Jessica's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 16 Sep 2024 21:52:28 -0700 60 Jessica's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Last Night at Chateau Marmont 8906041
Brooke loved reading the dishy celebrity gossip rag Last Night . That is, until her marriage became a weekly headline...

For five years, she’s worked two jobs to support her husband’s dream of making it in the music world. Finally, after countless gigs at Manhattan dive bars and toiling as an A&R intern, the soulful, enigmatic Julian Alter gets signed by Sony, where he logs long hours in the recording studio with no promise of success. But when he is invited to perform on a national late-night talk show, he is catapulted to stardom—literally overnight.

At first the newfound fame is fun—who wouldn’t want to stay at the Chateau Marmont or love being treated like rock royalty? But as Brooke’s sweet husband becomes increasingly absent and tabloid rumors swirl, Brooke begins to question the truth about their marriage and is forced to finally come to terms with what she thinks she wants—and what she actually needs.]]>
388 Lauren Weisberger 1439146942 Jessica 3 3.49 2010 Last Night at Chateau Marmont
author: Lauren Weisberger
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2010
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/09/16
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Year of Wonders 4965
Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition.

As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.

As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."

Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. ]]>
304 Geraldine Brooks 0142001430 Jessica 2 4.00 2001 Year of Wonders
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2001
rating: 2
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date added: 2023/07/30
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White Teeth 3711 White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.]]> 448 Zadie Smith 0375703861 Jessica 0 3.80 2000 White Teeth
author: Zadie Smith
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/08
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<![CDATA[The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox]]> 228836
Iris’s grandmother Kitty always claimed to be an only child. But Esme’s papers prove she is Kitty’s sister, and Iris can see the shadow of her dead father in Esme’s face. 

Esme has been labeled harmless—sane enough to coexist with the rest of the world. But she's still basically a stranger, a family member never mentioned by the family, and one who is sure to bring life-altering secrets with her when she leaves the ward. If Iris takes her in, what dangerous truths might she inherit?

A gothic, intricate tale of family secrets, lost lives, and the freedom brought by truth, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox will haunt you long past its final page.]]>
245 Maggie O'Farrell 0151014116 Jessica 4 3.70 2006 The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 4
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date added: 2016/06/05
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The Magician's Assistant 774226 "A secretive magician’s death becomes the catalyst for his partner’s journey self-discovery in this “enchanting� book (San Francisco Chronicle) “that is something of a magic trick in itself� (Newsweek).     When Parsifal, a handsome and charming magician, dies suddenly, his widow Sabine—who was also his faithful assistant for twenty years—learns that the family he claimed to have lost in a tragic accident is very much alive and well. Sabine is left to unravel his secrets, and the journey she takes, from sunny Los Angeles to the bitter windswept plains of Nebraska, will work its own magic on her. Sabine's extraordinary tale, “with its big dreams, vast spaces, and disparate realities lying side by side� captures the hearts of its readers and “proves to be the perfect place for miraculous transformations� (The New Yorker). "
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357 Ann Patchett Jessica 3 3.61 1997 The Magician's Assistant
author: Ann Patchett
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1997
rating: 3
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date added: 2014/02/19
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Golden Country 1800544
Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Golden Country captures the exuberance of the American dream while exposing its underbelly—disillusionment, greed, and the disaffection bred by success.]]>
349 Jennifer Gilmore 0156034379 Jessica 3 3.25 2006 Golden Country
author: Jennifer Gilmore
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2006
rating: 3
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date added: 2012/11/23
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The Lovely Bones 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 Jessica 3 3.87 2002 The Lovely Bones
author: Alice Sebold
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2002
rating: 3
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date added: 2011/08/09
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The Little Book 3004139 An irresistible triumph of the imagination more than thirty years in the making, The Little Book is a breathtaking love story that spans generations, ranging from fin de siècle Vienna through the pivotal moments of the twentieth century.

The Little Book is the extraordinary tale of Wheeler Burden, California-exiled heir of the famous Boston banking Burdens, philosopher, student of history, legend's son, rock idol, writer, lover of women, recluse, half-Jew, and Harvard baseball hero. In 1988 he is forty-seven, living in San Francisco. Suddenly he is - still his modern self - wandering in a city and time he knows mysteriously well: fin de siècle Vienna. It is 1897, precisely ninety-one years before his last memory and a half-century before his birth.

It's not long before Wheeler has acquired appropriate clothes, money, lodging, a group of young Viennese intellectuals as friends, a mentor in Sigmund Freud, a bitter rival, a powerful crush on a luminous young American woman, a passing acquaintance with local celebrity Mark Twain, and an incredible and surprising insight into the dashing young war-hero father he never knew.

But the truth at the center of Wheeler's dislocation in time remains a stubborn mystery that will take months of exploration and a lifetime of memories to unravel and that will, in the end, reveal nothing short of the eccentric Burden family's unrivaled impact on the very course of the coming century. The Little Book is a masterpiece of unequaled storytelling that announces Selden Edwards as one of the most dazzling, original, entertaining, and inventive novelists of our time.]]>
416 Selden Edwards 0525950613 Jessica 5 3.73 2008 The Little Book
author: Selden Edwards
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2010/03/09
date added: 2011/07/17
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Every Last One 7468160
In this breathtaking and beautiful novel, the #1 New York Times" bestselling author Anna Quindlen creates an unforgettable portrait of a mother, a father, a family, and the explosive, violent consequences of what seem like inconsequential actions.

Mary Beth Latham has built her life around her family, around caring for her three teenage children and preserving the rituals of their daily life. When one of her sons becomes depressed, Mary Beth focuses on him, only to be blindsided by a shocking act of violence. What happens afterwards is a testament to the power of a woman's love and determination, and to the invisible lines of hope and healing that connect one human being with another. Ultimately, as rendered in Anna Quindlen's mesmerizing prose, Every Last One" is a novel about facing every last one of the things we fear most, about finding ways to navigate a road we never intended to travel, and about living a life we never dreamed we'd have to live, but find ourselves brave enough to try.]]>
299 Anna Quindlen 1400065747 Jessica 5 3.85 2010 Every Last One
author: Anna Quindlen
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2010
rating: 5
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date added: 2011/01/30
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<![CDATA[The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1)]]> 5043 Ken Follett is known worldwide as the master of split-second suspense, but his most beloved and bestselling book tells the magnificent tale of a twelfth-century monk driven to do the seemingly impossible: build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known.

Everything readers expect from Follett is here: intrigue, fast-paced action, and passionate romance. But what makes The Pillars of the Earth extraordinary is the time the twelfth century; the place feudal England; and the subject the building of a glorious cathedral. Follett has re-created the crude, flamboyant England of the Middle Ages in every detail. The vast forests, the walled towns, the castles, and the monasteries become a familiar landscape.

Against this richly imagined and intricately interwoven backdrop, filled with the ravages of war and the rhythms of daily life, the master storyteller draws the reader irresistibly into the intertwined lives of his characters into their dreams, their labors, and their loves: Tom, the master builder; Aliena, the ravishingly beautiful noblewoman; Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge; Jack, the artist in stone; and Ellen, the woman of the forest who casts a terrifying curse. From humble stonemason to imperious monarch, each character is brought vividly to life.

The building of the cathedral, with the almost eerie artistry of the unschooled stonemasons, is the center of the drama. Around the site of the construction, Follett weaves a story of betrayal, revenge, and love, which begins with the public hanging of an innocent man and ends with the humiliation of a king.

For the TV tie-in edition with the same ISBN go to this Alternate Cover Edition
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976 Ken Follett 045122213X Jessica 4 4.34 1989 The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1)
author: Ken Follett
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at: 2011/01/30
date added: 2011/01/30
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Room 7937843
Told in the inventive, funny, and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience—and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible.

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough ... not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.]]>
321 Emma Donoghue Jessica 5 4.04 2010 Room
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2010
rating: 5
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Angle of Repose 292408
Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical.]]>
569 Wallace Stegner 014016930X Jessica 5 4.24 1971 Angle of Repose
author: Wallace Stegner
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1971
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close]]> 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 Jessica 5 3.98 2005 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
author: Jonathan Safran Foer
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2005
rating: 5
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date added: 2011/01/30
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<![CDATA[The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium, #3)]]> 7889113
Once upon a time, she was a victim. Now Salander is fighting back.]]>
743 Stieg Larsson 0857380516 Jessica 5 4.13 2007 The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium, #3)
author: Stieg Larsson
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2007
rating: 5
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date added: 2010/08/13
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<![CDATA[The Girl Who Played With Fire (Millennium #2)]]> 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 Jessica 4 4.25 2006 The Girl Who Played With Fire (Millennium #2)
author: Stieg Larsson
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2006
rating: 4
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date added: 2010/08/13
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A Happy Marriage 6072556 A stunningly candid and revelatory love story by an acclaimed novelist and screenwriter whose return to fiction after a long hiatus will be heralded by critics and readers.In the 1970s Yglesias’s first novels, written while he was a teenager, were hailed by critics as the arrival of a young American  genius.  A  Happy  Marriage,  his  first  novel  in thirteen years, is a gorgeous and moving story about a thirty- year marriage, inspired by his own relationship with his wife, who died in 2004.

Told from the husband’s point of view, with revelatory and sometimes disarming candor, A Happy Marriage is the story of Enrique Sabas and his wife Margaret, alternating between the first three weeks of their acquaintance (a comic and romantic misadventure) and the bittersweet final weeks of Margaret’s life as she says goodbye to her family, friends, and children. Laced throughout with intimate recollections of moments of crises and joy from the middle years of their relationship, the novel charts the ebb and flow of marriage, illuminating the mysteries and magic of marital love.

Neither sentimental nor cynical, and written with an intense devotion to character and emotional suspense, A Happy Marriage reveals a partnership that brings maturity and great pleasure to the lives of two people. Bold, elegiac, and stunningly vivid, A Happy Marriage will break every reader’s heart—and perhaps infuse some marriages with greater love.]]>
384 Rafael Yglesias 1439102309 Jessica 4 3.78 2009 A Happy Marriage
author: Rafael Yglesias
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2009
rating: 4
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date added: 2010/08/13
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One Day 6280118
So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that?

And every year that follows?
--back cover]]>
435 David Nicholls 0340896965 Jessica 3 3.86 2009 One Day
author: David Nicholls
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2009
rating: 3
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date added: 2010/08/13
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<![CDATA[Love and Other Impossible Pursuits]]> 174161
For Emilia Greenleaf, life is by turns a comedy of errors and an emotional minefield. Yes, sheâ s a Harvard Law grad who married her soul mate. Yes, they live in elegant comfort on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But with her one-and-only, Jack, came a stepsonâ a know-it-all preschooler named William who has become her number one responsibility every Wednesday afternoon. With William, Emilia encounters a number of impossible pursuitsâ such as the pursuit of cab drivers who speed away when they see Williamâ s industrial-strength car seat and the pursuit of lactose-free, strawberry-flavored, patisserie-quality cupcakes, despite the fact that Williamâ s allergy is a figment of his over-protective motherâ s imagination.

As much as Emilia wants to find common ground with William, she becomes completely preoccupied when she loses her newborn daughter. After this, the sight of any child brings her to tears, and Wednesdays with William are almost impossible. When his unceasing questions turn to the babyâ s death, Emilia is at a total loss. Doesnâ t anyone understand that self-pity is a full-time job? Ironically, it is only through her blundering attempts to bond with William that she finally heals herself and learns what family really means.]]>
0 Ayelet Waldman 1415927464 Jessica 5 3.62 2006 Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
author: Ayelet Waldman
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2010/06/29
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Imperfect Birds 6709616
But as the school year draws to a close, there are disturbing signs that the life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham, and that Elizabeth's hopes for her daughter to remain immune from the pull of the darker impulses of drugs and alcohol are dashed. Slowly and against their will, Elizabeth and James are forced to confront the fact that Rosie has been lying to them-and that her deceptions will have profound consequences.]]>
288 Anne Lamott 1594487510 Jessica 0 to-read 3.29 2010 Imperfect Birds
author: Anne Lamott
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2010/04/18
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Atlas of Unknowns 4330608 336 Tania James 030726890X Jessica 0 to-read 3.62 2009 Atlas of Unknowns
author: Tania James
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2010/04/18
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The Last Chinese Chef 554865 Lost in Translation and A Cup of Light to one of the great Chinese subjects: food. As in her previous novels, Mones’s captivating story also brings into focus a changing China -- this time the hidden world of high culinary culture.

When Maggie McElroy, a widowed American food writer, learns of a Chinese paternity claim against her late husband’s estate, she has to go immediately to Beijing. She asks her magazine for time off, but her editor counters with an assignment: to profile the rising culinary star Sam Liang.

In China Maggie unties the knots of her husband’s past, finding out more than she expected about him and about herself. With Sam as her guide, she is also drawn deep into a world of food rooted in centuries of history and philosophy. To her surprise she begins to be transformed by the cuisine, by Sam’s family -- a querulous but loving pack of cooks and diners -- and most of all by Sam himself. The Last Chinese Chef is the exhilarating story of a woman regaining her soul in the most unexpected of places.]]>
278 Nicole Mones 0618619666 Jessica 3 3.81 2007 The Last Chinese Chef
author: Nicole Mones
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2007
rating: 3
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date added: 2010/04/18
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Let the Great World Spin 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 Jessica 4 3.95 2009 Let the Great World Spin
author: Colum McCann
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2009
rating: 4
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date added: 2010/04/18
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Loving Frank 898885 I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.

So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.

In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright.

Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion.

Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.]]>
384 Nancy Horan 0345494997 Jessica 3 3.76 2007 Loving Frank
author: Nancy Horan
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2010/04/06
date added: 2010/04/06
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Away 217086 Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York's Lower East Side, to Seattle's Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom's work—her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart—come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.]]> 240 Amy Bloom 1400063566 Jessica 2 ]]> 3.37 2007 Away
author: Amy Bloom
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at: 2008/03/12
date added: 2010/03/17
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It took me about two months to read this book which never happens. I'm not sure that I give it enough credit. It's incredibly sad, but an interesting story of a woman who escapes Russia during the pograms only to attempt to return in search her her lost daughter.

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Open 6480781
Agassi’s incredibly rigorous training begins when he is just a child. By the age of thirteen, he is banished to a Florida tennis camp that feels like a prison camp. Lonely, scared, a ninth-grade dropout, he rebels in ways that will soon make him a 1980s icon. He dyes his hair, pierces his ears, dresses like a punk rocker. By the time he turns pro at sixteen, his new look promises to change tennis forever, as does his lightning-fast return.

And yet, despite his raw talent, he struggles early on. We feel his confusion as he loses to the world’s best, his greater confusion as he starts to win. After stumbling in three Grand Slam finals, Agassi shocks the world, and himself, by capturing the 1992 Wimbledon. Overnight he becomes a fan favorite and a media target.

Agassi brings a near-photographic memory to every pivotal match and every relationship. Never before has the inner game of tennis and the outer game of fame been so precisely limned. Alongside vivid portraits of rivals from several generations—Jimmy Connors, Pete Sampras, Roger Federer—Agassi gives unstinting accounts of his brief time with Barbra Streisand and his doomed marriage to Brooke Shields. He reveals a shattering loss of confidence. And he recounts his spectacular resurrection, a comeback climaxing with his epic run at the 1999 French Open and his march to become the oldest man ever ranked number one.

In clear, taut prose, Agassi evokes his loyal brother, his wise coach, his gentle trainer, all the people who help him regain his balance and find love at last with Stefanie Graf. Inspired by her quiet strength, he fights through crippling pain from a deteriorating spine to remain a dangerous opponent in the twenty-first and final year of his career. Entering his last tournament in 2006, he’s hailed for completing a stunning metamorphosis, from nonconformist to elder statesman, from dropout to education advocate. And still he’s not done. At a U.S. Open for the ages, he makes a courageous last stand, then delivers one of the most stirring farewells ever heard in a sporting arena.

With its breakneck tempo and raw candor, Open will be read and cherished for years. A treat for ardent fans, it will also captivate readers who know nothing about tennis. Like Agassi’s game, it sets a new standard for grace, style, speed, and power.]]>
388 Andre Agassi 0307268195 Jessica 5 4.29 2009 Open
author: Andre Agassi
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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date added: 2010/03/09
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Nanny Returns (Nanny, #2) 6487537 in love with Nan, the smart, spirited,
and sympathetic heroine of the
#1 New York Times bestseller
The Nanny Diaries.
Now she's back. After living abroad for twelve years, she and her husband, Ryan, aka H.H., have returned to New York to make a life for themselves. In the midst of getting her new business off the ground and fixing up their fixer-upper, Ryan announces his sudden desire to start a family. His timing simply couldn't be worse. To compound the mounting construction and marital chaos, her former charge, Grayer X, now sixteen years old, makes a drunken, late-night visit, wanting to know why she abandoned him all those years ago. But how can she explain to Grayer what she still hasn't come to terms with herself? In an attempt to assuage her guilt, yet against every instinct, Nan tries to help Grayer and his younger brother, Stilton, through their parents' brutal divorce, drawing her back into the ever-bizarre life of Mrs. X and her Upper East Side enclave of power and privilege. After putting miles and years between herself and this world, Nan finds she's once again on the front line of the battle with the couture-clad elite for their children's wellbeing. With its whip-smart dialogue and keen observations of modern life, Nanny Returns gives a firsthand tour of what happens when a community that chose money over love finds itself with neither. The Nanny Diaries was made into a major motion picture.]]>
305 Emma McLaughlin 1416585672 Jessica 3 2.92 2009 Nanny Returns (Nanny, #2)
author: Emma McLaughlin
name: Jessica
average rating: 2.92
book published: 2009
rating: 3
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date added: 2010/03/09
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The Postmistress 6578507
What would happen if someone did the unthinkable-and didn't deliver a letter? Filled with stunning parallels to today, The Postmistress is a sweeping novel about the loss of innocence of two extraordinary women-and of two countries torn apart by war.]]>
11 Sarah Blake 0143145444 Jessica 0 to-read 3.34 2009 The Postmistress
author: Sarah Blake
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2010/02/09
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Wench 6751356 An ambitious and startling debut novel that follows the lives of four women at a resort popular among slaveholders who bring their enslaved mistresses

wench \'wench\ n. from Middle English "wenchel," 1 a: a girl, maid, young woman; a female child.

Tawawa House in many respects is like any other American resort before the Civil War. Situated in Ohio, this idyllic retreat is particularly nice in the summer when the Southern humidity is too much to bear. The main building, with its luxurious finishes, is loftier than the white cottages that flank it, but then again, the smaller structures are better positioned to catch any breeze that may come off the pond. And they provide more privacy, which best suits the needs of the Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their black, enslaved mistresses. It's their open secret.

Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are regulars at Tawawa House. They have become friends over the years as they reunite and share developments in their own lives and on their respective plantations. They don't bother too much with questions of freedom, though the resort is situated in free territory–but when truth-telling Mawu comes to the resort and starts talking of running away, things change.

To run is to leave behind everything these women value most–friends and families still down South–and for some it also means escaping from the emotional and psychological bonds that bind them to their masters. When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, the women of Tawawa House soon learn that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable and that love exists even in the most inhuman, brutal of circumstances–all while they are bearing witness to the end of an era.

An engaging, page-turning, and wholly original novel, Wench explores, with an unflinching eye, the moral complexities of slavery.]]>
290 Dolen Perkins-Valdez 006170654X Jessica 0 to-read 3.72 2009 Wench
author: Dolen Perkins-Valdez
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Beat the Reaper (Peter Brown, #1)]]> 3173125
Pietro "Bearclaw" Brnwna is a hitman for the mob, with a genius for violence, a well-earned fear of sharks, and an overly close relationship with the Federal Witness Relocation Program. More likely to leave a trail of dead gangsters than a molecule of evidence, he's the last person you want to see in your hospital room.

Nicholas LoBrutto, aka Eddy Squillante, is Dr. Brown's new patient, with three months to live and a very strange idea: that Peter Brown and Pietro Brnwa might-just might-be the same person ...

Now, with the mob, the government, and death itself descending on the hospital, Peter has to buy time and do whatever it takes to keep his patients, himself, and his last shot at redemption alive. To get through the next eight hours-and somehow beat the reaper.

Spattered in adrenaline-fueled action and bone-saw-sharp dialogue, BEAT THE REAPER is a debut thriller so utterly original you won't be able to guess what happens next, and so shockingly entertaining you won't be able to put it down.]]>
320 Josh Bazell 0316032220 Jessica 0 to-read 3.80 2009 Beat the Reaper (Peter Brown, #1)
author: Josh Bazell
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Girl Who Fell from the Sky]]> 6449290
In the tradition of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, here is a portrait of a young girl - and society's ideas of race, class, and beauty.]]>
264 Heidi W. Durrow 1565126807 Jessica 0 to-read 3.59 2010 The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
author: Heidi W. Durrow
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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The Piano Teacher 4332082
Enter Claire Pendleton from London. Months after her husband is transferred to Hong Kong in 1951, she accepts a position as a piano teacher to the daughter of a wealthy couple, the Chens. Claire begins to see the appeal of the sweltering city and is soon taken in by the Chen's driver, the curiously underutilized Will Truesdale. A handsome charmer with a mysterious limp, Will appears to be the perfect companion for Claire, who's often left to her own devices. But a further examination leaves her with more questions than answers.

An intricately woven tale of lives changed by historical events, Lee's debut brings this hothouse flower of a city alive with passion, and imagines characters both unforgettable and tragic.]]>
328 Janice Y.K. Lee 0670020486 Jessica 3 3.35 2009 The Piano Teacher
author: Janice Y.K. Lee
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2009
rating: 3
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City of Thieves 1971304
By turns insightful and funny, thrilling and terrifying, City of Thieves is a gripping, cinematic World War II adventure and an intimate coming-of-age story with an utterly contemporary feel for how boys become men.]]>
258 David Benioff 0670018708 Jessica 5 4.28 2008 City of Thieves
author: David Benioff
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2008
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society]]> 2728527
“Treat yourself to this book, please - I can’t recommend it highly enough.� (Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love)

“I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.�

January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb....

As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends - and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island - boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all. Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the society’s members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds will change her forever.

Written with warmth and humor as a series of letters, this novel is a celebration of the written word in all its guises and of finding connection in the most surprising ways.

Praise for The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

“A jewel... Poignant and keenly observed, Guernsey is a small masterpiece about love, war, and the immeasurable sustenance to be found in good books and good friends.� (People)

“A book-lover’s delight, an implicit and sometimes explicit paean to all things literary.� (Chicago Sun-Times)

“A sparkling epistolary novel radiating wit, lightly worn erudition and written with great assurance and aplomb.� (The Sunday Times [London])

“Cooked perfectly à point: subtle and elegant in flavour, yet emotionally satisfying to the finish.� (The Times [London])]]>
277 Mary Ann Shaffer 0385340990 Jessica 4 4.13 2008 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
author: Mary Ann Shaffer
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2008
rating: 4
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True Colors 3975186 True Colors is New York Times bestselling author Kristin Hannah's most provocative, compelling, and heart-wrenching story yet. With the luminous writing and unforgettable characters that are her trademarks, she tells the story of three sisters whose once-solid world is broken apart by jealousy, betrayal, and the kind of passion that rarely comes along.

The Grey sisters have always been close. After their mother's death, the girls banded together, becoming best friends. Their stern, disapproving father cares less about his children than about his reputation. To Henry Grey, appearances are everything, and years later, he still demands that his daughters reflect his standing in the community.

Winona, the oldest, needs her father's approval most of all. An overweight bookworm who never felt at home on the sprawling horse ranch that has been in her family for three generations, she knows that she doesn't have the qualities her father values. But as the best lawyer in town, she's determined to someday find a way to prove her worth to him.

Aurora, the middle sister, is the family peacemaker. She brokers every dispute and tries to keep them all happy, even as she hides her own secret pain.

Vivi Ann is the undisputed star of the family. A stunningly beautiful dreamer with a heart as big as the ocean in front of her house, she is adored by all who know her. Everything comes easily for Vivi Ann, until a stranger comes to town. . . .

In a matter of moments, everything will change. The Grey sisters will be pitted against one another in ways that none could have imagined. Loyalties will be tested and secrets revealed, and a terrible, shocking crime will shatter both their family and their beloved town.

With breathtaking pace and penetrating emotional insight, True Colors is an unforgettable novel about sisters, rivalry, forgiveness, redemption—and ultimately, what it means to be a family.]]>
400 Kristin Hannah 0312364105 Jessica 1 3.96 2009 True Colors
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2009
rating: 1
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The Doctor's Wife 227462

“The memory starts here, in my apron pocket, with the gun.�

So begins The Doctor’s Wife, a stunning debut novel about four people and the cataclysmic intersection of their lives. Michael is a rising OB/GYN at a prominent private practice in Albany, New York; he also moonlights at a local women’s health clinic. But Annie, his wife, has become tired of her workaholic husband’s absences, and the soccer-mom lifestyle has worn thin. She begins a passionate love affair with bad-boy, fading celebrity painter Simon Haas—an affair that quickly goes awry when Simon’s wife Lydia, who is also the model upon whom he built his career, discovers the truth. 

Abortion, local evangelism, marital disenchantment, and the rifts of social class:  Brundage takes on the fault lines of our era with a deft hand. 

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368 Elizabeth Brundage 0452286913 Jessica 3 3.52 2004 The Doctor's Wife
author: Elizabeth Brundage
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2004
rating: 3
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Zeitoun 6512154
Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun run a house-painting business in New Orleans. In August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Kathy evacuates with their four young children, leaving Zeitoun to watch over the business. In the days following the storm he travels the city by canoe, feeding abandoned animals and helping elderly neighbors. Then, on September 6th, police officers armed with M-16s arrest Zeitoun in his home. Told with eloquence and compassion, Zeitoun is a riveting account of one family’s unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water.]]>
342 Dave Eggers 1934781630 Jessica 5 4.05 2009 Zeitoun
author: Dave Eggers
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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Who by Fire 3055326
Sharp and captivating, Who by Fire deftly explores what happens when people try to rescue one another.]]>
362 Diana Spechler 0061572934 Jessica 3 3.29 2008 Who by Fire
author: Diana Spechler
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2008
rating: 3
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The 19th Wife 2586771
Soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds, a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was expelled from his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside to discover the truth behind his father’s death. As Ann Eliza’s narrative intertwines with that of Jordan’s search, readers are pulled deeper into the mysteries of love, family, and faith.]]>
514 David Ebershoff 1400063973 Jessica 4 3.64 2008 The 19th Wife
author: David Ebershoff
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2010/02/09
date added: 2010/02/09
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Everyone Worth Knowing 29547 What happens when a girl on the fringe enters the realm of New York's chic, party-hopping elite?
Soon after Bette Robinson quits her horrendous Manhattan banking job like the impulsive girl she's never been, the novelty of walking her four-pound dog around the unglamorous Murray Hill neighborhood wears as thin as the "What are you going to do with your life?" phone calls from her parents. Then Bette meets Kelly, head of Manhattan's hottest PR firm, and suddenly she has a brand-new job where the primary requirement is to see and be seen inside the VIP rooms of the city's most exclusive nightclubs. But when Bette begins appearing in a vicious new gossip column, she realizes that the line between her personal life and her professional life is...invisible.]]>
448 Lauren Weisberger 1416543007 Jessica 4 3.45 2005 Everyone Worth Knowing
author: Lauren Weisberger
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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date added: 2010/01/05
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Sarah's Key 556602
Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's sixtieth anniversary, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist, is asked by her Paris-based American magazine to write an article about this black day in France's past. Julia has lived in Paris for nearly twenty-five years, married a Frenchman, and she is shocked both by her ignorance about the event and the silence that still surrounds it. In the course of her investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connects her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from the terrible days spent shut in at the Vel' d'Hiv' to the camps and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Writing about the fate of her country with a pitiless clarity, Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and denial surrounding this painful episode in French history.
(front flap)]]>
294 Tatiana de Rosnay 0312370830 Jessica 4 4.18 2006 Sarah's Key
author: Tatiana de Rosnay
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2006
rating: 4
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A Friend of the Family 6389263 The Ice Storm, American Beauty, and Little Children, charting a father's fall from grace as he struggles to save his family, his reputation, and himself.]]> 302 Lauren Grodstein 1565129164 Jessica 3 3.36 2009 A Friend of the Family
author: Lauren Grodstein
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2009
rating: 3
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date added: 2010/01/05
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Await Your Reply 6251222
Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can't stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.

A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.

My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself through unconventional and precarious means.

Await Your Reply
is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored.
(jacket)]]>
324 Dan Chaon 0345476026 Jessica 4 3.54 2009 Await Your Reply
author: Dan Chaon
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2009
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater]]> 6449638 The New York Times restaurant critic's heartbreaking and hilarious account of how he learned to love food just enough after decades of wrestling with his weight

Frank Bruni was born round. Round as in stout, chubby, and hungry, always and endlessly hungry. He grew up in a big, loud Italian family in White Plains, New York, where meals were epic, outsize affairs. At those meals, he demonstrated one of his foremost qualifications for his future career: an epic, outsize appetite for food. But his relationship with eating was tricky, and his difficulties with managing it began early.

When he was named the restaurant critic for the New York Times in 2004, he knew enough to be nervous. He would be performing one of the most closely watched tasks in the epicurean universe; a bumpy ride was inevitable, especially for someone whose writing beforehand had focused on politics, presidential campaigns, and the Pope.

But as he tackled his new role as one of the most loved and hated tastemakers in the New York restaurant world, he also had to make sense of a decades-long love-hate affair with food, which had been his enemy as well as his friend. Now he’d have to face down this enemy at meal after indulgent meal. His Italian grandmother had often said, "Born round, you don’t die square." Would he fall back into his worst old habits? Or had he established a truce with the food on his plate?

In tracing the highly unusual path Bruni traveled to become a restaurant critic, Born Round tells the captivating story of an unpredictable journalistic odyssey and provides an unflinching account of one person’s tumultuous, often painful lifelong struggle with his weight. How does a committed eater embrace food without being undone by it? Born Round will speak to every hungry hedonist who has ever had to rein in an appetite to avoid letting out a waistband, and it will delight anyone interested in matters of family, matters of the heart, and the big role food plays in both.]]>
354 Frank Bruni 1594202311 Jessica 3 3.68 2009 Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater
author: Frank Bruni
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2009
rating: 3
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East of the Sun 3548256 Kaiser-i-Hind is en route to Bombay. In Cabin D38, Viva Hollowat, an inexperienced chaperone, is worried she's made a terrible mistake. Her advert in The Lady has resulted in three unsettling charges to be escorted to India.

Rose, a beautiful, dangerously naive English girl, is about to be married to the cavalry officer she has met only a handful of times.

Victoria, the bridesmaid, is determined to lose her virginity on the journey before finding a husband of her own in India. And overshadowing all three of them, the malevolent presence of Guy Glover, a strange and disturbed schoolboy.

Three potential Memsahibs with a myriad of reasons for leaving England, but the cargo of hopes and secrets they carry has done little to prepare them for what lies ahead.

From the parties of the wealthy Bombay socialites to the poverty of the orphans on Tamarind Street, East of the Sun is everything a historical novel should be: alive with glorious detail, fascinating characters and masterful storytelling.]]>
458 Julia Gregson 1409102513 Jessica 3 3.62 2007 East of the Sun
author: Julia Gregson
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2007
rating: 3
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This is Where I Leave You 6224935 A riotously funny, emotionally raw New York Times bestselling novel about love, marriage, divorce, family, and the ties that bind—whether we like it or not.

The death of Judd Foxman’s father marks the first time that the entire Foxman clan has congregated in years. There is, however, one conspicuous absence: Judd's wife, Jen, whose affair with his radio- shock-jock boss has recently become painfully public. Simultaneously mourning the demise of his father and his marriage, Judd joins his dysfunctional family as they reluctantly sit shiva and spend seven days and nights under the same roof. The week quickly spins out of control as longstanding grudges resurface, secrets are revealed and old passions are reawakened. Then Jen delivers the clincher: she's pregnant...

“Often sidesplitting, mostly heartbreaking...[Tropper is] a more sincere, insightful version of Nick Hornby, that other master of male psyche.”—USA Today

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JASON BATEMAN, TINA FEY, JANE FONDA, AND ADAM DRIVER
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339 Jonathan Tropper 052595127X Jessica 5 3.87 2003 This is Where I Leave You
author: Jonathan Tropper
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2003
rating: 5
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Beginner's Greek 1845050 So begins the immensely entertaining story of Peter and his unrequited love for his best friend's girl; of Charlotte and her less-than-perfect marriage to a man in love with someone else; of Jonathan and his wicked and fateful debauchery; and of Holly, the impetus for it all. Along the way, there's the evil boss, the desirable temptress, miscommunications, misrepresentations, fiendish behavior, letters gone astray, and ultimately, an ending in which every character gets his due.
Both incisive and wonderfully funny, this is a brilliantly understated comedy of manners in which love lost is found again.

"James Collins has written a romantic, funny and insightful page turner about love in modern times, missed opportunities and the wheel of fate (with a blow-out!) that is so engaging and real, you will find it impossible to put down. Peter Russell is an everyman filled with longing, lust and good sense. I promise you will root for him as fate throws him curves aplenty on his path to true love. BEGINNER'S GREEK and Peter Russell are keepers."
-- Adriana Trigiani , bestselling author of Lucia, Lucia and Big Stone Gap]]>
448 James Collins 0316021555 Jessica 2 3.21 2008 Beginner's Greek
author: James Collins
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2010/01/05
date added: 2010/01/05
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<![CDATA[Very Valentine (Valentine, #1)]]> 3673357 Very Valentine sweeps the reader from the streets of Manhattan to the picturesque hills of la bella Italia.]]> 371 Adriana Trigiani 0061257052 Jessica 3 3.80 2009 Very Valentine (Valentine, #1)
author: Adriana Trigiani
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2009
rating: 3
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date added: 2009/07/07
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<![CDATA[Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen]]> 13747
Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that’s going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year.

At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and crépes, she realizes there’s more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye. With Julia’s stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts the local butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends her husband on late-night runs for yet more butter and rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver.

And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life’s ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance.]]>
310 Julie Powell 031610969X Jessica 0 to-read 3.74 2005 Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
author: Julie Powell
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2009/07/06
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<![CDATA[Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith]]> 10847
A multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. This is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.

Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this "divinely inspired" crime, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. Along the way, he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest-growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.

Krakauer takes readers inside isolated communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, where some forty-thousand Mormon Fundamentalists believe the mainstream Mormon Church went unforgivably astray when it renounced polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the leaders of these outlaw sects are zealots who answer only to God. Marrying prodigiously and with virtual impunity (the leader of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five "plural wives," several of whom were wed to him when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties), fundamentalist prophets exercise absolute control over the lives of their followers, and preach that any day now the world will be swept clean in a hurricane of fire, sparing only their most obedient adherents.

Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism’s violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the most successful homegrown faith in the United States, and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism. The result is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.]]>
400 Jon Krakauer 0330419129 Jessica 4 4.01 2003 Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
author: Jon Krakauer
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/07/06
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The Book Thief 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 Jessica 4 4.38 2005 The Book Thief
author: Markus Zusak
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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Out Stealing Horses 398323
Trond’s friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning would turn out to be different. What began as a joy ride on “borrowed� horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance of grief. Trond soon learns what befell Jon earlier that day—an incident that marks the beginning of a series of vital losses for both boys.

Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer.]]>
258 Per Petterson Jessica 0 to-read 3.79 2003 Out Stealing Horses
author: Per Petterson
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2009/07/06
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<![CDATA[Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln]]> 2199 Winner of the Lincoln Prize

Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln's political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.

On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry.

Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.

It was this capacity that enabled Lincoln as president to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war.

We view the long, horrifying struggle from the vantage of the White House as Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through.

This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history.]]>
916 Doris Kearns Goodwin Jessica 0 to-read 4.27 2005 Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2009/07/06
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<![CDATA[A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius]]> 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 Jessica 4 3.70 2000 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
author: Dave Eggers
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2000
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/07/06
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The Elegance of the Hedgehog 2967752
We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.]]>
325 Muriel Barbery 1933372605 Jessica 3 3.76 2006 The Elegance of the Hedgehog
author: Muriel Barbery
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2006
rating: 3
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date added: 2009/07/06
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Beach Music 16729
A Southerner living abroad, Jack McCall is scarred by tragedy and betrayal. His desperate desire to find peace after his wife’s suicide draws him into a painful, intimate search for the one haunting secret in his family’s past that can heal his anguished heart. Spanning three generations and two continents, from the contemporary ruins of the American South to the ancient ruins of Rome, from the unutterable horrors of the Holocaust to the lingering trauma of Vietnam, Beach Music sings with life’s pain and glory. It is a novel of lyric intensity and searing truth, another masterpiece among Pat Conroy’s legendary and beloved novels.]]>
800 Pat Conroy 0553381539 Jessica 4 4.17 1995 Beach Music
author: Pat Conroy
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1995
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/07/06
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<![CDATA[The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium #1)]]> 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 Jessica 4 4.17 2005 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium #1)
author: Stieg Larsson
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/07/06
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<![CDATA[The Unbearable Lightness of Being]]> 9717 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles, to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers.]]> 314 Milan Kundera 0571224385 Jessica 2 4.12 1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
author: Milan Kundera
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1984
rating: 2
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<![CDATA[Firefly Lane (Firefly Lane, #1)]]> 1472878 New York Times bestselling author of On Mystic Lake comes a powerful novel of love, loss, and the magic of friendship. . . .

In the turbulent summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the “coolest girl in the world� moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all---beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a loving family who mortifies her at every turn. Tully, steeped in glamour and mystery, but with a secret that is destroying her. They make a pact to be best friends forever; by summer’s end they’ve become TullyandKate. Inseparable.

So begins Kristin Hannah’s magnificent new novel. Spanning more than three decades and playing out across the ever-changing face of the Pacific Northwest, Firefly Lane is the poignant, powerful story of two women and the friendship that becomes the bulkhead of their lives.

From the beginning, Tully is desperate to prove her worth to the world. Abandoned by her mother at an early age, she longs to be loved unconditionally. In the glittering, big-hair era of the eighties, she looks to men to fill the void in her soul. But in the buttoned-down nineties, it is television news that captivates her. She will follow her own blind ambition to New York and around the globe, finding fame and success . . . and loneliness. 

Kate knows early on that her life will be nothing special. Throughout college, she pretends to be driven by a need for success, but all she really wants is to fall in love and have children and live an ordinary life. In her own quiet way, Kate is as driven as Tully. What she doesn’t know is how being a wife and mother will change her . . . how she’ll lose sight of who she once was, and what she once wanted. And how much she’ll envy her famous best friend. . . .

For thirty years, Tully and Kate buoy each other through life, weathering the storms of friendship---jealousy, anger, hurt, resentment. They think they’ve survived it all until a single act of betrayal tears them apart . . . and puts their courage and friendship to the ultimate test.

Firefly Lane is for anyone who ever drank Boone’s Farm apple wine while listening to Abba or Fleetwood Mac. More than a coming-of-age novel, it’s the story of a generation of women who were both blessed and cursed by choices. It’s about promises and secrets and betrayals. And ultimately, about the one person who really, truly knows you---and knows what has the power to hurt you . . . and heal you. Firefly Lane is a story you’ll never forget . . . one you’ll want to pass on to your best friend.]]>
479 Kristin Hannah 0312364083 Jessica 4 4.16 2008 Firefly Lane (Firefly Lane, #1)
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2008
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/07/06
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Admission 5633771 Admission. Aren't there two sides to the word? And two opposing sides...It's what we let in, but it's also what we let out."

For years, 38-year-old Portia Nathan has avoided the past, hiding behind her busy (and sometimes punishing) career as a Princeton University admissions officer and her dependable domestic life. Her reluctance to confront the truth is suddenly overwhelmed by the resurfacing of a life-altering decision, and Portia is faced with an extraordinary test. Just as thousands of the nation's brightest students await her decision regarding their academic admission, so too must Portia decide whether to make her own ultimate admission.

Admission is at once a fascinating look at the complex college admissions process and an emotional examination of what happens when the secrets of the past return and shake a woman's life to its core.]]>
452 Jean Hanff Korelitz 0446540706 Jessica 5 3.39 2009 Admission
author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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date added: 2009/07/06
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Cutting for Stone 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 Jessica 5 4.32 2009 Cutting for Stone
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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date added: 2009/07/06
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The Help 4667024
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women, mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends, view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.


Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here]]>
464 Kathryn Stockett 0399155341 Jessica 5 4.46 2009 The Help
author: Kathryn Stockett
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa]]> 144214
WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN is a stirring memoir of the disintegration of a family set against the collapse of a country. But it is also a vivid portrait of the profound strength of the human spirit and the enduring power of love.]]>
344 Peter Godwin 0316158941 Jessica 0 to-read 4.15 2006 When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa
author: Peter Godwin
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2009/02/24
shelves: to-read
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A Confederacy of Dunces 310612
His mother thinks he needs to go to work. He does, in a succession of jobs. Each job rapidly escalates into a lunatic adventure, a full-blown disaster; yet each has, like Don Quixote's, its own eerie logic.

His girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff of the Bronx, thinks he needs sex.

Ignatius is an intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt, and one-man war against everybody: Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, Protestants, and the assorted excesses of modern times.

A tragicomedy, set in New Orleans.]]>
394 John Kennedy Toole 0802130208 Jessica 3 3.89 1980 A Confederacy of Dunces
author: John Kennedy Toole
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1980
rating: 3
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date added: 2009/02/24
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The more days that go by, the more I kind of miss Ignatius. Although I definitely think men tend to like this more, I'm glad I read it. I've learned new uses for the word "abortion" and a gained a distaste for hot dogs.
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<![CDATA[Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America]]> 3245249
What would it take?

That was the question that Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children—not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children’s Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in their lives—their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents.

Whatever It Takes is a tour de force of reporting, an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey Canada but of the parents and children in Harlem who are struggling to better their lives, often against great odds. Carefully researched and deeply affecting, this is a dispatch from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time.
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296 Paul Tough 0618569898 Jessica 4 4.15 2008 Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America
author: Paul Tough
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2008
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/02/24
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<![CDATA[New Moon (The Twilight Saga, #2)]]> 49041 There is an alternate cover edition for ISBN13 9780316160193 here.

I knew we were both in mortal danger. Still, in that instant, I felt well. Whole. I could feel my heart racing in my chest, the blood pulsing hot and fast through my veins again. My lungs filled deep with the sweet scent that came off his skin. It was like there had never been any hole in my chest. I was perfect - not healed, but as if there had never been a wound in the first place.

I FELT LIKE I WAS TRAPPED IN ONE OF THOSE TERRIFYING NIGHTMARES, the one where you have to run, run till your lungs burst, but you can't make your body move fast enough.... But this was no dream, and, unlike the nightmare, I wasn't running for my life; I was racing to save something infinitely more precious. My own life meant little to me today.

FOR BELLA SWAN THERE IS ONE THING more important than life itself: Edward Cullen. But being in love with a vampire is even more dangerous than Bella could ever have imagined. Edward has already rescued Bella from the clutches of one evil vampire, but now, as their daring relationship threatens all that is near and dear to them, they realize their troubles may be just beginning....

LEGIONS OF READERS ENTRANCED BY THE New York Times bestseller Twilight are hungry for the continuing story of star-crossed lovers Bell and Edward. In New Moon, Stephanie Meyer delivers another irresistible combination of romance and suspense with a supernatural spin. passionate, riveting, and full of surprising twists and turns, this vampire love saga is well on its way to literary immortality.]]>
563 Stephenie Meyer 0316160199 Jessica 2 3.61 2006 New Moon (The Twilight Saga, #2)
author: Stephenie Meyer
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2006
rating: 2
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date added: 2009/02/24
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<![CDATA[Twilight (The Twilight Saga, #1)]]> 41865
First, Edward was a vampire.

Second, there was a part of him - and I didn't know how dominant that part might be - that thirsted for my blood.

And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Deeply seductive and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight is a love story with bite.]]>
498 Stephenie Meyer 0316015849 Jessica 3 3.66 2005 Twilight (The Twilight Saga, #1)
author: Stephenie Meyer
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2005
rating: 3
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date added: 2009/02/24
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Unaccustomed Earth 85301
In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he’s harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he’s keeping all to himself. In “A Choice of Accommodations,� a husband’s attempt to turn an old friend’s wedding into a romantic getaway weekend with his wife takes a dark, revealing turn as the party lasts deep into the night. In “Only Goodness,� a sister eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish, and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,� a trio of linked stories—a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love, and fate—we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.

Unaccustomed Earth is rich with Jhumpa Lahiri’s signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom, and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is a masterful, dazzling work of a writer at the peak of her powers.]]>
352 Jhumpa Lahiri 0676979343 Jessica 5 4.14 2008 Unaccustomed Earth
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2008
rating: 5
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date added: 2009/02/24
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<![CDATA[Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures) : True Stories from a War Zone]]> 71121 320 Kenneth Cain 0091901642 Jessica 3 4.09 2004 Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures) : True Stories from a War Zone
author: Kenneth Cain
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/02/24
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Don't read this in a public place.... people get the wrong idea and then solicit you :)
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Interpreter of Maladies 5439 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.]]>
198 Jhumpa Lahiri 0618101365 Jessica 4 4.18 1999 Interpreter of Maladies
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1999
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/02/24
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To the Power of Three 351653
From multiple-award winner Laura Lippman, one of the most acclaimed authors of crime fiction writing today, comes a tale of secrets, friendship, and betrayal that illuminates a dark and chilling event with clarity and empathy.]]>
448 Laura Lippman 0060506733 Jessica 3 3.55 2005 To the Power of Three
author: Laura Lippman
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2005
rating: 3
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date added: 2008/08/17
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<![CDATA[Case Histories (Jackson Brodie, #1)]]> 16243 1 A little girl disappears in the night.
2 A beautiful young office worker falls to a maniac's attack.
3 A new mother is overwhelmed by demands from her baby and husband - until a fit of rage creates a grisly, bloody escape.
Result : Startling connections and discoveries emerge. . . .]]>
389 Kate Atkinson 0316010707 Jessica 4 3.79 2004 Case Histories (Jackson Brodie, #1)
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 4
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date added: 2008/08/17
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The Groom to Have Been 2790140
Just as Nasr, a young man with a vibrant professional and social life in New York, begins to prepare for the arranged marriage he hopes will appease his Indian Muslim family and assure him a union as happy as his parents�, he starts to suspect that his true love has been within his reach his entire life. Nasr has known Jameela since they were children, and for nearly that long she has flouted the traditions her community holds dear. But now the rebellion that always made her seem dangerous suddenly makes him wonder if she might be his perfect match. Feeling increasingly trapped as his wedding date approaches, Nasr contemplates a drastic escape, but in the wake of 9/11, new fears and old prejudices threaten to stand between him and the promise of happiness. Current in its political themes and classic in its treatment of doomed love, The Groom to Have Been is a graceful and emotionally charged debut.]]>
399 Saher Alam 0385524609 Jessica 3 3.18 2008 The Groom to Have Been
author: Saher Alam
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2008
rating: 3
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date added: 2008/08/17
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The Washingtonienne 127740

"Just between us girls, Washington is an easy place to get laid. It's a simple matter of economics: supply and demand. Washington lacks those industries that attract the Beautiful People, such as entertainment and fashion. Instead it has the government, also know as 'Hollywood for the Ugly.' Without the model-actress population to compete with, my stock shot up when I moved to DC."



When Jacqueline Turner's fiancée gives her two days to move out of his apartment, she has no choice but to leave New York City and crash with her best friend in Washington, DC. (She can't be expected to keep herself in cute clothes while paying New York City rent, after all.) She needs a new, exciting life—not to mention real employment. Where better to get a fresh start than the nation's capital?



Alas, DC turns out to be a lot more buttoned-up and toned down than she'd hoped. It's a town where a girl has to make her own excitement—and Jacqueline Turner is just the woman for the job.

From the married presidential appointee who gives her cash after each tryst, to the lascivious Georgetown lawyer who parades her around like something out of Pretty Woman, Jackie's roster of paramours grows so complicated her friends ask her to start a blog so they can keep up. But in a small town like Washington, the line between private and public blurs very easily. Just as one of her beaux takes a lead in the race for her heart, Jackie realizes this blog idea may be more than she bargained for�



Deliciously gossipy and impossible to put down, The Washingtonienne is every bit as outrageously scandalous as the real-life exploits that inspired it.




In May, 2004, 26-year-old Jessica Cutler was thrust into the public eye when the on-line diary she kept for her friends exploded into Washington's scandale du jour. Immediately fired from her job as mail girl in the office of Senator Mike DeWine (for "unacceptable use of Senate computers"), Jessica remains unemployed in Washington, D.C.

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303 Jessica Cutler 1401308473 Jessica 1 2.88 2005 The Washingtonienne
author: Jessica Cutler
name: Jessica
average rating: 2.88
book published: 2005
rating: 1
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date added: 2008/08/17
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Inés of My Soul 3300
Valdivia's dream is to succeed where other Spaniards have failed: to become the conquerer of Chile. The natives of Chile are fearsome warriors, and the land is rumored to be barren of gold, but this suits Valdivia, who seeks only honor and glory. Together the lovers Inés Suárez and Pedro de Valdivia will build the new city of Santiago, and they will wage a bloody, ruthless war against the indigenous Chileans—the fierce local Indians led by the chief Michimalonko, and the even fiercer Mapuche from the south. The horrific struggle will change them forever, pulling each of them toward their separate destinies.

Inés of My Soul is a work of breathtaking scope: meticulously researched, it engagingly dramatizes the known events of Inés Suárez's life, crafting them into a novel full of the narrative brilliance and passion readers have come to expect from Isabel Allende.]]>
321 Isabel Allende 0061161535 Jessica 2 3.97 2006 Inés of My Soul
author: Isabel Allende
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2006
rating: 2
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date added: 2008/08/17
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The Historian 10692
Late one night in 1972, as a 16-year-old girl, she discovers a mysterious book and a sheaf of letters in her father's library—a discovery that will have dreadful and far-reaching consequences, and will send her on a journey of mind-boggling danger. While seeking clues to the secrets of her father's past and her mother's puzzling disappearance, she follows a trail from London to Istanbul to Budapest and beyond, and learns that the letters in her possession provide a link to one of the world's darkest and most intoxicating figures. Generation after generation, the legend of Dracula has enticed and eluded both historians and opportunists alike. Now a young girl undertakes the same search that ended in the death and defilement of so many others—in an attempt to save her father from an unspeakable fate.
(Fall 2005 Selection)]]>
704 Elizabeth Kostova 0751537284 Jessica 0 to-read 3.78 2005 The Historian
author: Elizabeth Kostova
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/07/14
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Pack Up the Moon 1998200 There's A Big Life Ahead Of Her. But Can She Find The Courage To Live It?

Emma is twenty-six, pretty, intelligent, and happily living with her childhood sweetheart John in a cute little Dublin apartment. Her biggest problem is that her mother won't stop nagging her to get married already. Emma and John feel like the perfect couple, their future alive with possibilities. But out of the blue, a tragedy throws her life into disarray, and Emma is suddenly, incomprehensibly, alone. As she emerges from grief, Emma has to find a whole new way of living, and her loyal friends rally round in an attempt to help.

Clodagh, Emma's lifelong friend, with whom she's shared everything from mud pies to dating disasters. Anne and Richard, more-or-less happily married and debating a move to the country. Emma's brother Noel, the young Catholic priest, finding his own faith tested even as he tries to comfort Emma. Sean, the gorgeous bad boy of a thousand one-night stands, uncomfortably aware of his and Emma's growing connection. Witty, acerbic, and sometimes downright shocking, Emma documents the stories of her friends and her own recovery from grief with a candor that engages the reader from the very first page.

With an amazing insight into the power of friendship and a wry, irreverent humor that considers no subject off-limits, talented new Irish writer Anna McPartlin tells a heartwarming story of the courage it takes to move past loss and learn to live.]]>
367 Anna McPartlin 1842232533 Jessica 3 3.90 2006 Pack Up the Moon
author: Anna McPartlin
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2008/07/01
date added: 2008/07/14
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I bought this at Target... need I say more? Pack of the Moon is about an Irish women whose longterm boyfriend dies in a freak accident. A summer read- cheesy, fun, and entertaining.
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Lost and Found 842582
What do a suburban mom and her troubled daughter, two recently divorced brothers, a pair of former child stars, born-again Christian newlyweds, and a couple of young millionaires have in common? They have all been selected to compete on Lost and Found, a daring new reality TV show. In teams of two, they will race across the globe - from Egypt to Japan, from Sweden to England - to battle for a million-dollar prize. They must decipher encrypted clues, recover mysterious artifacts, and outwit their opponents to stay in play.

What starts as a lark turns deadly serious as the number of players is whittled down, temptations beckon, and the bonds between partners strain and unravel. Before long the question is not only who will capture the final prize, but at what cost.]]>
496 Carolyn Parkhurst 0786287160 Jessica 2 3.26 2006 Lost and Found
author: Carolyn Parkhurst
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at: 2008/07/01
date added: 2008/07/14
shelves:
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Perfect for the plane, which is where I read this entire book. It's about a group of people competing in a reality TV show- a scavenger hunt around the world. It's written from various participants' perspectives including a mother-daughter team, a pair of brothers, two former child stars, and a born-again Christian couple that's trying to renounce their former gay lifestyles. It's a fast and light read.
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The Whole World Over 27646
From the author of the beloved novel Three Junes comes a rich and commanding story about the accidents, both grand and small, that determine our choices in love and marriage. Greenie, openhearted yet stubborn, devotes most of her passionate attention to her Greenwich Village bakery and her four–year–old son, George. Her husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, a traditional gay man who has become her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart.

It is at Walter’s restaurant that the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie’s coconut cake and decides to woo her away from the city to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts—and finds herself heading west without her husband. This impulsive decision will change the course of several lives within and beyond Greenie’s orbit. Alan, alone in New York, must face down his demons; Walter, eager for platonic distraction, takes in his teenage nephew. Yet Walter cannot steer clear of love trouble, and despite his enforced solitude, Alan is still surrounded by women: his powerful sister, an old flame, and an animal lover named Saga, who grapples with demons all her own. As for Greenie, living in the shadow of a charismatic politician leads to a series of unforeseen consequences that separate her from her only child. We watch as folly, chance, and determination pull all these lives together and apart over a year that culminates in the fall of the twin towers at the World Trade Center, an event that will affirm or confound the choices each character has made—or has refused to face.

Julia Glass is at her best here, weaving a glorious tapestry of lives and lifetimes, of places and people, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important, and often most fragile, connections to others. In The Whole World Over she has given us another tale that pays tribute to the extraordinary complexities of love.]]>
509 Julia Glass 0375422749 Jessica 4 3.49 2006 The Whole World Over
author: Julia Glass
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2008/07/01
date added: 2008/07/14
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I really like Julia Glass' writing style. She weaves together multiple characters who all have link whether big or small. The Whole World over takes place in NYC and New Mexico around 2000-1. It culminates with 9/11 which I was not too fond of, but she captures the true sentiments of how people in the city and across the country felt at the time. It was a dense read, but engaging throughout. I can't wait for her next book!
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<![CDATA[Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There]]> 106330
Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature? Do you work for one of those visionary software companies where people come to work wearing hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot? If so, you might be a Bobo.]]>
284 David Brooks 0684853787 Jessica 0 to-read 3.61 2000 Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
author: David Brooks
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/06/29
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Summer People 1777091 313 Brian Groh 006120997X Jessica 2 2.43 2007 Summer People
author: Brian Groh
name: Jessica
average rating: 2.43
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at: 2008/06/29
date added: 2008/06/29
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Chasing Harry Winston 426775 The Devil Wears Prada and Everyone Worth Knowing returns with the story of three best friends who vow to change their entire lives...and change them fast. Emmy is newly single, and not by choice. She was this close to the ring and the baby she's wanted her whole life when her boyfriend left her for his twenty-three-year-old personal trainer - whose fees are paid by Emmy. With her plans for the perfect white wedding in the trash, Emmy is now ordering takeout for one. Her friends insist an around-the-world sex-fueled adventure will solve all her problems - could they be right?

Leigh, a young star in the publishing business, is within striking distance of landing her dream job as senior editor and marrying her dream guy. And to top it all off, she has just purchased her dream apartment. Only when Leigh begins to edit the enfant terrible of the literary world, the brilliant and brooding Jesse Chapman, does she start to notice some cracks in her perfect life...

Adriana is the drop-dead-gorgeous daughter of a famous supermodel. She possesses the kind of feminine wiles made only in Brazil, and she never hesitates to use them. But she's about to turn thirty and - as her mother keeps reminding her - she won't have her pick of the men forever. Everyone knows beauty is ephemeral and there's always someone younger and prettier right around the corner. Suddenly she's wondering...does Mother know best?

These three very different girls have been best friends for a decade in the greatest city on earth. As they near thirty, they're looking toward their future...but despite all they've earned - first-class travel, career promotions, invites to all the right parties, and luxuries small and large - they're not quite sure they like what they see...

One Saturday night at the Waverly Inn, Adriana and Emmy make a pact: within a single year, each will drastically change her life. Leigh watches from the sidelines, not making any promises, but she'll soon discover she has the most to lose. Their friendship is forever, but everything else is on the table. Three best friends. Two resolutions. One year to pull it off.]]>
288 Lauren Weisberger 0743290119 Jessica 3 3.38 2008 Chasing Harry Winston
author: Lauren Weisberger
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2008
rating: 3
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date added: 2008/06/24
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The Year of Fog 332348
Six-year-old Emma vanished into the thick San Francisco fog. Or into the heaving Pacific. Or somewhere just beyond: to a parking lot, a stranger’s van, or a road with traffic flashing by. Devastated by guilt, haunted by her fears about becoming a stepmother, Abby refuses to believe that Emma is dead. And so she searches for clues about what happened that morning—and cannot stop the flood of memories reaching from her own childhood to illuminate that irreversible moment on the beach.

Now, as the days drag into weeks, as the police lose interest and fliers fade on telephone poles, Emma’s father finds solace in religion and scientific probability—but Abby can only wander the beaches and city streets, attempting to recover the past and the little girl she lost. With her life at a crossroads, she will leave San Francisco for a country thousands of miles away. And there, by the side of another sea, on a journey that has led her to another man and into a strange subculture of wanderers and surfers, Abby will make the most astounding discovery of all—as the truth of Emma’s disappearance unravels with stunning force.

A profoundly original novel of family, loss, and hope—of the choices we make and the choices made for us�The Year of Fog beguiles with the mysteries of time and memory even as it lays bare the deep and wondrous workings of the human heart. The result is a mesmerizing tour de force that will touch anyone who knows what it means to love a child.]]>
369 Michelle Richmond 0385340117 Jessica 0 to-read 3.46 2006 The Year of Fog
author: Michelle Richmond
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/06/24
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Black & White 25761
Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to fourteen. The Clara Series, which graced the walls of museums around the world as well as the pages of New York City tabloids that labeled the work pornographic, cast a long and inescapable shadow over its subject. At eighteen, when Clara might have entered university and begun to shape an identity beyond her sensationalized, unsought role in the New York art world, she fled to the quiet obscurity of small-town Maine, where she married and had a child, a daughter whom she has tried to shield from the central facts of her early life and her damaging role as her mother’s muse.

Fourteen years later, Ruth Dunne is dying, and Clara is summoned to her bedside. Despite her anguish and ambivalence about confronting a family life she has repressed and denied for more than a decade, Clara returns. She finds Ruth surrounded, even in her illness, by worshipful interns, protective assistants, and her conniving art dealer.

Once again, she is Clara Dunne, the object of curiosity, the girl in the photos. Except this time she has her own daughter to think about—a girl who at nine looks strikingly like the girl in Ruth’s photos—and she yearns to protect her, to insulate her from the exposure that will inevitably result when her two worlds, New York and Maine, collide.

As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro’s novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart. A brilliant examination of motherhood—a novel that pits artistic inspiration against maternal obligation and asks whether the two can ever be fully reconciled� Black & White explores the limits and duties of family loyalties, and even of love. Gripping, haunting, psychologically complex, this is Shapiro at her captivating best.]]>
272 Dani Shapiro 0375415483 Jessica 4 3.62 2007 Black & White
author: Dani Shapiro
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2007
rating: 4
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date added: 2008/06/24
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A really fast read about a woman who as a young girl was the subject of her mother's famous photographs. The book deals with mother-daughter and sibling relationships and mortality issues. It was personally enjoyable because much of it took place on the Upper West Side of NYC. Recommended for those interested in art too.
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Nineteen Minutes 2188936 455 Jodi Picoult 0743496736 Jessica 3 4.08 2007 Nineteen Minutes
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2007
rating: 3
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date added: 2008/06/24
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Jodi Picoult always captures what's it's like to be a teenager (a time in life that I am obviously interested in!). In this book, she writes about the fall out from a school shooting from various characters perspectives and makes the reader sympathetic towards even the most seemingly detestable ones. It's engaging and fast-paced. A good summer or travel read. Although, I have to admit, I HATED the ending.
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American Psycho 28676 American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.]]> 399 Bret Easton Ellis 0679735771 Jessica 3 3.82 1991 American Psycho
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1991
rating: 3
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The Jane Austen Book Club 2152 The Extraordinary New York Times Bestseller

In California's central valley, five women and one man join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they get together, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her eye for the frailties of human behavior and her ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Karen Joy Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships.

Dedicated Austenites will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through the novel, but most readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, despite two centuries of separation, unite two great writers of brilliant social comedy.

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288 Karen Joy Fowler 0452286530 Jessica 3 3.12 2004 The Jane Austen Book Club
author: Karen Joy Fowler
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.12
book published: 2004
rating: 3
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The Birth of Venus 28078
But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art.

The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.]]>
427 Sarah Dunant Jessica 4 3.81 2003 The Birth of Venus
author: Sarah Dunant
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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Bikini Season (Heart Lake, 1) 2949487
Erin enlists the help of her cooking club--Angela, Megan and Kizzy--and the Teeny Bikini Diet Club is born. The women make a pact to get slim enough to wear their bikinis to the lake by summertime, a pact that changes their lives forever. With a little help from her friends, Angela faces her fear that her marriage is crumbling. Megan confronts the self-esteem issues that have always held her back. Kizzy deals with her husband's efforts to sabotage her diet and keep her overweight. And Erin learns some important truths about love.

Pull up your favorite beach chair and savor this funny, inspiring story about being true to yourself and following your heart, and the women who enrich our lives.]]>
273 Sheila Roberts 0312370806 Jessica 2 3.49 2008 Bikini Season (Heart Lake, 1)
author: Sheila Roberts
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2008/06/01
date added: 2008/06/15
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A ridiculous beach read, but perfect for a day at the pool!
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Burning Bright 2871 Girl With a Pearl Earring, returns with another brilliantly rendered historical tale set in the waning days of eighteenth-century London.

Poet, artist, and printer William Blake works in obscurity as England is rocked by the shock waves of the French Revolution. Next door, the Kellaway family has just moved in, and country boy Jem Kellaway strikes up a tentative friendship with street–savvy Maggie Butterfield.

As their stories intertwine with Blake’s, the two children navigate the confusing and exhilarating path to adolescence, and inspire the poet to create the work that enshrined his genius.]]>
320 Tracy Chevalier 052594978X Jessica 2 3.40 2007 Burning Bright
author: Tracy Chevalier
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at: 2008/06/15
date added: 2008/06/15
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The Art of French Kissing 1013522
Well, Emma Sullivan can always figure that out later. The point is -- she's in Paris! Which would be great, except that she's stuck doing public relations for one of the hottest -- and craziest -- rock stars on the planet. Making things worse is Gabriel Francoeur, the sexy and stubborn reporter who refuses to believe her when she tells him that her client was just playing Go Fish in that hotel room with all those scantily-clad girls....

But Emma will always have Paris. The City of Light, of romance, of high fashion and of unfathomable varieties of cheese. If a girl can't reinvent herself here, there's no hope! It's time to leave the old Emma Sullivan behind and become someone courageous, exciting, successful. The type of girl who, when faced with a reporter who won't stop asking questions, knows just what to do. After all, they don't call it French kissing for nothing!]]>
338 Kristin Harmel 0446581437 Jessica 3 3.66 2007 The Art of French Kissing
author: Kristin Harmel
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2008/03/01
date added: 2008/05/25
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A perfect mindless read and great for anyone who lived/studied abroad in Paris. Totally predictable, but the kind of book you read in a day and want nothing more from.
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Abundance 100967 "Like everyone, I am born naked."

With this opening line of Naslund's compelling new novel, a very human Marie Antoinette invites readers to live her story as she herself experiences it. From the lush gardens of Versailles to the lights and gaiety of Paris, the verdant countryside of France, and finally the stark and terrifying isolation of a prison cell, the young queen's life is joyful, poignant, and harrowing by turns. As her world of unprecedented royal splendor crumbles, the charming Marie Antoinette matures into a heroine of inspiring stature, one whose nobility arises not from the circumstance of her birth but from her courageous spirit.

Marie Antoinette was a child of fourteen when her mother, the Empress of Austria, arranged for her to leave her family and her country to become the wife of the fifteen-year-old Dauphin, the future King of France. Coming of age in the most public of arenas, the young queen embraces her new family and the French people, and she is embraced in return. Eager to be a good wife and strong queen, she shows her new husband nothing but love and encouragement, though he repeatedly fails to consummate their marriage and in doing so, fails to give her the thing she—and the people of France—desires most: a child and an heir to the throne.

Deeply disappointed and isolated in her own intimate circle apart from the social life of the court, the queen allows herself to remain ignorant of the country's growing economic and political crises. She entrusts her soul to her women friends, her music teacher, her hairdresser, the ambassador from Austria, and a certain Swedish count so handsome that admirers label him "the Picture." When her innocent and well-chaperoned pilgrimage to watch the sun rise is viciously misrepresented in satiric pamphlets as a drunken orgy, the people begin to turn against her. Poor harvests, bitter winters, war debts, and poverty precipitate rebellion and revenge as the royal family and many nobles are caught up in a murderous time known as "the Terror."

With penetrant insight into new historical scholarship and with wondrous narrative skill, Naslund offers an intimate, fresh, and dramatic re-creation of this compelling woman that goes beyond popular myth. Abundance reveals a compassionate and spontaneous Marie Antoinette who rejected the formality and rigid protocol of the court; an enchanting and tenderhearted outsider who was loved by her adopted homeland and people until she became the target of revolutionary cruelty and violence; a dethroned queen whose depth of character sustained her in even the worst of times.

Once again, Sena Jeter Naslund has shed new light on an important moment of historical change and made that time as real to us as the one we are living now. Exquisitely detailed, beautifully written, heartbreaking and powerful, Abundance is a novel that is impossible to put down.]]>
556 Sena Jeter Naslund 0060825391 Jessica 0 to-read 3.74 2006 Abundance
author: Sena Jeter Naslund
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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The Fountainhead 2122
This modern classic is the story of intransigent young architect Howard Roark, whose integrity was as unyielding as granite...of Dominique Francon, the exquisitely beautiful woman who loved Roark passionately, but married his worst enemy...and of the fanatic denunciation unleashed by an enraged society against a great creator. As fresh today as it was then, Rand’s provocative novel presents one of the most challenging ideas in all of fiction—that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress...

“A writer of great power. She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly...This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.”—The New York Times]]>
704 Ayn Rand Jessica 4 3.87 1943 The Fountainhead
author: Ayn Rand
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1943
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[The da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)]]> 968 The da Vinci Code, The da Vinci Code, The da Vinci Code, and The da Vinci Code

While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci -- clues visible for all to see -- yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.

Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion -- an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci, among others.

In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who seems to anticipate their every move. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory's ancient secret -- and an explosive historical truth -- will be lost forever.

The Da Vinci Code heralds the arrival of a new breed of lightning-paced, intelligent thriller utterly unpredictable right up to its stunning conclusion.]]>
489 Dan Brown Jessica 4 3.92 2003 The da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)
author: Dan Brown
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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date added: 2008/05/25
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<![CDATA[Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer]]> 7742 Ahab's Wife is a remarkable epic spanning a rich, eventful, and dramatic life. Inspired by a brief passage in Moby Dick, it is the story of Una, exiled as a child to live in a lighthouse, removed from the physical and emotional abuse of a religion-mad father. It is the romantic adventure of a young woman setting sail in a cabin boy's disguise to encounter darkness, wonder, and catastrophe; the story of a devoted wife who witnesses her husband's destruction by obsession and madness. Ultimately it is the powerful and moving story of a woman's triumph over tragedy and loss through her courage, creativity, and intelligence.]]> 668 Sena Jeter Naslund 0060838744 Jessica 4 4.03 1999 Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer
author: Sena Jeter Naslund
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1999
rating: 4
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date added: 2008/05/25
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Straight Man 414298 391 Richard Russo 0375701907 Jessica 4 4.01 1997 Straight Man
author: Richard Russo
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1997
rating: 4
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date added: 2008/05/25
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Into the Wild 1845 Librarian's Note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

In April, 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, a party of moose hunters found his decomposed body. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw away the maps. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.]]>
207 Jon Krakauer 0385486804 Jessica 5 4.01 1996 Into the Wild
author: Jon Krakauer
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1996
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster]]> 1898
Into Thin Air is the definitive account of the deadliest season in the history of Everest by the acclaimed journalist and author of the bestseller Into the Wild. On assignment for Outside Magazine to report on the growing commercialization of the mountain, Krakauer, an accomplished climber, went to the Himalayas as a client of Rob Hall, the most respected high-altitude guide in the world. A rangy, thirty-five-year-old New Zealander, Hall had summited Everest four times between 1990 and 1995 and had led thirty-nine climbers to the top. Ascending the mountain in close proximity to Hall's team was a guided expedition led by Scott Fischer, a forty-year-old American with legendary strength and drive who had climbed the peak without supplemental oxygen in 1994. But neither Hall nor Fischer survived the rogue storm that struck in May 1996.

Krakauer examines what it is about Everest that has compelled so many people -- including himself -- to throw caution to the wind, ignore the concerns of loved ones, and willingly subject themselves to such risk, hardship, and expense. Written with emotional clarity and supported by his unimpeachable reporting, Krakauer's eyewitness account of what happened on the roof of the world is a singular achievement.]]>
368 Jon Krakauer Jessica 4 4.24 1997 Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
author: Jon Krakauer
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1997
rating: 4
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date added: 2008/05/25
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A Spot of Bother 4701
At 61, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels and listening to a bit of light jazz. Then his tempestuous daughter, Katie, announces that she is getting re-married, to the deeply inappropriate Ray. Her family is not pleased � as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has “strangler’s hands.� Katie can’t decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband’s ex-colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials.

Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.

The way these damaged people fall apart � and come together � as a family is the true subject of Haddon’s disturbing yet amusing portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.

A SPOT OF BOTHER is Mark Haddon’s unforgettable follow-up to the internationally beloved bestseller THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME. Here the madness � literally � of family life proves rich comic fodder for Haddon’s crackling prose and bittersweet insights into misdirected love.]]>
354 Mark Haddon 0385520514 Jessica 2 3.50 2006 A Spot of Bother
author: Mark Haddon
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2006
rating: 2
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<![CDATA[A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League]]> 69559
In September 1995, after years of near superhuman dedication, he realizes that ambition when he begins as a freshman at Brown University. In this updated edition, A Hope in the Unseen chronicles Cedric’s odyssey during his last two years of high school, follows him through his difficult first year at Brown, and now tells the story of his subsequent successes in college and the world of work.]]>
373 Suskind 0767901266 Jessica 0 3.95 1998 A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League
author: Suskind
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/05/25
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Disgrace 6192 220 J.M. Coetzee 0143036378 Jessica 3 3.86 1999 Disgrace
author: J.M. Coetzee
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1999
rating: 3
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date added: 2008/05/25
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