Quinn's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 20 Jul 2023 04:31:46 -0700 60 Quinn's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl]]> 35838277 354 Andrea Lawlor 0986086991 Quinn 0 3.88 2017 Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
author: Andrea Lawlor
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/20
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]]> <![CDATA[The Child and the River (New York Review Books Classics)]]> 114721149
The Child and the River tells a simple but haunting tale. Pascalet, a boy growing up on a farm in the south of France, is permitted by his parents to play wherever he likes—only never by the river. Prohibition turns into Pascalet dreams of nothing so much as heading down to the river, and one day, with his parents away, he does. Wandering along the bank, intoxicated with newfound freedom, he falls asleep in a rowboat and wakes to find himself caught in rapids and run aground on an island where a band of Gypsies has pitched camp together with their trained bear. Hiding in the underbrush, Pascalet observes that the group includes a boy his age, who, after receiving a whipping, has been left tied to a post. This is Gatzo, and as soon as night falls, Pascalet sets him loose. The boys escape in a boat and spend an idyllic week on the river. But then the mysterious “puppeteer of souls� arrives, bringing their adventure to an end, and Pascalet must go back home to face the music. Has he seen the last of his new friend?

Long hailed as a sort of French Huckleberry Finn , The Child and the River is, as Henri Bosco himself once wrote in a letter to a friend, “a novel very good, I think, for children, adolescents, and poets.� A beguiling adventure story, it is also beautifully written, full of keenly observed details of the river’s wilds, well captured by Joyce Zonana’s new translation.]]> 96 Henri Bosco 168137742X Quinn 0 to-read 3.83 1945 The Child and the River (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Henri Bosco
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1945
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Other Name: Septology I-II]]> 46024004 The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours� drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.

Written in hypnotic prose that shifts between the first and third person, The Other Name calls into question concrete notions around subjectivity and the self. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Through flashbacks, Fosse deftly explores the convergences and divergences in the lives of both Asles, slowly building towards a decisive encounter between them both. A writer at the zenith of his career, with The Other Name, the first two volumes in his Septology, Fosse presents us with an indelible and poignant exploration of the human condition that will endure as his masterpiece.]]> 351 Jon Fosse Quinn 0 currently-reading 4.04 2019 The Other Name: Septology I-II
author: Jon Fosse
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/30
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]]> Mrs. Dalloway 14942 194 Virginia Woolf 0151009988 Quinn 5 3.80 1925 Mrs. Dalloway
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1925
rating: 5
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]]> Getting Lost 60246617 Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an attaché to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate and unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living in the suburbs of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters. She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives merely to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the moment of desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.




Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Translated brilliantly for the first time by Alison L. Strayer, Getting Lost is a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and despair.]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1913097005 Quinn 4 3.43 2001 Getting Lost
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/27
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]]> Septology (Septologien, #1-7) 60246552
Jon Fosse’s ​SٴDZDz is a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience � incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.]]> 825 Jon Fosse 1804270067 Quinn 0 to-read 4.49 2022 Septology (Septologien, #1-7)
author: Jon Fosse
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> Paradais 58730652 Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society - with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies - and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.]]> 118 Fernanda Melchor 1913097870 Quinn 4 3.62 2021 Paradais
author: Fernanda Melchor
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/15
date added: 2023/01/15
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]]> <![CDATA[The Copenhagen Trilogy (The Copenhagen Trilogy, #1-3)]]> 53317528 Called a masterpiece by The New York Times, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing

Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969-71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child's single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.

Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today's discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up--in this sense, it's Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.

Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class, female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark's most important modern authors, with Tove fever gripping readers.]]> 371 Tove Ditlevsen 0374602395 Quinn 5 4.36 1967 The Copenhagen Trilogy (The Copenhagen Trilogy, #1-3)
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1967
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Selected Poems (English, French and French Edition)]]> 584642 Book by Reverdy, Pierre 179 Pierre Reverdy 0916390462 Quinn 0 currently-reading 4.30 1969 Selected Poems (English, French and French Edition)
author: Pierre Reverdy
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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]]> Dreams and Stones 1187918 Dreams and Stones is a small masterpiece, one of the most extraordinary works of literature to come out of Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism. In sculpted, poetic prose reminiscent of Bruno Schulz, it tells the story of the emergence of a great city. In Tulli’s hands myth, metaphor, history, and narrative are combined to magical effect. Dreams and Stones is about the growth of a city, and also about all cities; at the same time it is not about cities at all, but about how worlds are created, trans- formed, and lost through words alone. A stunning debut by one of Europe’s finest new writers.]]> 110 Magdalena Tulli 0972869263 Quinn 0 to-read 3.72 1995 Dreams and Stones
author: Magdalena Tulli
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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]]> Night Train 56760360       Selected from many hundreds in the original Dutch, the stories gathered here―humorous, or bizarre, or comfortingly homely―are something like daybook entries, novels-in-brief, philosophical meditations, or events recreated from life, but―inhabiting the borderland between fiction and reality―might best be described as autobiographical mini-fables.
This morning at 11:30, in the full sun, I go up into the hayloft where I haven’t been for years. I climb over boxes and shelving, and open the door. A frightened owl flies straight at me, dead quiet, as quiet as a shadow can fly, I look into his eyes―he’s a large owl, it’s not strange that I’m frightened too, we frighten each other. I myself thought that owls never move in the daytime. What the owl thinks about me, I don’t know.]]> 128 A.L. Snijders 0811228568 Quinn 0 to-read 3.87 Night Train
author: A.L. Snijders
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.87
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]]> <![CDATA[Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)]]> 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 Quinn 0 never-finished, to-read 4.21 1993 Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/13
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]]> Dept. of Speculation 17402288
Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.]]> 179 Jenny Offill 0385350813 Quinn 0 3.76 2014 Dept. of Speculation
author: Jenny Offill
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> Weather 37506228
As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience—but still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks... And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.]]> 208 Jenny Offill 0385351100 Quinn 0 3.57 2020 Weather
author: Jenny Offill
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> Motherhood 36203362 How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”�Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children.

In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation.

In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home.

Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.]]> 304 Sheila Heti 1627790772 Quinn 0 3.66 2018 Motherhood
author: Sheila Heti
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories]]> 22929586 A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.]]> 406 Lucia Berlin 0374202397 Quinn 5 4.22 2015 A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
author: Lucia Berlin
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4)]]> 25242224 The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women with unmatched honesty and brilliance.

The Story of the Lost Child is the concluding volume in the dazzling saga of two women � the brilliant, bookish Elena, and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults, with husbands, lovers, aging parents, and children. Their friendship has been the gravitational center of their lives. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up � a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. In this final novel she has returned to Naples, drawn back as if responding to the city's obscure magnetism. Lila, on the other hand, could never free herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect the neighborhood. Proximity to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable.

The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.]]> 473 Elena Ferrante 1609452860 Quinn 0 4.47 2014 The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels, #3)]]> 23156040 418 Elena Ferrante Quinn 0 4.38 2013 Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels, #3)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> Simple Passion 399257 80 Annie Ernaux 1583225749 Quinn 0 to-read 3.92 1991 Simple Passion
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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]]> Liberation Day 60471573 Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose--wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned--Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

Love Letter is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson, in the midst of a dystopian political situation in the not-too-distant future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and each other. Ghoul is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park in Colorado, and follows the exploits of a lonely, morally complex character named Brian, who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his "reality." In Mother's Day, two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle of a hailstorm. And in Elliott Spencer, our eighty-nine-year-old protagonist finds himself brainwashed--his memory "scraped"--a victim of a scheme in which poor, vulnerable people are reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters.

Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention as Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.]]> 256 George Saunders 0525509593 Quinn 0 to-read 3.99 2022 Liberation Day
author: George Saunders
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> Babylon Revisited 10392644 But it hadn't been given for nothing. It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that he would now always remember.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories defined the 1920s 'Jazz Age' generation, with their glittering dreams and tarnished hopes. In these three tales of a fragile recovery, a cut-glass bowl and a life lost, Fitzgerald portrays, in exquisite prose and with deep human sympathy, the idealism of youth and the ravages of success. This book includes Babylon Revisited, The Cut-Glass Bowl and The Lost Decade.]]> 112 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0141195967 Quinn 0 to-read 3.73 1931 Babylon Revisited
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1931
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead]]> 51648276
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?

Duration: 11 hours 39 minutes.]]> 274 Olga Tokarczuk Quinn 0 to-read, never-finished 3.93 2009 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/02
shelves: to-read, never-finished
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]]> <![CDATA[Basic Black with Pearls (A List)]]> 25089755 144 Helen Weinzweig 1487000472 Quinn 0 3.55 1980 Basic Black with Pearls (A List)
author: Helen Weinzweig
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at: 2020/01/02
date added: 2023/01/02
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]]> The Summer Book 79550
Full of brusque humour and wisdom, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own experience and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of the novels she wrote for adults. This new edition sees the return of a European literary gem—fresh, authentic and deeply humane.]]> 192 Tove Jansson 0954221710 Quinn 0 4.05 1972 The Summer Book
author: Tove Jansson
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous]]> 41880609 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born � a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam � and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.]]> 246 Ocean Vuong 0525562028 Quinn 0 4.05 2019 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2022/12/02
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]]> I Am the Brother of XX 34847126 I Am the Brother of XX, she does it again. Like a magician or a master criminal, who can say how she gets away with it, but whether the stories involve famous writers (Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky) or baronesses or 13th-century visionaries or tormented siblings bred up in elite Swiss boarding schools, they somehow steal your heart. And they don’t rest at that, but endlessly disturb your mind.]]> 101 Fleur Jaeggy 0811225992 Quinn 0 currently-reading 3.74 2014 I Am the Brother of XX
author: Fleur Jaeggy
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/02
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]]> Sweet Days of Discipline 1440460 I beati anni del castigo in its Italian original won the 1990 Premio Bagutta and the 1990 Premio Speciale Rapallo. In Tim Parks� consummate translation (with its "spare, haunting quality of a prose poem"), Sweet Days of Discipline was selected as one of the London Times Literary Supplement’s Notable Books of 1992: "In a period when novels are generally overblown and scarcely portable, it is good to be able to recommend [one that is] miraculously short and beautifully written."]]> 101 Fleur Jaeggy 0811212351 Quinn 0 3.73 1989 Sweet Days of Discipline
author: Fleur Jaeggy
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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]]> The Door 497499 262 Magda Szabó 1843431939 Quinn 5 4.09 1987 The Door
author: Magda Szabó
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1987
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/02
date added: 2023/01/02
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]]> <![CDATA[Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)]]> 6520929
His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.]]> 535 Hilary Mantel 0805080686 Quinn 0 to-read, never-finished 3.87 2009 Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/02
shelves: to-read, never-finished
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]]> Rock Crystal 2871400 76 Adalbert Stifter 159017285X Quinn 0 3.80 1853 Rock Crystal
author: Adalbert Stifter
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1853
rating: 0
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]]> The Dog of the South 938212 246 Charles Portis 0879519312 Quinn 5 3.83 1979 The Dog of the South
author: Charles Portis
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1979
rating: 5
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]]> Outline 21400742
Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.

Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.]]> 249 Rachel Cusk 0571233627 Quinn 0 3.68 2014 Outline
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2021/08/02
date added: 2022/01/03
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]]> Station Eleven 20170404 An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.]]> 333 Emily St. John Mandel 0385353308 Quinn 0 4.05 2014 Station Eleven
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> The Memory Police 37004370
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.]]> 274 Yōko Ogawa 1101870605 Quinn 0 3.72 1994 The Memory Police
author: Yōko Ogawa
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at: 2021/01/02
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]]> The Kites 34390245

Filled with unforgettable characters—an indomitable chef who believes Michelin stars are more enduring than military conquests; a Jewish brothel Madam who reinvents everything about herself during the war; a piano virtuoso turned RAF pilot�The Kites is Romain Gary’s poetic call for resistance in whatever form it takes.]]> 384 Romain Gary 0811226549 Quinn 0 4.25 1980 The Kites
author: Romain Gary
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/03
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]]> Strange Weather in Tokyo 18283207 176 Hiromi Kawakami 1846275083 Quinn 0 3.63 2001 Strange Weather in Tokyo
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/01/03
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review:

]]> The Bluest Eye 11337 The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change—in painful, devastating ways.

With its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrison's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.]]> 216 Toni Morrison Quinn 0 4.13 1970 The Bluest Eye
author: Toni Morrison
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/01/03
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]]> The Female Persuasion 44564172
Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Faith Frank, dazzlingly persuasive and elegant at sixty-three, has been a central pillar of the women’s movement for decades, a figure who inspires others to influence the world. Upon hearing Faith speak for the first time, Greer—madly in love with her boyfriend, Cory, but still full of longing for an ambition that she can’t quite place—feels her inner world light up. And then, astonishingly, Faith invites Greer to make something out of that sense of purpose, leading Greer down the most exciting path of her life as it winds toward and away from her meant-to-be love story with Cory and the future she’d always imagined.

Charming and wise, knowing and witty, Meg Wolitzer delivers a novel about power and influence, ego and loyalty, womanhood and ambition. At its heart, The Female Persuasion is about the flame we all believe is flickering inside of us, waiting to be seen and fanned by the right person at the right time. It’s a story about the people who guide and the people who follow (and how those roles evolve over time), and the desire within all of us to be pulled into the light.]]> 480 Meg Wolitzer 0399573232 Quinn 2 No. 3.50 2018 The Female Persuasion
author: Meg Wolitzer
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2019/07/23
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No.
]]> Short Stories 23790
"Backgrounds" includes a rich selection of Chekhov's letters, in new translations by Professor Matlaw, and Gorky's celebrated essay on Chekhov, translated by Ivy Litvinov. The critical essays offer general views of Chekhov's art and achievement and detailed analyses of particular stories. The critics are D. S. Mirsky, A. B. Derman (whose essay has been translated from the Russian especially for this edition), Renato Poggioli, Gleb Struve, Donald Rayfield, Karl Kramer, Virginia Llewellyn Smith, and Nils Ake Nilsson.

A Selected Bibliography directs readers to resources for further study.


Chameleon (1884) --
Oysters (1884) --
A living chronology (1885) --
The huntsman (1885) --
Misery (1886) --
The requiem (1886) --
Anyuta (1886) --
Agatha (1886) --
Grisha (1886) --
A gentleman friend (1886) --
The chorus girl (1886)--
Dreams (1886) --
Vanka (1886)--
At home (1887) --
The siren's song (1887) --
Sleepy (1888) --
The grasshopper (1892) --
In exile --
Rothschild's fiddle (1894) --
The student (1894) --
The teacher of literature (1889-94) --
Whitebrow (1895) --
Anna on the neck (1895) --
The house with the mansard (1896) --
The pecheneg (1898)--
A journey by cart (1897) --
The man in a case (1898) --
Gooseberries (1898) --
About love (1898) --
A doctor's visit (1902) --
The darling (1899) --
The lady with the dog (1899) --
The bishop (1902) --
The betrothed (1903).]]> 384 Anton Chekhov 0393090027 Quinn 4 4.36 1932 Short Stories
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1932
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/04/18
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]]> Night 231614 --back cover]]> 109 Elie Wiesel 0553272535 Quinn 4 4.29 1956 Night
author: Elie Wiesel
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1956
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2016/05/03
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]]> <![CDATA[The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels, #2)]]> 17465515 My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker's James Wood described as "large, captivating, amiably peopled ... a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal," Ferrante proves herself to be one of Italy's most accomplished storytellers. She writes vividly about a specific neighborhood of Naples from the late-1950s through to the current day and about two remarkable young women who are very much the products of that place and time. Yet in doing so she has created a world in which readers will recognize themselves and has drawn a marvelously nuanced portrait of friendship.

In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her entrée into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and is a source of strength in the face of life's challenges. In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, the acclaimed author of The Days of Abandonment, gives readers a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging.]]> 471 Elena Ferrante Quinn 5 4.47 2012 The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels, #2)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2015/02/01
date added: 2016/03/06
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]]> I Served the King of England 19271031 In a comic masterpiece following the misadventures of a simple but
hugely ambitious waiter in pre-World War II Prague, who rises to wealth
only to lose everything with the onset of Communism, Bohumil Hrabal
takes us on a tremendously funny and satirical trip through 20th-century
Czechoslovakia.

First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is "an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel" (The New York Times),
telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a
deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called
upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie. It is one of
the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a Nazi
woman athlete as the Germans are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war,
through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he
reaches the heights of his ambition, building a hotel. He becomes a
millionaire, but with the institution of communism, he loses everything
and is sent to inspect mountain roads. Living in dreary circumstances,
Ditie comes to terms with the inevitability of his death, and with his
place in history.]]> 256 Bohumil Hrabal 0811220087 Quinn 4 3.89 1983 I Served the King of England
author: Bohumil Hrabal
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2015/10/08
date added: 2015/10/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao]]> 297673
Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.]]> 335 Junot Díaz 1594489580 Quinn 4 3.89 2007 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
author: Junot Díaz
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/04/17
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]]> The Trace 20724722 The Trace is a masterful, poetic novel about a journey through Mexico taken by a couple recovering from a world shattered. Driving through the Chihuahua Desert, they retrace the route of 19th century American writer Ambrose Bierce (who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution) and try to piece together their lives after a devastating incident involving their adolescent son.

With tenderness and precision, Gander explores the intimacies of the couple's relationship as they travel through Mexican towns, through picturesque canyons, and desert capes, on a journey through the heart of the Mexican landscape. Taking a shortcut through the brutally hot desert home, their car overheats miles from nowhere, the story spinning out of control, with devastating consequences.]]> 240 Forrest Gander 081122371X Quinn 4 3.72 2014 The Trace
author: Forrest Gander
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2014
rating: 4
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date added: 2015/04/17
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]]> <![CDATA[The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)]]> 11734
Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."]]> 361 Philip Roth Quinn 0 3.89 2000 The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
author: Philip Roth
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/04/09
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]]> Selected Crônicas 153421 ôԾ, is just as immediately stimulating today and ably reinforces her reputation as one of Brazil's greatest writers. Indeed, these columns should establish her as being among the era's most brilliant essayists. She is masterful, even reminiscent of Montaigne, in her ability to spin the mundane events of life into moments of clarity that reveal greater truths."�Publishers Weekly]]> 296 Clarice Lispector 0811213404 Quinn 4 4.38 1996 Selected Crônicas
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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date added: 2015/03/12
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]]> Bartleby & Co. 58832 Bartleby Co., an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melville story, in answer to any question or demand, replies: "I would prefer not to." Addressing such "artists of refusal" as Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Herman Melville, and J. D. Salinger, Bartleby Co. could be described as a meditation: a walking tour through the annals of literature. Written as a series of footnotes (a non-work itself), Bartleby embarks on such questions as why do we write, why do we exist? The answer lies in the novel itself: told from the point of view of a hermetic hunchback who has no luck with women, and is himself unable to write, Bartleby is an utterly engaging work of profound and philosophical beauty.]]> 178 Enrique Vila-Matas 0811216985 Quinn 0 to-read 3.99 2000 Bartleby & Co.
author: Enrique Vila-Matas
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/03/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Bridge of Beyond 17262564
A masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond relates the triumph of a generous and hopeful spirit, while offering a gorgeously lush, imaginative depiction of the flora, landscape, and customs of Gua­deloupe. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s incantatory prose, interwoven with Creole proverbs and lore, appears here in a remarkable translation by Barbara Bray.]]> 246 Simone Schwarz-Bart 1590176804 Quinn 0 to-read 4.10 1972 The Bridge of Beyond
author: Simone Schwarz-Bart
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/03/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> Piano Stories 454294
"My stories have no logical structures," Hernández wrote, and indeed they proceed in a most uncanny fashion. Concatenations of images, skeins of sensations, startling metaphors like raids on the unconscious—these are the pathways through Hernández's fluid and animistic world. People and things, memory and fantasy are form-shifting aspects of one another: a statue stops taking its "role" seriously in order to spend time "playing with the pigeons"; a splashing Italian fountain foretells the astonishing part that water will play in a bereaved woman's life; curtained windows haunt a room as though they were twin maids dressed alike in lace and drapery; a man greets his wife by saying, "I always forget to bring a lens and have a good look at the plants in the greens of your eyes. I know how you get your complexion, though: by rubbing olives in your skin."

Though logic is not imposed on his stories from without, there is nothing arbitrary about Hernández's gentle surrealism. These tales unfold with the authority of dreams of childhood reveries, ready at any moment to take over from the rigorous banality we work so hard to enforce. Hernández's ear for the hidden language of the world is always strange and surprising. The delicious secret of his work is here revealed to English-language readers for, amazingly enough, the very first time.]]> 256 Felisberto Hernández 0941419541 Quinn 0 to-read 4.20 1993 Piano Stories
author: Felisberto Hernández
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/03/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[White Walls: Collected Stories]]> 310720
White Walls is the most comprehensive collection of Tolstaya's short fiction to be published in English so far. It presents the contents of her two previous collections, On the Golden Porch and Sleepwalker in a Fog, along with several previously uncollected stories. Tolstaya writes of lonely children and lost love, of philosophers of the absurd and poets working as janitors, of angels and halfwits. She shows how the extraordinary will suddenly erupt in the midst of ordinary life, as she explores the human condition with a matchless combination of unbound imagination and unapologetic sympathy.

A New York Review Books Original

"Tolstaya carves indelible people who roam the imagination long after the book is put down." --Time]]> 404 Tatyana Tolstaya 1590171977 Quinn 0 to-read 4.01 2007 White Walls: Collected Stories
author: Tatyana Tolstaya
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/03/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> Thus Were Their Faces 22056496
Silvina Ocampo is undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great masters of the short story. Italo Calvino once said about her, “I don’t know another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don’t show us.� Thus Were Their Faces collects a wide range of Ocampo’s best short fiction and novella-length stories from her whole writing life. Stories about creepy doubles, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks to a girl, a house of sugar that is the site of an eerie possession, children who lock their perverse mothers in a room and burn it, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote that the cruelty of Ocampo’s stories was the result of her nobility of soul, a judgment as paradoxical as much of her own writing. For her whole life Ocampo avoided the public eye, though since her death in 1993 her reputation has only continued to grow, like a magical forest. Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world’s finest.]]> 354 Silvina Ocampo 1590177673 Quinn 0 to-read 3.93 1988 Thus Were Their Faces
author: Silvina Ocampo
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2015/03/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> Satin Island 22543699 Remainder (the major feature-film adaption of which will be released in 2015) and C (short-listed for the Booker Prize), and winner of the Windham Campbell Prize, a novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world--modern, postmodern, whatever world you think you are living in.

When we first meet U., our narrator, he is waiting out a delay in the Turin airport. Clicking through corridors of trivia on his laptop he stumbles on information about the Shroud of Turin--and is struck by the degree to which our access to the truth is always mediated by a set of veils or screens, with any world built on those truths inherently unstable. A "corporate ethnographer," U. is tasked with writing the "Great Report," an ell-encompassing document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions. Madison, the woman he is seeing, is increasingly elusive, much like the particulars in the case of the recent parachutist's death with which U. is obsessed. Add to that his longstanding obsession with South Pacific cargo cults and his developing, inexplicable interest in oil spills. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are startled awake by a dream of an apocalyptic cityscape. In Satin Island, Tom McCarthy captures--as only he can-- the way we experience our world, our efforts to find meaning (or just to stay awake) and discern the narratives we think of as our lives.]]> 192 Tom McCarthy 0307593959 Quinn 3 3.25 2015 Satin Island
author: Tom McCarthy
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2015
rating: 3
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date added: 2015/03/12
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Interesting, anticlimactic, makes me feel like I should give it some more thought to know what I just read, but I'm on to the next thing already. There were several odd coincidences with my own life and dream life -- one of the characters gets thyroid cancer, and then radioactive iodine treatment, and then dies. Hopefully, the dying part won't be true for another several decades. The other concerns Satin Island itself, which appears to the narrator in a dream, much like my dream of Caston Deluca, including the approach by sea.
]]> <![CDATA[Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove]]> 190576
Originally rendered by C.K. Scott Moncrieff from an early and unreliable French edition, Proust’s masterpiece has now been flawlessly translated by Terence Kilmartin in this acclaimed version.]]> 1056 Marcel Proust 0394711823 Quinn 5
i like when his happiness crystallized on gilberte in the champs-elysees.

**OK i'm putting this on the back burner because my copy is unreadable. plus its so freakin long.]]> 4.29 1913 Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove
author: Marcel Proust
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1913
rating: 5
read at: 2007/01/01
date added: 2015/02/28
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...this copy is so crappy i've already lost the first 30+ pages and the cover.

i like when his happiness crystallized on gilberte in the champs-elysees.

**OK i'm putting this on the back burner because my copy is unreadable. plus its so freakin long.
]]> Frankenstein 18490 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780141439471

'Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart ...'

Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.

Based on the third edition of 1831, this volume contains all the revisions Mary Shelley made to her story, as well as her 1831 introduction and Percy Bysshe Shelley's preface to the first edition. This revised edition includes as appendices a select collation of the texts of 1818 and 1831 together with 'A Fragment' by Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori's 'The Vampyre: A Tale'.]]> 288 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Quinn 4 3.77 1818 Frankenstein
author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1818
rating: 4
read at: 2014/12/01
date added: 2015/02/03
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]]> <![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (My Brilliant Friend, #1)]]> 13586707 331 Elena Ferrante Quinn 5 3.91 2011 My Brilliant Friend (My Brilliant Friend, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2014/01/01
date added: 2015/02/03
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]]> Austerlitz 88442 Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by “one of the most gripping writers imaginable� (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, the fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, he follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.]]> 415 W.G. Sebald 0140297995 Quinn 5 3.97 2001 Austerlitz
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2015/01/01
date added: 2015/02/03
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]]> The Rings of Saturn 434903 The Rings of Saturn � with its curious archive of photographs � records a walking tour along the east coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich.]]> 296 W.G. Sebald 0811214133 Quinn 5 4.26 1995 The Rings of Saturn
author: W.G. Sebald
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2014/12/01
date added: 2015/02/03
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]]> Stranger in a Strange Land 350 NAME: Valentine Michael Smith
ANCESTRY: Human
ORIGIN: Mars

Valentine Michael Smith is a human being raised on Mars, newly returned to Earth. Among his people for the first time, he struggles to understand the social mores and prejudices of human nature that are so alien to him, while teaching them his own fundamental beliefs in grokking, watersharing, and love.]]> 525 Robert A. Heinlein Quinn 3 3.93 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land
author: Robert A. Heinlein
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1961
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2014/11/21
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review:

]]> Dune (Dune, #1) 234225 Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is the "spice" melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing consciousness. Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize worth killing for...

When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul's family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined. And as he evolves into the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib, he will bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.

A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.]]> 604 Frank Herbert 0340839937 Quinn 4 4.21 1965 Dune (Dune, #1)
author: Frank Herbert
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/11/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Hobbit, or There and Back Again]]> 5907 Written for J.R.R. Tolkien’s own children, The Hobbit met with instant critical acclaim when it was first published in 1937. Now recognized as a timeless classic, this introduction to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf, Gollum, and the spectacular world of Middle-earth recounts of the adventures of a reluctant hero, a powerful and dangerous ring, and the cruel dragon Smaug the Magnificent. The text in this 372-page paperback edition is based on that first published in Great Britain by Collins Modern Classics (1998), and includes a note on the text by Douglas A. Anderson (2001).]]> 366 J.R.R. Tolkien Quinn 4 4.29 1937 The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1937
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/11/21
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]]> Death on the Installment Plan 106096 Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Céline's influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today's "black comedy."

Death on the Installment Plan is the story of young Ferdinand's first 18 years. His life is one of hatred, of the grinding struggle of small shopkeepers to survive, of childhood sensations and fantasies—lusty, scatological, violent, but also poetic. There is a running battle with his ineffectual insurance clerk of a father, with his mother, who lives and whines around the junkshop she runs for the boys benefit; there is also the superbly funny Meanwell College in England, where the boy went briefly, a Dickensian, nightmare institution. Always there is humiliation, failure, and boredom, at least until he teams up with the "scientist" des Pereires. This inventor, con-man, incorrigible optimist—whose last project is to grow enormous potatoes by electricity—rescues him, if only temporarily; for the reader he is one of the most lovable charlatans in French literature.]]> 592 Louis-Ferdinand Céline 0811200175 Quinn 3 4.25 1936 Death on the Installment Plan
author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1936
rating: 3
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date added: 2014/11/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis]]> 6670287 Salon) and “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction� (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.]]> 733 Lydia Davis 0374270600 Quinn 4 4.26 2009 The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
author: Lydia Davis
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/11/21
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]]> Housekeeping 11741 Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.]]> 219 Marilynne Robinson 0312424094 Quinn 4 3.82 1980 Housekeeping
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1980
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/11/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Squishy Turtle and Friends (Cloth Books)]]> 40793
-Textured fabrics and bright colors help to develop children's sensory awareness.

-Rhyming text helps kids improve their listening skills.



Book Details:

Format: Cloth Book Publication Date: 9/13/2003 Pages: 8 Reading Level: Age 2 and Up ]]> 8 Roger Priddy 0312491840 Quinn 3 4.01 2003 Squishy Turtle and Friends (Cloth Books)
author: Roger Priddy
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2014/11/21
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hugs and Kisses (Baby Faces Board Book)]]> 992207 12 Roberta Grobel Intrater 0439420032 Quinn 4 3.86 1949 Hugs and Kisses (Baby Faces Board Book)
author: Roberta Grobel Intrater
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1949
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/11/21
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]]> Peekaboo! 15791054 16 Taro Gomi 1452108358 Quinn 5 3.78 1993 Peekaboo!
author: Taro Gomi
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/11/21
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]]> The Passion According to G.H. 153426 173 Clarice Lispector 0816617120 Quinn 3 4.20 1964 The Passion According to G.H.
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1964
rating: 3
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date added: 2014/11/21
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]]> Selected Stories 160313
This collection gathers forty-two of Walser's stories. Encompassing everything from journal entries, notes on literature, and biographical sketches to anecdotes, fables, and visions, it is an ideal introduction to this fascinating writer of whom Hermann Hesse famously declared, "If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place."

Response to a Request
Flower Days
Trousers
Two Strange Stories
Balloon Journey
Kleist in Thum
The Job Application
The Boat
A Little Ramble
Helbling's Story
The Little Berliner
Nervous
The Walk
So! "I've Got You"
Nothing at All
Kienast
Poests
Frau Wilke
The Street
Snowdrops
Winter
The She-Owl
Knocking
Titus
Vladimir
Parisian Newspapers
The Monkey
Dostoevsky's Idiot
Am I Dreaming?
The Little Tree
Stork and Porcupine
A Contribution to the Celebration of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer
A Sort of Speech
A Letter to Therese Breitbach
A Village Tale
The Aviator
The Pimp
Masters and Workers
Essay on Freedom
A Biedermeier Story
The Honeymoon
Thoughts on Cezanne]]> 252 Robert Walser 0940322986 Quinn 4 4.22 1982 Selected Stories
author: Robert Walser
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1982
rating: 4
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]]> 101 Uses for a Dead Cat 366970 96 Simon Bond 0517545160 Quinn 5 3.72 1981 101 Uses for a Dead Cat
author: Simon Bond
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1981
rating: 5
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]]> Selected Poems 849394 146 Kenneth Patchen 0811201465 Quinn 4 4.11 1957 Selected Poems
author: Kenneth Patchen
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1957
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/11/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?]]> 759826
"[Carver's stories] can ... be counted among the masterpieces of American Literature." � The New York Times Book Review

"One of the great short story writers of our time—of any time." � The  Philadelhpia Inquirer

"The whole collection is a knock out. Few writers can match Raymond Carver's entwining style and language." � The Dallas Morning News]]> 251 Raymond Carver 0679735690 Quinn 4 4.16 1976 Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
author: Raymond Carver
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1976
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[What We Talk About When We Talk About Love]]> 11438 Alternate-cover edition can be found here

In his second collection, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated and beloved short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.]]> 159 Raymond Carver 0679723056 Quinn 4 4.11 1981 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
author: Raymond Carver
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1981
rating: 4
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]]> Cloud Atlas 49628
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . .

Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.

But the story doesn't end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.]]> 509 David Mitchell 0375507256 Quinn 5 4.02 2004 Cloud Atlas
author: David Mitchell
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2004
rating: 5
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date added: 2014/11/21
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]]> The Blind Assassin 227614 The Blind Assassin opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. Brilliantly weaving together such seemingly disparate elements, Atwood creates a world of astonishing vision and unforgettable impact.]]> 521 Margaret Atwood 0385720955 Quinn 3 3.95 2000 The Blind Assassin
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2000
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)]]> 38447
Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.]]> 311 Margaret Atwood 038549081X Quinn 4 4.15 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1985
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/11/21
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]]> Jesus' Son 6150891
Denis Johnson's now classic story collection Jesus' Son chronicles a wild netherworld of addicts and lost souls, a violent and disordered landscape that encompasses every extreme of American culture. These are stories of transcendence and spiraling grief, of hallucinations and glories, of getting lost and found and lost again. The insights and careening energy in Jesus' Son have earned the book a place of its own among the classics of twentieth-century American literature. It was adapted into a critically-praised film in 1999.]]> 133 Denis Johnson 031242874X Quinn 4 4.01 1992 Jesus' Son
author: Denis Johnson
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1992
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[A Song of Ice and Fire (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1-4)]]> 9814682 Time magazine—has created a world that is as rich and vital as any piece of historical fiction, set in an age of knights and chivalry and filled with a plethora of fascinating, multidimensional characters that you love, hate to love, or love to hate as they struggle for control of a divided kingdom. It is this very vitality that has led it to be adapted as the HBO miniseries “Game of Thrones.�

This bundle includes the following novels:
A GAME OF THRONES
A CLASH OF KINGS
A STORM OF SWORDS
A FEAST FOR CROWS]]> 4081 George R.R. Martin 0345529057 Quinn 4 4.65 2011 A Song of Ice and Fire (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1-4)
author: George R.R. Martin
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.65
book published: 2011
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/11/21
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]]> Jane Eyre 16154687
Unabashedly romantic and utterly enthralling, Jane Eyre endures as one of the greatest love stories of all time]]> 296 Charlotte Brontë Quinn 3 4.38 1847 Jane Eyre
author: Charlotte Brontë
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1847
rating: 3
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]]> The Bone Clocks 21403302
For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.

A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.]]> 640 David Mitchell 0812994736 Quinn 4 3.97 2014 The Bone Clocks
author: David Mitchell
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2014
rating: 4
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]]> The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 24583
Unlike his brother Sid, Tom receives "lickings" from his Aunt Polly; ever the mischief-maker, would rather play hooky than attend school and often sneaks out his bedroom window at night to adventure with his friend, Huckleberry Finn ­ the town's social outcast. Tom, despite his dread of schooling, is extremely clever and would normally get away with his pranks if Sid were not such a "tattle-tale."

As punishment for skipping school to go swimming, Aunt Polly assigns Tom the chore of whitewashing the fence surrounding the house. In a brilliant scheme, Tom is able to con the neighborhood boys into completing the chore for him, managing to convince them of the joys of whitewashing. At school, Tom is equally as flamboyant, and attracts attention by chasing other boys, yelling, and running around. With his usual antics, Tom attempts to catch the eye of Becky Thatcher, a new girl in town, and persuades her to get "engaged" by kissing him. But their romance collapses when she learns Tom has been "engaged" previously to Amy Lawrence. Shortly after Becky shuns him, he accompanies Huckleberry Finn to the graveyard at night, where they witness the murder of Dr. Robinson.

Excerpt:
"TOM!"
No answer.
"TOM!"
No answer.
"What's gone with that boy,  I wonder? You TOM!"
No answer.
The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked through them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not service—she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:
"Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll�"
She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.
"I never did see the beat of that boy!"]]> 244 Mark Twain Quinn 4 3.92 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
author: Mark Twain
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1876
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories]]> 655
As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of his sufferings. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich and the other works in this volume, Tolstoy conjures characters who, tested to the limit, reveal glorious and unexpected reserves of courage or baseness of a near inhuman kind. Two vivid parables and The Forged Coupon, a tale of criminality, explore class relations after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the connection between an ethical life and worldly issues. In Master and Workman Tolstoy creates one of his most gripping dramas about human relationships put to the test in an extreme situation. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is an existential masterpiece, a biting satire that recounts with extraordinary power the final illness and death of a bourgeois lawyer.

In his Introduction Andrew Kahn explores Tolstoy's moral concerns and the stylistic features of these late stories, sensitively translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater.]]> 304 Leo Tolstoy 0451528808 Quinn 4 4.13 1886 The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1886
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/03/05
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]]> Crime and Punishment 5692 564 Fyodor Dostoevsky Quinn 4 4.29 1866 Crime and Punishment
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1866
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/01/05
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]]> The Architecture of Happiness 23418
And yet a concern for architecture and design is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. The Architecture of Happiness starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and it argues that it is architecture's task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.

Whereas many architects are wary of openly discussing the word beauty, this book has at its center the large and naïve question: What is a beautiful building? It is a tour through the philosophy and psychology of architecture that aims to change the way we think about our homes, our streets and ourselves.]]> 288 Alain de Botton 0375424431 Quinn 4 never-finished 3.86 2006 The Architecture of Happiness
author: Alain de Botton
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2006
rating: 4
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date added: 2010/09/25
shelves: never-finished
review:

]]> Ulysses 763241 Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

Considered the greatest 20th century novel written in English, in this edition Walter Gabler uncovers previously unseen text. It is a disillusioned study of estrangement, paralysis and the disintegration of society.]]> 783 James Joyce 0679600116 Quinn 5 4.03 1922 Ulysses
author: James Joyce
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1922
rating: 5
read at: 2001/01/01
date added: 2009/12/16
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this is my favorite book. i have nothing insightful to add to the scholarship surrounding this goddamned brilliant masterpiece. i loved it so much when i first discovered it that i slept with it IN MY BED. i had an old hardcover that i found in my parents' garage. my mom had to read it in college and hated it.
]]> Heart of a Dog 113205 123 Mikhail Bulgakov 0802150594 Quinn 4 4.15 1925 Heart of a Dog
author: Mikhail Bulgakov
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1925
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/09/10
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]]> Story of the Eye 436806
Story of the Eye, written in 1928, is his best-known work; it is unashamedly surrealistic, both disgusting and fascinating, and packed with seemingly endless violations. It's something of an underground classic, rediscovered by each new generation. Most recently, the Icelandic pop singer Björk Guðdmundsdóttir cites Story of the Eye as a major inspiration: she made a music video that alludes to Bataille's erotic uses of eggs, and she plans to read an excerpt for an album.

Warning: Story of the Eye is graphically sexual, and is only suited for adults who are not easily offended.]]> 103 Georges Bataille 0872862097 Quinn 5 3.70 1928 Story of the Eye
author: Georges Bataille
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1928
rating: 5
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]]> Hopscotch 53413 Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.

The book is highly influenced by Henry Miller’s reckless and relentless search for truth in post-decadent Paris and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s modal teachings on Zen Buddhism.

Cortázar's employment of interior monologue, punning, slang, and his use of different languages is reminiscent of Modernist writers like Joyce, although his main influences were Surrealism and the French New Novel, as well as the "riffing" aesthetic of jazz and New Wave Cinema.

In 1966, Gregory Rabassa won the first National Book Award to recognize the work of a translator, for his English-language edition of Hopscotch. Julio Cortázar was so pleased with Rabassa's translation of Hopscotch that he recommended the translator to Gabriel García Márquez when García Márquez was looking for someone to translate his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude into English. "Rabassa's One Hundred Years of Solitude improved the original," according to García Márquez.]]> 564 Julio Cortázar 0394752848 Quinn 5 4.24 1963 Hopscotch
author: Julio Cortázar
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1963
rating: 5
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date added: 2009/03/01
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]]> Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer 222625 242 Kenneth Patchen 0811214117 Quinn 0 3.85 1948 Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer
author: Kenneth Patchen
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at: 2009/03/01
date added: 2009/03/01
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I LOVE KENNETH PATCHEN. what more can i say? the man is a tender-hearted genius.
]]> The Green Hills of Earth 50831 288 Robert A. Heinlein 0671578537 Quinn 4 3.87 1951 The Green Hills of Earth
author: Robert A. Heinlein
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1951
rating: 4
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date added: 2008/12/15
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]]> The Moon and the Bonfire 132376 192 Cesare Pavese 0720611199 Quinn 4 3.88 1950 The Moon and the Bonfire
author: Cesare Pavese
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1950
rating: 4
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date added: 2008/09/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Journey to the End of the Night]]> 12395 Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.]]> 453 Louis-Ferdinand Céline 0811216543 Quinn 5 4.23 1932 Journey to the End of the Night
author: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2008/06/30
date added: 2008/06/30
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]]> The Leopard 625094 The Sicilian prince Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa (1896-1957) died just after writing The Leopard, his only novel. Visconti's film adaptation, starring Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1963.

In Sicily, in 1860, a family from the high aristocracy suffered the consequences of the change of regime in favor of the Republicans. While Prince Salina lets himself be overcome by nostalgia, his nephew Tancred embodies the new force that is shaking his country. He asks for the hand of Angélique, daughter of an upstart, while this union marks the defeat of the family coat of arms.]]> 319 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 0679731210 Quinn 4 4.01 1958 The Leopard
author: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1958
rating: 4
read at: 2008/06/30
date added: 2008/06/30
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]]> <![CDATA[The Place of Dead Roads (The Red Night Trilogy, #2)]]> 24509 The Place of Dead Roads is the second novel in the trilogy with Cities of the Red Night and The Western Lands.]]> 306 William S. Burroughs 0312278659 Quinn 5 3.93 1983 The Place of Dead Roads (The Red Night Trilogy, #2)
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1983
rating: 5
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date added: 2008/06/30
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]]> The Immoralist 70101 The Immoralist , André Gide presents the confessional account of a man seeking the truth of his own nature. The story's protagonist, Michel, knows nothing about love when he marries the gentle Marceline out of duty to his father. On the couple's honeymoon to Tunisia, Michel becomes very ill, and during his recovery he meets a young Arab boy whose radiant health and beauty captivate him. An awakening for him both sexually and morally, Michel discovers a new freedom in seeking to live according to his own desires. But, as he also discovers, freedom can be a burden. A frank defense of homosexuality and a challenge to prevailing ethical concepts, The Immoralist is a literary landmark, marked by Gide's masterful, pure, simple style.]]> 123 André Gide 0142180025 Quinn 3 3.61 1902 The Immoralist
author: André Gide
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1902
rating: 3
read at: 2008/04/29
date added: 2008/04/29
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]]> Gravity’s Rainbow 415 776 Thomas Pynchon 0143039946 Quinn 4 4.01 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Quinn
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/04/27
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]]> Sentimental Education 2183 460 Gustave Flaubert 0140447970 Quinn 0 3.86 1869 Sentimental Education
author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1869
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/04/07
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]]> Madame Bovary 19075 335 Gustave Flaubert 0140449124 Quinn 5 3.71 1856 Madame Bovary
author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1856
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/04/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Information Bomb (Radical Thinkers)]]> 203092 Virilio's exploration of the relationship between technology, war and information technology.

“Civilization or the militarization of science?�

With this typically hyperbolic and provocative question as a starting point, Paul Virilio explores the dominion of techno-science, cyberwar and the new information technologies over our lives . . . and deaths. After the era of the atomic bomb, Virilio posits an era of genetic and information bombs which replace the apocalyptic bang of nuclear death with the whimper of a subliminally reinforced eugenics. We are entering the age of euthanasia.

These exhilarating bulletins from the information war extend the range of Virilio's work. The Information Bomb spans everything from Fukuyama to Larry Flynt, the Sensation exhibition of New British Art to space travel, all seen through the optic of Virilio's trenchant and committed theoretical position.]]> 160 Paul Virilio 1844670597 Quinn 3 3.71 1998 The Information Bomb (Radical Thinkers)
author: Paul Virilio
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2008/03/28
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]]> Nana 371456 473 Émile Zola 3746611091 Quinn 4 3.87 1880 Nana
author: Émile Zola
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1880
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/03/28
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]]> Tess of the D’Urbervilles 32261 here and here.

When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her ‘cousin� Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future.]]> 518 Thomas Hardy Quinn 4 3.83 1891 Tess of the D’Urbervilles
author: Thomas Hardy
name: Quinn
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1891
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/01/24
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review:
ok, so, honestly, i skipped the parts about 50-75% through. i read the first half and the final quarter, but not the second to last quarter. am i making myself clear? it got really depressing and i skipped until the end to see what happened.
]]>