Stephen L. Carter 030727263X Ashley 0 to-read 3.68 2012
author: Stephen L. Carter
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/07/13
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]]> 6892870
Lisbeth Salander - the heart of Larsson's two previous novels - lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She's fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she'll be taken back to Stockholm to stand trial for three murders. With the help of her friend, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, she will not only have to prove her innocence, but also identify and denounce those in authority who have allowed the vulnerable, like herself, to suffer abuse and violence. And, on her own, she will plot revenge - against the man who tried to kill her, and the corrupt government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life.

Once upon a time, she was a victim. Now Salander is fighting back.

~from the jacket]]> 566 Stieg Larsson 030726999X Ashley 0 to-read 4.23 2007
author: Stieg Larsson
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/06/05
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]]> 5060378 Millenium publisher Mikael Blomkvist has made his reputation exposing corrupt establishment figures. So when a young journalist approaches him with an investigation into sex trafficking, Blomkvist cannot resist waging war on the powerful figures who control this lucrative industry.

The Murder
When a young couple is found dead in their Stockholm apartment, it's a straightforward job for Inspector Bublanski and his team. The killer left the weapon at the scene - and the fingerprints on the gun point in only one direction.

The Girl Who Played with Fire
Ex-security analyst Lisbeth Salander is wanted for murder. Her history of unpredictable and vengeful behaviour makes her an official danger to society - but no-one can find her. The only way Salander can be reached is by computer. But she can break into almost any network she chooses...]]> 503 Stieg Larsson 0307269981 Ashley 4 4.25 2006
author: Stieg Larsson
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2006
rating: 4
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date added: 2012/06/05
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]]> 6818019 ��
Nujood Ali's childhood came to an abrupt end in 2008 when her father arranged for her to be married to a man three times her age. With harrowing directness, Nujood tells of abuse at her husband's hands and of her daring escape.��With the help of local advocates and the press, Nujood obtained her freedom—an extraordinary achievement in Yemen, where almost half of all girls are married under the legal age. Nujood's courageous defiance of both Yemeni customs and her own family has inspired other young girls in the Middle East to challenge their marriages.

Hers is an unforgettable story of tragedy, triumph, and courage.]]> 188 Nujood Ali 0307589676 Ashley 0 3.81 2009
author: Nujood Ali
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2012/02/01
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]]> 260439
First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700��titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the��series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date��translations by award-winning translators.]]> 246 Shirley Jackson 0140071083 Ashley 2 3.81 1959
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1959
rating: 2
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date added: 2011/09/18
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]]> 6948436
Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it so we will just say this:

This is the story of two women.

Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice.

Two years later, they meet again - the story starts there...

Once you have read it, you'll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.]]> 271 Chris Cleave 1416589643 Ashley 0 to-read 3.76 2008
author: Chris Cleave
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/09/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 12232938
So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her -- her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable tragedy and loss, The Lovely Bones succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even joy.]]> 372 Alice Sebold 0316166685 Ashley 4 3.87 2002
author: Alice Sebold
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2008/02/01
date added: 2011/08/09
shelves:
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]]> 11275
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.]]> 607 Haruki Murakami 0965341984 Ashley 4
I can't say much more without writing a review full of spoilers, but I will admit it's not for everyone. Still, I certainly enjoyed the ride.]]> 4.16 1994
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2011/03/07
shelves:
review:
I loved every second of this book, especially the the eclectic cast of characters (think anything by David Lynch or the fiji mermaid episode of the X-Files). It's difficult to create the perfect balance of creepiness, humor, and absolute strangeness, yet somehow Murakami effortlessly pulls it off.

I can't say much more without writing a review full of spoilers, but I will admit it's not for everyone. Still, I certainly enjoyed the ride.
]]> 4957350
At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.]]> 192 Paul Harding 1934137197 Ashley 0 3.41 2009
author: Paul Harding
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/02/04
shelves:
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]]> 3591262
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.
(front flap)]]> 560 Abraham Verghese 0375414495 Ashley 0 4.32 2009
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/01/03
shelves:
review:

]]> 7067799 --penguinrandomhouse.com]]> 544 Kathryn Stockett Ashley 3 4.40 2009
author: Kathryn Stockett
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2010/11/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 5602255 Hannah Tinti Ashley 2 3.79 2008
author: Hannah Tinti
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2010/10/15
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review:

]]> 14891 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness -- in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience.]]> 496 Betty Smith 0061120073 Ashley 0 to-read 4.29 1943
author: Betty Smith
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/09/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 5941033
Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.

Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.�� A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent�� (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.]]> 351 Colum McCann 1400063736 Ashley 0 to-read 3.95 2009
author: Colum McCann
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/09/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6288
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 there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,�� are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.]]> 241 Cormac McCarthy 0307265439 Ashley 3 3.99 2006
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2010/08/31
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]]> 3109 What should we have for dinner? For omnivore like ourselves, this simple question has always posed a dilemma. When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods on offer might shorten your life. Today, buffered by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.
The Omnivore's Dilemma is groundbreaking book, in which one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves?
To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.
The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Ultimately, this is a book as much about visionary solutions as it is about problems, and Pollan contends that, when it comes to food, doing the right thing often turns out to be the tastiest thing an eater can do. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.]]> 450 Michael Pollan 1594200823 Ashley 4 4.18 2006
author: Michael Pollan
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2006
rating: 4
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date added: 2010/08/23
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]]> 52397
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.

When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.]]> 345 Octavia E. Butler 0446675504 Ashley 0 to-read 4.21 1993
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/08/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 24770
But Tally's new friend Shay isn't sure she wants to become a pretty. When Shay runs away, Tally learns about a whole new side of the pretty world—and it isn't very pretty. The authorities offer Tally a choice: find her friend and turn her in, or never turn pretty at all. Tally's choice will change her world forever....]]> 425 Scott Westerfeld 0689865384 Ashley 0 to-read 3.85 2005
author: Scott Westerfeld
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/08/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 51606
This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome... but so is war.

Winner of the National Book Award.]]> 309 Dalton Trumbo 0806512814 Ashley 0 to-read 4.19 1939
author: Dalton Trumbo
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1939
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/08/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6944566
Golden Richards, husband to four wives, father to twenty-eight children, is having the mother of all midlife crises. His construction business is failing, his family has grown into an overpopulated mini-dukedom beset with insurrection and rivalry, and he is done in with grief: due to the accidental death of a daughter and the stillbirth of a son, he has come to doubt the capacity of his own heart. Brady Udall, one of our finest American fiction writers, tells a tragicomic story of a deeply faithful man who, crippled by grief and the demands of work and family, becomes entangled in an affair that threatens to destroy his family’s future. Like John Irving and Richard Yates, Udall creates characters that engage us to the fullest as they grapple with the nature of need, love, and belonging.

Beautifully written, keenly observed, and ultimately redemptive, The Lonely Polygamist is an unforgettable story of an American family—with its inevitable dysfunctionality, heartbreak, and comedy—pushed to its outer limits.]]> 602 Brady Udall 0393062627 Ashley 0 to-read 3.50 2010
author: Brady Udall
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/08/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 534255 I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.

At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect.]]> 236 Lucy Grealy 0060569662 Ashley 0 to-read 3.97 1994
author: Lucy Grealy
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/08/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 126859 0 Ann Patchett 0060855967 Ashley 0 to-read 3.77 2004
author: Ann Patchett
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/08/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 428350 One Perfect Day masterfully mixes investigative journalism and social commentary to explore the workings of the wedding industry an industry that claims to be worth $160 billion to the U.S. economy and which has every interest in ensuring that the American wedding becomes ever more lavish and complex. Taking us inside the workings of the wedding industry including the swelling ranks of professional event planners, department stores with their online registries, the retailers and manufacturers of bridal gowns, and the Walt Disney Company and its Fairy Tale Weddings program New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead skillfully holds the mirror up to the bride's deepest hopes and fears about her wedding day, revealing that for better or worse, the way we marry is who we are.]]> 256 Rebecca Mead 1594200882 Ashley 0 to-read 3.52 2007
author: Rebecca Mead
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/08/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 15957 352 Ann Patchett 1841150509 Ashley 0 to-read 3.81 1992
author: Ann Patchett
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/08/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 5826 318 Ann Patchett Ashley 3 3.93 2001
author: Ann Patchett
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2010/08/02
date added: 2010/08/02
shelves:
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]]> 256566 276 Jonathan Safran Foer 0060529709 Ashley 0 to-read 3.91 2002
author: Jonathan Safran Foer
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/07/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 7338070
Thus begins the story of Jennifer Mascia’s bizarre but strangely magical childhood. An only child, she revels in her parents�� intense love for her—and rides the highs and lows of their equally passionate arguments. They are a tight-knit band, never allowing many outsiders in. And then there are the oddities that Jenny notices only as she gets older: the fact that her father had two names before he went away—in public he was Frank, but at home her mother called him Johnny; the neat, hidden hole in the carpet where her parents keep all their cash. The family sees wild swings in wealth—one year they’re shopping for Chanel and Louis Vuitton at posh shopping centers in Los Angeles, the next they’re living in one room and subsisting on food stamps.
��
What have her parents done? What was the reason for her father’s incarceration so many years ago? When Jenny, at twenty-two, uncovers her father’s criminal record during an Internet search, still more questions are raised. By then he is dying of cancer, so she presses her mother for answers, eliciting the first in a series of reluctant admissions about her father’s criminal past. Before her mother dies, four years later, Jenny is made privy to one final, riveting confession, which sets her on a search for the truth her mother fought to conceal for so many years. As Jenny unravels her family’s dark secrets, she must confront the grisly legacy she has inherited and the hard truth that her parents are not—and have never been—who they claimed to be. In the face of unimaginable tragedy, Jenny will ultimately find an acceptance and understanding just as meaningful and powerful as her parents�� love.

In a memoir both raw and unwavering, Jennifer Mascia tells the amazing story of a life lived—unwittingly—with criminals. Full of great love and enormous loss, Never Tell Our Business to Strangers will captivate and enthrall, both with its unrelenting revelations and its honest, witty heart.
��]]> 400 Jennifer Mascia 0345505352 Ashley 0 to-read 2.93 2010
author: Jennifer Mascia
name: Ashley
average rating: 2.93
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/07/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6148028 Sparks are igniting.
Flames are spreading.
And the Capitol wants revenge.

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the Hunger Games. She and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark are miraculously still alive. Katniss should be relieved, happy even. After all, she has returned to her family and her longtime friend, Gale. Yet nothing is the way Katniss wishes it to be. Gale holds her at an icy distance. Peeta has turned his back on her completely. And there are whispers of a rebellion against the Capitol—a rebellion that Katniss and Peeta may have helped create.

Much to her shock, Katniss has fueled an unrest that she's afraid she cannot stop. And what scares her even more is that she's not entirely convinced she should try. As time draws near for Katniss and Peeta to visit the districts on the Capitol's cruel Victory Tour, the stakes are higher than ever. If they can't prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that they are lost in their love for each other, the consequences will be horrifying.

In Catching Fire, the second novel of the Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins continues the story of Katniss Everdeen, testing her more than ever before . . . and surprising readers at every turn.]]> 391 Suzanne Collins 0439023491 Ashley 4 4.34 2009
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2010/06/28
shelves:
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]]> 2767052
Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun. . . .

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.]]> 374 Suzanne Collins Ashley 5 4.34 2008
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2010/06/28
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]]> 76620 Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ISBN13 9780380395866 here.

Set in England's Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of very special creatures on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of friends, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society.]]> 478 Richard Adams 038039586X Ashley 0 4.08 1972
author: Richard Adams
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1972
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/05/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 5997693 In this groundbreaking work of investigative journalism by the author of the New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming, Michelle Goldberg exposes the global war on women's reproductive rights and its disastrous and unreported consequences for the future of global development

Women's rights are often treated as mere appendages to great questions of war, peace, poverty, and economic development. But as networks of religious fundamentalists, feminists, and bureaucrats struggle to remake sexual and childbearing norms worldwide, the battle to control women's bodies has become a high-stakes enterprise, with the United States often supporting the most reactionary forces.

In a work of incisive cultural analysis and deep reporting, Michelle Goldberg shows how the emancipation of women has become the key human rights struggle of the twenty-first century. The Means of Reproduction travels through four continents, examining issues such as abortion, female circumcision, and Asia's missing girls to show how the battle over women's bodies has been globalized and how, too often, the United States has joined sworn enemies such as Iran and Sudan in an axis of repression. Reporting with unique insight from both the rarefied realm of international policy and from individual women's lives, Goldberg elucidates the economic, demographic, and health consequences of women's oppression, which affect more than half the world's population.

As The Means of Reproduction reveals, the conflict between self-determination and patriarchal tradition has come to define pressing questions of global development. Empowering women is the key to retarding the progress of AIDS, curbing overpopulation, and helping the third world climb out of poverty, but attempts to improve women's status elicit fierce opposition from conservatives who see women's submission as key to their own national or religious identity.

From the anticommunist genesis of America's attempts to stem population growth in poor countries to the current worldwide attack on women's rights as a decadent Western imposition, Goldberg explores the interplay between the great issues of our time and the politics of sex and childbearing. Finally, The Means of Reproduction shows how women, strengthened by a solidarity that transcends borders, are fighting for freedom.]]> 272 Michelle Goldberg 1594202087 Ashley 0 4.01 2009
author: Michelle Goldberg
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/05/04
shelves:
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]]> 2429135
An international publishing sensation, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.]]> 480 Stieg Larsson 0670069019 Ashley 4 4.17 2005
author: Stieg Larsson
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2010/04/22
date added: 2010/04/22
shelves:
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]]> 53645 282 Ruth Reichl 0767903382 Ashley 3 4.08 1998
author: Ruth Reichl
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2010/03/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 6334 288 Kazuo Ishiguro 1400078776 Ashley 4 3.85 2005
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2010/01/14
shelves:
review:
Although this book ended up being much different than what I was expecting, I really enjoyed reading it. Ishiguro has once said that his works "bear(s) little resemblance to Japanese fiction" but as a reader I'd have to disagree. With most Japanese fiction, I'd say 9 times out of 10, I feel like as if the vast differences in cultures make the the stories not translate very well for an American audience and I generally end up feeling as though I'm "missing" something. I didn't feel that was the case with this book. Ishiguro did a great job combining the sensitivity valued in Western novels with the uniqueness & darkness found in the East..... something I consider to be a pretty impressive feat.
]]> 6202342
When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt, only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and Elspeth her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers--with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another.

The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery in London. They come to know the building's other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Marjike, Martin's devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including--perhaps--their aunt, who can't seem to leave her old apartment and life behind.

Niffenegger weaves a captivating story in Her Fearful Symmetry about love and identity, about secrets and sisterhood, and about the tenacity of life--even after death.]]> 406 Audrey Niffenegger 0224085611 Ashley 3
However, the last one hundred pages to the end of this book, where most of the characters end up making decisions that make absolutely zero sense considering the discoveries made about their relationships, really threw me for a loop and seemed very haphazard. This part of the book also lacked the imagery and description that made the fist part of the book so great.

In short, beautiful & fun book to read but the last past seemed rushed and unfinished. I enjoyed the beginning enough to read another book by Niffenegger.
]]> 3.27 2009
author: Audrey Niffenegger
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2010/01/03
date added: 2010/01/03
shelves:
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I really enjoyed readying this book. Niffenegger does a great job of using vivid imagery to create a story featuring interesting characters set in a fascinating "real life" city and setting. Choosing highland cemetery in London and mentioning several historical figures and moments at the beginning of the book somehow cemented the believability of the story and the characters (initially, anyway) while also adding to their eccentricities. Adding a supernatural twist to what initially appears to be a love story was a nice twist that sparked my interest. Niffeneggar also did a decent job of exploring the complicated relationship of twins.

However, the last one hundred pages to the end of this book, where most of the characters end up making decisions that make absolutely zero sense considering the discoveries made about their relationships, really threw me for a loop and seemed very haphazard. This part of the book also lacked the imagery and description that made the fist part of the book so great.

In short, beautiful & fun book to read but the last past seemed rushed and unfinished. I enjoyed the beginning enough to read another book by Niffenegger.

]]> 2071575
Slowly people start moving in to the house, filling it with noise, laughter, and with tears. As the house comes alive again, Nan finds her family and friends expanding. Her son comes home for the summer, and then an unexpected visitor turns all their lives upside down.

As she did so masterfully in her numerous NY Times bestselling novels, including Second Chance, Jane Green once again proves herself one of the preeminent writers of contemporary women's fiction.]]> 341 Jane Green 0670018856 Ashley 2 3.64 2008
author: Jane Green
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2009/12/30
date added: 2009/12/30
shelves:
review:

]]> 6171892 150 Bernard Beckett 0547225490 Ashley 4 3.89 2006
author: Bernard Beckett
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2009/12/30
date added: 2009/12/30
shelves:
review:

]]> 2562408
Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The Wild Trees , Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored.

The canopy voyagers are young—just college students when they start their quest—and they share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there’s nothing left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air.

The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called “fire caves.�� Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one’s death.

Preston’s account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists�� passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees�� the story of the fate of the world’s most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.]]> 295 Richard Preston 0812975596 Ashley 3 4.19 2007
author: Richard Preston
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/11/04
shelves:
review:

]]> 6393184 320 Rick Maydak 0980033969 Ashley 4 3.40 2009
author: Rick Maydak
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/09/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 2145681

When Augusten Burroughs was small, his father was a shadowy presence in his life: a form on the stairs, a cough from the basement, a silent figure smoking a cigarette in the dark. As Augusten grew older, something sinister within his father began to unfurl.�� Something dark and secretive that could not be named.��

Betrayal after shocking betrayal ensued, and Augusten’s childhood was over. The kind of father he wanted didn’t exist for him. This father was distant, aloof, uninterested��

And then the “games�� began.

With "A Wolf at the Table", Augusten Burroughs makes a quantum leap into untapped emotional terrain: the radical pendulum swing between love and hate, the unspeakably terrifying relationship between father and son. Told with scorching honesty and penetrating insight, it is a story for anyone who has ever longed for unconditional love from a parent. Though harrowing and brutal, "A Wolf at the Table" will ultimately leave you buoyed with the profound joy of simply being alive. It’s a memoir of stunning psychological cruelty and the redemptive power of hope.

��]]> 242 Augusten Burroughs 0312342020 Ashley 3 3.75 2008
author: Augusten Burroughs
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/09/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 126807
In his moments of lucidity, the gentle, likable Bobbie alludes to his earlier life as a successful photographer. Laurel finds it hard to believe that this destitute, unstable man could once have chronicled the lives of musicians and celebrities, but a box of photographs and negatives discovered among Bobbie's meager possessions after his death lends credence to his tale. How could such an accomplished man have fallen on such hard times? Becoming obsessed with uncovering Bobbie's past, Laurel studies his photographs, tracking down every lead they provide into the mystery of his life before homelessness -- including links to the rich neighborhoods of her own Long Island childhood and to the earlier world of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, with its larger-than-life characters, elusive desires, and haunting sorrows.

In a narrative of dazzling invention, literary ingenuity, and psychological complexity, Bohjalian engages issues of homelessness and mental illness by evoking the humanity that inhabits the core of both. At the same time, his tale is fast-paced and riveting -- The Double Bind combines the suspense of a thriller with the emotional depths of the most intimate drama. The breathtaking surprises of its final pages will leave readers stunned, overwhelmed by the poignancy of life's fleeting truths, as caught in Bobbie Crocker's photographs and in Laurel Estabrook's painful pursuit of Bobbie's past -- and her own.


Behind The Double Bind

While Bobbie Crocker, the photographer in The Double Bind, is fictitious, the photographs that appear in the book are real. They were taken by a man named Bob "Soupy" Campbell, who, as Chris Bohaljian explains in his Author's Note, "had gone from photographing luminaries from the 1950s and 1960s to winding up at a homeless shelter in northern Vermont."

Bohaljian's viewing of Campbell's work after the photographer's death provided an inspiration for The Double Bind. "We tend to stigmatize the homeless and blame them for their plight," Bohjalian writes.

"We are oblivious to the fact that most had lives as serious as our own before everything fell apart. The photographs in this book are a testimony to that reality."]]> 368 Chris Bohjalian 1400047463 Ashley 2
On a more positive note, I think I would had read The Great Gatsby earlier (you'll miss out on quite a bit if you don't) and began to read this book not knowing that it was a spin-off, I would have enjoyed it more. Although not incredibly gripping, it's still a page turner and has a nice twist at the end.

I'd recommend this to a friend as a vacation read while also warning them not to have incredibly high expectations.



]]> 3.64 2007
author: Chris Bohjalian
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2009/07/27
shelves:
review:
I would have given book a rating of 2.5 if that was an option. For me this book was average, but not great and definitely not what I saw expecting. It seemed like more of a "beach read" and I was assuming I'd get a bit more from a spin-off of an American classic. Even though I didn't feel The Great Gatsby lived up to the hype, I think anytime you following up any sort of iconic creation you better be prepared to really blow people away. I would have liked to have read something unique, maybe darker, more well-written, with more of an ability to stand on it's own. This book is completely ordinary.

On a more positive note, I think I would had read The Great Gatsby earlier (you'll miss out on quite a bit if you don't) and began to read this book not knowing that it was a spin-off, I would have enjoyed it more. Although not incredibly gripping, it's still a page turner and has a nice twist at the end.

I'd recommend this to a friend as a vacation read while also warning them not to have incredibly high expectations.




]]> 4671 The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald’s family and from his lifelong publisher.

This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author’s own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.]]> 180 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0743273567 Ashley 3 3.93 1925
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 3
read at: 2009/07/19
date added: 2009/07/19
shelves:
review:

]]> 6514 294 Sylvia Plath 0571268862 Ashley 3 4.05 1963
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1963
rating: 3
read at: 2009/06/08
date added: 2009/06/08
shelves:
review:

]]> 4588
The key belonged to his father, he's sure of that. But which of New York's 162 million locks does it open?

So begins a quest that takes Oskar - inventor, letter-writer and amateur detective - across New York's five boroughs and into the jumbled lives of friends, relatives, and complete strangers. He gets heavy boots, he gives himself little bruises and he inches ever nearer to the heart of a family mystery that stretches back fifty years. But will it take him any closer to, or further from, his lost father?]]> 326 Jonathan Safran Foer 0618711651 Ashley 4 3.98 2005
author: Jonathan Safran Foer
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/05/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 503248 In this heartfelt memoir from one of the youngest recipients of the transorbital lobotamy, Howard Dully shares the story of a painfully dysfunctional childhood, a misspent youth, his struggle to claim the life that was taken from him, and his redemption.

At twelve, Howard Dully was guilty of the same crimes as other boys his age: he was moody and messy, rambunctious with his brothers, contrary just to prove a point, and perpetually at odds with his parents. Yet somehow, this normal boy became one of the youngest people on whom Dr. Walter Freeman performed his barbaric transorbital—or ice pick—lobotomy.

Abandoned by his family within a year of the surgery, Howard spent his teen years in mental institutions, his twenties in jail, and his thirties in a bottle. It wasn’t until he was in his forties that Howard began to pull his life together. But even as he began to live the “normal�� life he had been denied, Howard struggled with one question: Why?

There were only three people who would know the truth: Freeman, the man who performed the procedure; Lou, his cold and demanding stepmother who brought Howard to the doctor’s attention; and his father, Rodney. Of the three, only Rodney, the man who hadn’t intervened on his son’s behalf, was still living. Time was running out. Stable and happy for the first time in decades, Howard began to search for answers.

Through his research, Howard met other lobotomy patients and their families, talked with one of Freeman’s sons about his father’s controversial life’s work, and confronted Rodney about his complicity. And, in the archive where the doctor’s files are stored, he finally came face to face with the truth. Revealing what happened to a child no one—not his father, not the medical community, not the state—was willing to protect, My Lobotomy exposes a shameful chapter in the history of the treatment of mental illness. Yet, ultimately, this is a powerful and moving chronicle of the life of one man.]]> 288 Howard Dully 0307381269 Ashley 4 3.73 2007
author: Howard Dully
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2009/04/06
date added: 2009/04/06
shelves:
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]]> 46190 224 Rob Sheffield 1400083028 Ashley 4 3.87 2007
author: Rob Sheffield
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/04/02
shelves:
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]]> 1489519
Jarvis Miller's artist husband has been in a coma for six years. And so, Jarvis has spent these years suspended between hope and grief, paralyzed with longing for a life and a marriage that are slipping away. But then, unexpectedly, Jarvis makes her first new friends in years when she meets the Kept Man three men whose lifestyles are funded by their successful wives, who gather once a week on laundry day. With their help, she reawakens to the city beyond her Brooklyn apartment, past the pitying eyes of her husband?s art dealer and his irresponsible best friend as her future begins to take on the irresistible tingles of possibility for the first time in almost a decade. When a shocking discovery casts a different light on her idealized marriage, she's propelled even further down a path that she would never have dared to imagine just months before. Tender, bold, and unabashed, The Kept Man is a compulsively readable novel about love and loss from one of our most dynamic new storytellers.]]> 304 Jami Attenberg 1594489521 Ashley 4 3.29 2007
author: Jami Attenberg
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2009/02/18
date added: 2009/02/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 11762 310 Don DeLillo 0140283307 Ashley 3
I'm anxious to see what everyone else in the South Charlotte Book Club has to say about this one.]]> 3.86 1985
author: Don DeLillo
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1985
rating: 3
read at: 2009/01/08
date added: 2009/01/08
shelves:
review:
I thought this novel was just okay. The eccentric characters and the way the book is written reminds me very much of "The Royal Tenenbaums" or "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", two movies which I absolutely love. As much as I enjoy this type of humor in a movie, I really like the books I read to have some sort of an emotional aspect that White Noise just didn't deliver. I'm not sure if it's do to being forcefed so much postmodern rhetoric as an art major in college, but I guess DeLillo just isn't one of my all time favorite authors.

I'm anxious to see what everyone else in the South Charlotte Book Club has to say about this one.
]]> 529626 The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...

Following the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century." This wild-spirited tale tells of a bitter strike that rages through a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers. Out of the Stamper family's rivalries and betrayals Ken Kesey has crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy.]]> 628 Ken Kesey 0140045295 Ashley 5 4.26 1964
author: Ken Kesey
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1964
rating: 5
read at: 2008/12/05
date added: 2008/12/05
shelves:
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]]> 2027150 No Wave is the first book to visually chronicle the collision of art and punk in the New York underground of 1976 to 1980. This in depth look at punk rock, new wave, experimental music, and the avant-garde art movement of the 70s and 80s focuses on the true architects of No Wave from James Chance to Lydia Lunch to Glenn Branca, as well as the luminaries that intersected the scene, such as David Byrne, Debbie Harry, Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, and Richard Hell.

This rarely documented scene was the creative stomping ground of young artists and filmmakers from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Jim Jarmusch as well as the musical genesis for the post-punk explosions of Sonic Youth and is here revealed for a new generation of fans and collectors.

Thurston Moore and Byron Coley have selected 150 unforgettable images, most of which have never been published previously, and compiled hundreds of hours of personal interviews to create an oral history of the movement, providing a never-seen-before exploration and celebration of No Wave.]]> 144 Thurston Moore 0810995433 Ashley 0 to-read 3.92 2008
author: Thurston Moore
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/10/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 19063 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still.

By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left behind there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordian-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.

But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.

In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

(Note: this title was not published as YA fiction)]]> 592 Markus Zusak Ashley 5 4.38 2005
author: Markus Zusak
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/10/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 45794
Veteran homicide detective Rocco Klein's passion for the job gave way long ago. His beat is a rough New Jersey neighborhood where the drug murders blur together, until the day Victor Dunham �� a twenty-year-old with a steady job and a clean record �� confesses to a shooting outside a fast-food joint. It doesn't take long for Rocco's attention to turn to Victor's brother, a street-corner crack dealer named Strike who seems a more likely suspect for the crime.

At once an intense mystery, and a revealing study of two men on opposite sides of an unwinnable war, Clockers is a stunningly well-rendered chronicle of modern life on the streets.]]> 608 Richard Price 0747562733 Ashley 4 4.09 1992
author: Richard Price
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2008/10/10
date added: 2008/10/10
shelves:
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]]> 4953 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an instant classic that will be read for decades to come.]]> 530 Dave Eggers 0375725784 Ashley 3 3.70 2000
author: Dave Eggers
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2008/10/10
date added: 2008/10/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 2874882 Life promises to be perfect for Dani. She has an almost-perfect boyfriend, Dave, a TV director who loves that Dani is "factory" - i.e., with no plastic surgery enhancements - and who always knows what's right for her career. At Flesh and Bone, she has an almost ideal job that lets her indulge her macabre forensic passions - even if the star's Restylane addiction forces Dani to do last-minute rewrites to delete her close-ups. She doesn't yet have the ideal figure, but a few more sessions at Barry's Boot Camp might fix that. And while that dream house in the Hollywood Hills eludes her, moving in seems just a matter of time - once Dave gets around to mentioning marriage.
But something isn't quite right with their relationship, and Dani - a wily and inventive Internet snoop - learns that Dave's real creative talents are (1) lying and (2) cheating on her. Soon she's plunged into the world of singledom, enduring a battalion of bad dates with men whose peccadilloes would drive a lesser woman to kill. More sleuthing leads Dani to discover the truth behind Dave's liaisons - and the motives of the Other Woman who caused her all this misery. Ultimately, our heroine is driven to a dramatic choice that is as shocking as it is sensible in the girl-eat-girl world of Hollywood.]]> 304 Jules Asner 1602860173 Ashley 3 2.70 2008
author: Jules Asner
name: Ashley
average rating: 2.70
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/09/09
shelves:
review:
I'm not an avid chick lit reader by any means, but when I saw this book on my bosses desk with Jules Asner (from E!) as the author I decided to give it a shot during my vacation. The book is definitely an entertaining beach read; if you go into it expecting only that you'll probably enjoy it. I guess no one in the South Charlotte Book club needs to feel embarrassed about read the Twilight Series (wink, wink).
]]> 347884
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

So begins the Pulitzer Prize winning memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.

Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.

Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.]]> 460 Frank McCourt 068487217X Ashley 0 to-read 3.96 1996
author: Frank McCourt
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/08/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 3985 639 Michael Chabon 0312282990 Ashley 3
I did think the character development and overall uniqueness of the story was fantastic. I also really enjoyed the ties to history and historical figures; coming across while reading continued to be a surprise. I think I would recommend this book to a friend, especially a friend with interest comic books or art (and a lot of time and a long attention span).]]> 4.18 2000
author: Michael Chabon
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/08/13
shelves:
review:
I thought the story was great, but this wasn't a book where I could read more than two small sections in one sitting. This book gets a bit wordy at times. The author tends to over-use (in my opinion) "lists" to make his point, which truly got on my nerves. To be honest, I was reading under a deadline in hopes of being finished by the book club meeting, so maybe I would have enjoyed it more if that wasn't the case.

I did think the character development and overall uniqueness of the story was fantastic. I also really enjoyed the ties to history and historical figures; coming across while reading continued to be a surprise. I think I would recommend this book to a friend, especially a friend with interest comic books or art (and a lot of time and a long attention span).
]]> 43641
Beautifully written, Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford.]]> 368 Sara Gruen 1565125606 Ashley 4 4.11 2006
author: Sara Gruen
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/06/13
shelves:
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]]> 2236763 You're twelve years old. It's the summer holiday. You're playing in the woods with your two best friends. Something happens. Something terrible. And the other two are never seen again.

Twenty years on, Rob Ryan - the child who came back - is a detective in the Dublin police force. He's changed his name. No one knows about his past. Even he has no memory of what happened that day.

Then, a little girl's body is found at the site of the old tragedy and Rob is drawn back into the mystery. For him and his DI partner, Cassie, every lead comes with its own sinister undercurrents. The victim's apparently normal family is hiding layers of secrets. Rob's own private enquiries are taking a toll on his mind. And every trail leads inexorably back...into the woods.]]> 596 Tana French 0340924764 Ashley 0 to-read 3.71 2007
author: Tana French
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/05/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218573 526 James K. Morrow 0060821809 Ashley 0 to-read 3.54 2005
author: James K. Morrow
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/05/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 2565549 The Romanov Bride follows the lives of two revolutionary souls, that of Grand Duchess Elisavyeta (or Ella), sister of the tsaritsa Aleksandra, and that of Pavel, a simple village man yearning for more.

The life of Grand Duchess Elisavyeta begins like a fairy tale - born a princess of Germany, she marries the Grand Duke Sergei of Russia and enters the most lavish and magnificent court in the world, that of the mighty Romanovs, where she is renowned for her sumptuous fashion, jewels, and beauty, not to mention her kind heart. Her husband, however, possesses no such grace, and he rules Moscow as he does his wife, with a cold, hard fist.

For Pavel and his bride, though, living in Sankt Peterburg means sharing a crowded cellar with other families, and being barely able to afford bread. Nevertheless, they are full of optimism, for their grandparents were serfs and this young couple is the first to leave the countryside to seek a better existence.

However, after an explosive confrontation between peaceful demonstrators and tsarist soldiers, the lives of Ella and Pavel take two very different turns, but the fire of revolutionary Russia eventually links their fates forever.

Robert Alexander once again masterfully combines the power of true history and riveting storytelling to bring this fascinating and legendary period to life.]]> 306 Robert Alexander 0670018813 Ashley 0 to-read 3.56 2008
author: Robert Alexander
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/05/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 7445 THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family.

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.

The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.]]> 288 Jeannette Walls 074324754X Ashley 0 to-read 4.32 2005
author: Jeannette Walls
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/05/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 9328
The House of the Spirits is an enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.]]> 448 Isabel Allende 0553383809 Ashley 0 to-read 4.26 1982
author: Isabel Allende
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/05/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 374147
In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction—at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful—and completely unforgettable.]]> 428 Arthur Golden 0679781587 Ashley 0 to-read 4.08 1997
author: Arthur Golden
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/05/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 28756 288 Chip Kidd 0060507403 Ashley 4 3.75 2001
author: Chip Kidd
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/05/12
shelves:
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]]> 97782
The characters in Then We Came To The End cope with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, secret romance, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. By day they compete for the best office furniture left behind and try to make sense of the mysterious pro-bono ad campaign that is their only remaining "work."]]> 387 Joshua Ferris 0316016381 Ashley 2 3.47 2007
author: Joshua Ferris
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2008/05/12
shelves:
review:
If this book wasn't the selection for the book club, I doubt I would have finished reading it (which is saying quite a bit; I hate not finishing books!). I only truly enjoyed reading one of the chapters; the rest I felt as if I was waiting for the plot to pick-up.
]]> 1379961 The New Yorker) novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks follows a rare manuscript through centuries of exile and war.
Inspired by a true story, "People of the Book" is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author.
Called "a tour de force" by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain.

When it falls to Australian rare book expert Hanna Heath to conserve this priceless work, the tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—a butterfly wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock the book’s deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics.
]]> 372 Geraldine Brooks 067001821X Ashley 0 to-read 4.02 2008
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/05/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 10441 401 Kim Edwards 0143037145 Ashley 0 to-read 3.70 2005
author: Kim Edwards
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/05/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 153025
But what UPS delivers to his door in a black heart-shaped box is no imaginary or metaphorical ghost, it's the real thing. And suddenly the suit's previous owner is everywhere - behind the bedroom door... seated in Jude's restored vintage Mustang... staring out from his widescreen TV - dangling a gleaming razor blade on a chain from one hand...]]> 376 Joe Hill 0061147931 Ashley 3 3.85 2007
author: Joe Hill
name: Ashley
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/05/09
shelves:
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]]> 874 324 Khaled Hosseini 0747588945 Ashley 4 4.23 2003
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/05/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 128029
With the passing of time comes Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the streets of Kabul loud with the sound of gunfire and bombs, life a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear, the women's endurance tested beyond their worst imaginings. Yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways, lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism. In the end it is love that triumphs over death and destruction.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a portrait of a wounded country and a story of family and friendship, of an unforgiving time, an unlikely bond, and an indestructible love.]]> 372 Khaled Hosseini 1594489505 Ashley 5 4.44 2007
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2007
rating: 5
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date added: 2008/05/07
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]]> 11588 497 Stephen King 0450040186 Ashley 5 4.28 1977
author: Stephen King
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1977
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/05/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 149267 For hundreds of thousands of fans who read The Stand in its original version and wanted more, this new edition is Stephen King's gift. And those who are listening to The Stand for the first time will discover a triumphant and eerily plausible work of the imagination that takes on the issues that will determine our survival.]]> 1152 Stephen King Ashley 5 4.35 1978
author: Stephen King
name: Ashley
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1978
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/05/07
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review:
Loved this book. Hated for it to end!
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