en-US Wed, 07 Aug 2024 20:43:11 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 54479 252 Jules Verne 014044906X Peter 3 3.95 1872
author: Jules Verne
name: Peter
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1872
rating: 3
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]]> 6442878
Alongside A DISGRACEFUL AFFAIR, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Stephen Crane, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, and Oscar Wilde to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful boxset in the aim to attract contemporary fans of short fiction to these revered masters of the form. Also, in each of these selections will appear a story from one of the new collections being published in 2009. A story from Barb Johnson's forthcoming collection will be printed at the back of this volume.]]> 224 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0061773743 Peter 5 3.98 1862
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Peter
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1862
rating: 5
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]]> 15730101 The Call of Cthulhu is a harrowing tale of the weakness of the human mind when confronted by powers and intelligences from beyond our world.]]> 43 H.P. Lovecraft Peter 4 3.97 1928
author: H.P. Lovecraft
name: Peter
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1928
rating: 4
read at: 2019/07/21
date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> 3188964 The Doors of Perception is a philosophical essay, released as a book, by Aldous Huxley. First published in 1954, it details his experiences when taking mescaline.

The book takes the form of Huxley's recollection of a mescaline trip that took place over the course of an afternoon in May 1953. The book takes its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'.

Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision". He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion.]]> 208 Aldous Huxley Peter 0 to-read 3.91 1956
author: Aldous Huxley
name: Peter
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> 60581087
Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.]]> 385 Cormac McCarthy 0593535227 Peter 5 3.58 2022
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Peter
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/20
date added: 2024/02/09
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]]> 38474
Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.]]> 448 James Baldwin 0141186372 Peter 5 4.32 1962
author: James Baldwin
name: Peter
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1962
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/09
date added: 2023/07/27
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]]> 60526802
1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.]]> 190 Cormac McCarthy 0307269000 Peter 5 3.83 2022
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Peter
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/11
date added: 2022/12/11
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]]> 9557 alternate cover can be found here

Sumire is in love with a woman seventeen years her senior. But whereas Miu is glamorous and successful, Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second-hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Kerouac novel.

Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire, and should she ever tell Miu how she feels for her? Meanwhile K wonders whether he should confess his own unrequited love for Sumire.

Then, a desperate Miu calls from a small Greek island: Sumire has mysteriously vanished...]]> 229 Haruki Murakami 0099448475 Peter 4 3.85 1999
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Peter
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2022/11/13
date added: 2022/12/11
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]]> 62069739
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature

A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.Ìę

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives BenjamĂ­n Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.]]> 193 BenjamĂ­n Labatut Peter 5 4.10 2020
author: BenjamĂ­n Labatut
name: Peter
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/27
date added: 2022/12/11
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]]> 15808720
They call themselves “Captains of the Sands,â€� a gang of orphans and runaways who live by their wits and daring in the torrid slums and sleazy back alleys of Bahia. Led by fifteen-year-old “Bullet,â€� the band—including a crafty liar named “Legless,â€� the intellectual “Professor,â€� and the sexually precocious “Cat”—pulls off heists and escapades against the right and privileged of Brazil. But when a public outcry demands the capture of the “little criminals,â€� the fate of these children becomes a poignant, intensely moving drama of love and freedom in a shackled land.

Captains of the Sands captures the rich culture, vivid emotions, and wild landscape of Bahia with penetrating authenticity and brilliantly displays the genius of Brazil’s most acclaimed author.]]> 288 Jorge Amado 014310635X Peter 4 3.99 1937
author: Jorge Amado
name: Peter
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1937
rating: 4
read at: 2015/04/28
date added: 2022/07/23
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]]> 95819 The only comprehensive gathering of Frost's published poetry, this affordable volume offers the entire contents of his eleven books of verse, from A Boy's Will (1913) to In the Clearing (1962). Frost scholar Lathem, who was also a close friend of the four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, scrupulously annotated the 350-plus poems in this collection, which has been the standard edition of Frost's work since it first appeared in 1969.
]]> 607 Robert Frost 0805005013 Peter 4 4.24 1969
author: Robert Frost
name: Peter
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2021/07/10
date added: 2022/07/14
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]]> 48944693
In addition to works written over a span of many years, plus one new poem and one new essay, the book contains David s personal reflections for many of the pieces, providing deeper context to its meaning.

In some ways an artistic representation of a close circle of companionship to the work and to the man : edited by his wife, and designed and typeset by close friends Edward Wates and John Nielson, the book forms an elegant testament to David Whyte's most closely-held understanding - that human life cannot be apportioned out as one thing or another; rather, it is best lived as a living conversation, a way between and beyond, made beautiful by darkness as well as light, at its essence both deeply solitary and profoundly communal.]]> 119 David Whyte 1932887504 Peter 5 4.63
author: David Whyte
name: Peter
average rating: 4.63
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/17
date added: 2022/07/14
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]]> 8837 ]]> 229 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 0156027496 Peter 5 4.18 1939
author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
name: Peter
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1939
rating: 5
read at: 2021/12/31
date added: 2022/07/14
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]]> 63033
The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long timeâ€� (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.

A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.]]> 577 Roberto Bolaño 0374191484 Peter 0 currently-reading 4.12 1998
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: Peter
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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]]> 6514 294 Sylvia Plath 0571268862 Peter 4 4.05 1963
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Peter
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1963
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/16
date added: 2022/07/14
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]]> 153426 173 Clarice Lispector 0816617120 Peter 4 4.20 1964
author: Clarice Lispector
name: Peter
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1964
rating: 4
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date added: 2022/07/14
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]]> 62798 The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, celebrated Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima creates a haunting and vivid portrait of a young man’s obsession with idealized beauty and his destructive quest to possess it fully.

Mizoguchi, an ostracized stutterer, develops a childhood fascination with Kyoto’s famous Golden Temple. While an acolyte at the temple, he fixates on the structure’s aesthetic perfection and it becomes the one and only object of his desire. But as Mizoguchi begins to perceive flaws in the temple, he determines that the only true path to beauty lies in an act of horrendous violence. Based on a real incident that occurred in 1950, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion brilliantly portrays the passions and agonies of a young man in postwar Japan, bringing to the subject the erotic imagination and instinct for the dramatic moment that marked Mishima as one of the towering makers of modern fiction. With an introduction by Donald Keene; Translated from the Japanese by Ivan Morris.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

]]> 247 Yukio Mishima 0679433155 Peter 5 4.04 1956
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Peter
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1956
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/07/14
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]]> 106096 Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. CĂ©line's influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today's "black comedy."

Death on the Installment Plan is the story of young Ferdinand's first 18 years. His life is one of hatred, of the grinding struggle of small shopkeepers to survive, of childhood sensations and fantasies—lusty, scatological, violent, but also poetic. There is a running battle with his ineffectual insurance clerk of a father, with his mother, who lives and whines around the junkshop she runs for the boys benefit; there is also the superbly funny Meanwell College in England, where the boy went briefly, a Dickensian, nightmare institution. Always there is humiliation, failure, and boredom, at least until he teams up with the "scientist" des Pereires. This inventor, con-man, incorrigible optimist—whose last project is to grow enormous potatoes by electricity—rescues him, if only temporarily; for the reader he is one of the most lovable charlatans in French literature.]]> 592 Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line 0811200175 Peter 0 to-read 4.25 1936
author: Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line
name: Peter
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1936
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/08/03
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]]> 383602
The setting is Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. The Telfairs are stonemasons and have been for generations. Ben Telfair has given up his education to apprentice himself to his grandfather, Papaw, a man who knows that "true masonry is not held together by cement but...by the warp of the world."

Out of the love that binds these two men and the gulf that separates them from the Telfairs who have forsaken � or dishonored � the family trade, Cormac McCarthy has crafted a drama that bears all the hallmarks of his great fiction: precise observation of the physical world; language that has the bite of common speech and the force of Biblical prose; and a breathtaking command of the art of storytelling.]]> 144 Cormac McCarthy 0679762809 Peter 3 3.88 1994
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Peter
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2021/04/18
date added: 2021/04/21
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]]> 6149 Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.]]> 325 Toni Morrison Peter 5 3.96 1987
author: Toni Morrison
name: Peter
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1987
rating: 5
read at: 2020/08/28
date added: 2021/01/20
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]]> 7805
Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.

Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.]]> 246 Vladimir Nabokov Peter 4 4.17 1962
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Peter
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1962
rating: 4
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date added: 2021/01/20
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]]> 37415 238 Zora Neale Hurston 0061120065 Peter 0 to-read 3.98 1937
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Peter
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1937
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/01/07
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]]> 10108463 The Devil All the Time follows a cast of characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.â€� There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill­ers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.]]> 261 Donald Ray Pollock 038553504X Peter 0 to-read 4.13 2011
author: Donald Ray Pollock
name: Peter
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/01/05
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]]> 80176 Winesburg, Ohio depicts the strange, secret lives of the inhabitants of a small town. In "Hands," Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented by his hands. In "Adventure," lonely Alice Hindman impulsively walks naked into the night rain. Threaded through the stories is the viewpoint of George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who, like his creator, stands witness to the dark and despairing dealings of a community of isolated people.]]> 240 Sherwood Anderson 0192839772 Peter 0 to-read 3.83 1919
author: Sherwood Anderson
name: Peter
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1919
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/01/03
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]]> 546644
Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social trends of late 1960s England. While around them crime and unrest surge, the Lovatts are certain that their old-fashioned contentment can protect them from the world outside—until the birth of their fifth baby.

Gruesomely goblin-like in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong and violent, Ben has nothing innocent or infant-like about him. As he grows older and more terrifying, Harriet finds she cannot love him, David cannot bring himself to touch him, and their four older children are afraid of him.

Understanding that he will never be accepted anywhere, Harriet and David are torn between their instincts as parents and their shocked reaction to this fierce and unlovable child whose existence shatters their belief in a benign world.]]> 133 Doris Lessing 0679721827 Peter 0 to-read 3.61 1988
author: Doris Lessing
name: Peter
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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]]> 130115
Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant, Moses. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses -- master and slave -- are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion. Their psychic tension explodes in an electrifying scene that ends this disturbing tale of racial strife in colonial South Africa.

The Grass Is Singing blends Lessing's imaginative vision with her own vividly remembered early childhood to recreate the quiet horror of a woman's struggle against a ruthless fate.]]> 208 Doris Lessing 0002257556 Peter 0 to-read 3.84 1950
author: Doris Lessing
name: Peter
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1950
rating: 0
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]]> 153747 "It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it."

So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby-Dick is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

This edition of Moby-Dick, which reproduces the definitive text of the novel, includes invaluable explanatory notes, along with maps, illustrations, and a glossary of nautical terms.]]> 720 Herman Melville 0142437247 Peter 5 3.53 1851
author: Herman Melville
name: Peter
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1851
rating: 5
read at: 2020/12/07
date added: 2020/12/07
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]]> 59780
During the course of these stories Calvino toys with continuous creation, the transformation of matter, and the expanding and contracting reaches of space and time. He succeeds in relating complex scientific concepts to the ordinary reactions of common humanity.

William Weaver's excellent translation won a National Book Award in 1969

“Naturally, we were all there," old Qfwfq said, "where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?â€�

The distance of the moon --
At daybreak --
A sign in space --
All at one point --
Without colors --
Games without end --
The aquatic uncle --
How much shall we bet? --
The dinosaurs --
The form of space --
The light-years --
The spiral.]]> 153 Italo Calvino 0156226006 Peter 0 4.23 1965
author: Italo Calvino
name: Peter
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1965
rating: 0
read at: 2020/05/18
date added: 2020/12/02
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]]> 34956735 11 Cormac McCarthy Peter 5 4.24 2017
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Peter
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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date added: 2020/10/29
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]]> 23878
Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to try and stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society--not just a pair of murderers—is put on trial.]]> 120 Gabriel García Márquez 140003471X Peter 0 to-read 3.98 1981
author: Gabriel GarcĂ­a MĂĄrquez
name: Peter
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/10/22
shelves: to-read
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]]> 38355410
Castle Rock is a small town, where word gets around quickly. That's why Scott Carey wants to confide only in his friend Doctor Bob Ellis about his strange condition he's losing weight without getting thinner, and the scales register the same whether he is in his clothes or out of them, no matter how heavy they are.

Scott also has new neighbors who have opened a "fine dining experience" in town, although it's an experience being shunned by the locals: Deirdre McComb and her wife Missy Donaldson don't exactly conform to a lifestyle the community approves of. And now Scott seems trapped in a feud with the couple over their dogs dropping their business on his lawn. Missy may be warm and friendly, but Deirdre is as cold as ice.

As the town prepares for its annual Thanksgiving 12K run, Scott begins to understand the prejudices the women face, and tries to help. Unlikely alliances form, and the mystery of Scott's affliction brings out the best in people who have indulged the worst in themselves and others.

From the master storyteller Stephen King comes this compelling tale about finding common ground despite differences, a magical story with deep resonance for our time.]]> 146 Stephen King 1982102314 Peter 4 3.59 2018
author: Stephen King
name: Peter
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2020/10/04
date added: 2020/10/04
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]]> 1723385 256 Gil Scott-Heron 0862415284 Peter 0 to-read 3.74 1970
author: Gil Scott-Heron
name: Peter
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/09/12
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]]> 12985
Each edition includes:
� Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play

� Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play

� Scene-by-scene plot summaries

� A key to famous lines and phrases

� An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language

� An essay by an outstanding scholar providing a modern perspective on the play

� Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books]]> 218 William Shakespeare Peter 4 3.78 1611
author: William Shakespeare
name: Peter
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1611
rating: 4
read at: 2020/09/06
date added: 2020/09/06
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]]> 26220336 133 Cormac McCarthy Peter 5 4.38
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Peter
average rating: 4.38
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2020/08/13
date added: 2020/08/13
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]]> 464260 The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,â€� written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle
all presented in searing, brilliant prose,â€� The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.]]> 106 James Baldwin 067974472X Peter 5 4.55 1963
author: James Baldwin
name: Peter
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2020/06/28
date added: 2020/07/11
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]]> 10975 366 William Faulkner Peter 5 3.86 1929
author: William Faulkner
name: Peter
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1929
rating: 5
read at: 2020/05/01
date added: 2020/05/01
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]]> 11989
It tells the story from the point of view of a narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown until the start of the last chapter, chapter 5 of part 5. The novel presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author's distinctive absurdist point of view.

The book tells a gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.

The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus' objection to the label. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their destinies. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka's, especially in The Trial, whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings; the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.]]> 308 Albert Camus Peter 5 4.05 1947
author: Albert Camus
name: Peter
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1947
rating: 5
read at: 2020/04/20
date added: 2020/04/20
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]]> 18423 The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants spend most of their time without a gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.

Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.]]> 304 Ursula K. Le Guin Peter 0 currently-reading 4.11 1969
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Peter
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/25
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 340793 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 0156787334.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister. A sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling. In this classic essay, Virginia Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have some money and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.]]> 114 Virginia Woolf Peter 5 4.07 1929
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Peter
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1929
rating: 5
read at: 2020/03/25
date added: 2020/03/25
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]]> 166997
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.]]> 292 John Williams 1590171993 Peter 5 4.36 1965
author: John Williams
name: Peter
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1965
rating: 5
read at: 2020/03/04
date added: 2020/03/07
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]]> 11229
In exposing the jumble of motivations that drive Arrowby and the other characters, Iris Murdoch lays bare "the truth of untruth"--the human vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world. Played out against a vividly rendered landscape and filled with allusions to myth and magic, Charles's confrontation with the tidal rips of love and forgiveness is one of Murdoch's most moving and powerful novels.]]> 528 Iris Murdoch 014118616X Peter 0 to-read 3.95 1978
author: Iris Murdoch
name: Peter
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/03/02
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]]> 53111 Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (If I cried out, who would hear me up there, among the angelic orders?). He wrote these words, the opening of the first Duino Elegy, in his notebook, then went inside to continue what was to be his major opus—completely only after another ten, tormented years of effort—and one of the literary masterpieces of the century. Duino Elegies speaks in a voice that is both intimate and majestic on the mysteries of human life and our attempt, in the words of the translator David Young, “to use our self-consciousness to some advantage: to transcend, through art and the imagination, our self-deception and our fear.”]]> 204 Rainer Maria Rilke 0393328848 Peter 0 to-read 4.45 1922
author: Rainer Maria Rilke
name: Peter
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1922
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 938212 246 Charles Portis 0879519312 Peter 0 to-read 3.83 1979
author: Charles Portis
name: Peter
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 7445 THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

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

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

The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.]]> 288 Jeannette Walls 074324754X Peter 0 to-read 4.32 2005
author: Jeannette Walls
name: Peter
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/02/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 22522805
The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years.

Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in nearly a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge, and war.

Included on TIME Magazine's "THE 100 BEST FANTASY BOOKS OF ALL TIME"]]> 317 Kazuo Ishiguro 030727103X Peter 4 3.56 2015
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Peter
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2020/02/21
date added: 2020/02/21
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]]> 248
Big Sur is the portrait of a place one of the most colorful in the U.S. and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (and writers who didn't write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (and the not-so-saintly looking for sex-cults or celebrity), sophisticated children and adult innocents; geniuses, cranks and the unclassifiable.

Henry Miller writes with a buoyancy and brimming energy that are infectious. He has a fine touch for comedy. But this is also a serious book the testament of a free spirit who has broken through the restraints and cliches of modern life to find within himself his own kind of paradise.

]]> 400 Henry Miller 0811201074 Peter 0 to-read 4.04 1957
author: Henry Miller
name: Peter
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/02/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 12395 Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.]]> 453 Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line 0811216543 Peter 0 to-read 4.23 1932
author: Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line
name: Peter
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1932
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29906980 Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary experience unlike any other—for no one but Saunders could conceive it.

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president says at the time. "God has called him home." Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy's body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction's ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices—living and dead, historical and invented—to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?]]> 368 George Saunders 0812995341 Peter 0 to-read 3.75 2017
author: George Saunders
name: Peter
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/02/15
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]]> 162332 This is an alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679750154

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea tells the tale of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call "objectivity." When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.]]> 181 Yukio Mishima Peter 5 3.87 1963
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Peter
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/11
date added: 2020/02/11
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]]> 43412920
A scorching indictment of America’s barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder—and a revolution in the novel.

It’s also very, very funny.]]> 1022 Lucy Ellmann 191029697X Peter 0 to-read 3.90 2019
author: Lucy Ellmann
name: Peter
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/02/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 888888
McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.]]> 1192 Joseph McElroy 1564780236 Peter 0 to-read 4.11 1987
author: Joseph McElroy
name: Peter
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/02/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> 24583
Unlike his brother Sid, Tom receives "lickings" from his Aunt Polly; ever the mischief-maker, would rather play hooky than attend school and often sneaks out his bedroom window at night to adventure with his friend, Huckleberry Finn ­ the town's social outcast. Tom, despite his dread of schooling, is extremely clever and would normally get away with his pranks if Sid were not such a "tattle-tale."

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

Excerpt:
"TOM!"
No answer.
"TOM!"
No answer.
"What's gone with that boy, ÌęI wonder? You TOM!"
No answer.
The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never lookedÌęthroughÌęthem for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not service—she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:
"Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll�"
She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.
"I never did see the beat of that boy!"]]> 244 Mark Twain Peter 5 3.92 1876
author: Mark Twain
name: Peter
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1876
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/05
date added: 2020/02/05
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]]> 59924
In a future world racked by violence and environmental catastrophes, George Orr wakes up one day to discover that his dreams have the ability to alter reality. He seeks help from Dr. William Haber, a psychiatrist who immediately grasps the power George wields. Soon George must preserve reality itself as Dr. Haber becomes adept at manipulating George's dreams for his own purposes.

The Lathe of Heaven is an eerily prescient novel from award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin that masterfully addresses the dangers of power and humanity's self-destructiveness, questioning the nature of reality itself. It is a classic of the science fiction genre.]]> 176 Ursula K. Le Guin 0060512741 Peter 5 4.12 1971
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: Peter
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1971
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/03
date added: 2020/02/03
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]]> 955662 parents to a town by the sea. The next few months are full of adventures--adjusting to a new home, a trip back to the hills for a visit, Popo's work as a carpenter's apprentice, the children's fun with a wondrous kits made by their father, and even a trip to the lighthouse at the end of the island
and an amazing tropical storm. When Popo and Fifina was first published in 1932, it was greeted with universal approval. The New York Times praised its "simple home-like atmosphere" and suggested that all children's books "should be written by poets." It has been a favorite among children, parents,
and teachers for more than two decades, and now this new edition introduces its magic to a new generation.]]> 128 Arna Bontemps 0195087658 Peter 0 to-read 3.43 1932
author: Arna Bontemps
name: Peter
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1932
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/02/02
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]]> 46114 The Waves introduces six characters—three men and three women—who are grappling with the death of a beloved friend, Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Virginia Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing them through their thoughts and interior soliloquies. As their understanding of nature’s trials grows, the chorus of narrative voices blends together in miraculous harmony, remarking not only on the inevitable death of individuals but on the eternal connection of everyone. The novel that most epitomizes Virginia Woolf’s theories of fiction in the working form, The Waves is an amazing book very much ahead of its time. It is a poetic dreamscape, visual, experimental, and thrilling.]]> 297 Virginia Woolf 0156949601 Peter 5 4.17 1931
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Peter
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1931
rating: 5
read at: 2020/01/29
date added: 2020/01/29
shelves:
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]]> 257498 112 William S. Burroughs 0142000256 Peter 0 to-read 3.84 1986
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Peter
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/01/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 23942 160 William S. Burroughs 0330300164 Peter 0 to-read 3.56 1985
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Peter
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/01/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 4016515 Ìę
Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.

Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son.

Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a “lifelong endeavor,â€� or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice–Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women she considers her extended family.

Like the rest of her remarkable work, Letter to My Daughter entertains and teaches; it is a book to cherish, savor, re-read, and share.

“I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you.”—from Letter to My Daughter]]> 192 Maya Angelou 1400066123 Peter 0 to-read 4.09 1987
author: Maya Angelou
name: Peter
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/01/02
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]]> 18749 A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,â€� Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.

With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor’s beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.

Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race—and the ways in which love can complicate them all. Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise and the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place, bringing us one of the most powerful, dramatic, and intensely emotional pictures of modern Africa that we have ever had.]]> 435 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 1400044162 Peter 0 to-read 4.34 2006
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Peter
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/01/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 5587960
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, which critics hailed as "one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years" (Baltimore Sun), with "prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes" (The Boston Globe); The Washington Post called her "the twenty-first-century daughter of Chinua Achebe." Her award-winning Half of a Yellow Sun became an instant classic upon its publication three years later, once again putting her tremendous gifts - graceful storytelling, knowing compassion, and fierce insight into her characters' hearts - on display. Now, in her most intimate and seamlessly crafted work to date, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.

In "A Private Experience," a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she's been pushing away. In "Tomorrow is Too Far," a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother's death. The young mother at the center of "Imitation" finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home. And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to reexamine them.

Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie's signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. The Thing Around Your Neck is a resounding confirmation of the prodigious literary powers of one of our most essential writers.]]> 218 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 0307271072 Peter 0 to-read 4.24 2008
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Peter
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/01/02
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]]> 59950 Librarian's note: An alternate cover of this ISBN can be found here.

From the Nobel Prize-winning writer and acclaimed author of Snow Country comes a beautiful rendering of the predicament of old age—about an elderly Tokyo businessman who must face the failures of his memory and the sudden upsurges of passion that illuminate the end of a life.

“A rich, complicated novelâ€�. Of all modern Japanese fiction, Kawabata’s is the closest to poetry.â€� â€�The New York Times Book Review

By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo’s life: his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the stirrings of desire. Out of this translucent web of attachments, Kawabata has crafted a novel that is a powerful, serenely observed meditation on the relentless march of time.

Translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker]]> 276 Yasunari Kawabata 0679762647 Peter 0 to-read 3.92 1954
author: Yasunari Kawabata
name: Peter
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1954
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/01/02
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]]> 7437 Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, a book that redefined not just literature but American culture. An unnerving tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, its formal innovation, taboo subject matter, and tour de force execution have exerted a significant influence on authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson; on the relationship of art and obscenity; and on the shape of music, film, and media generally. Naked Lunch: The Restored Text includes many editorial corrections to errors present in previous editions, and incorporates Burroughs’s notes on the text, several essays he wrote over the years about the book, and an appendix of 20 percent new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript, which predates the first published version. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a valuable and fresh experience of this classic of our culture.]]> 289 William S. Burroughs 0802140181 Peter 0 to-read 3.48 1959
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Peter
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1959
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/12/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> 100793 Wandering, a love letter to this magic-garden world that can be read as a meditation on his attempt to begin a new life. His pure prose, his heartfelt lyricism, and his love for the old earth, for its blessings that renew themselves, all sing in this serene book.

The first German edition of Wandering included facsimiles of fourteen watercolor landscapes. Hesse's painting had blossomed in the southern countryside and he even toyed with the idea "that I might still succeed in escaping literature entirely and making a living at the more appealing trade of painter." Unfortunately, his original pictures for Wandering have disappeared; this edition reproduces in black-and-white the full-color reproductions of the 1920 edition.]]> 119 Hermann Hesse 0224008048 Peter 4 4.20 1920
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Peter
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1920
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/31
date added: 2019/12/31
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]]> 13175692
Innsmouth is a dilapidated seaside town with secrets as a hybrid race of half-human and half-amphibian creatures worship the gods of Cthulhu and Dagon�

Written in 1931, and published by the Visionary Publishing Company some five years later.]]> 158 H.P. Lovecraft 1450562795 Peter 3 4.14 1936
author: H.P. Lovecraft
name: Peter
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1936
rating: 3
read at: 2019/07/30
date added: 2019/12/28
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]]> 410 547 Thomas Pynchon 0060930217 Peter 4 4.01 1963
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Peter
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1963
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/28
date added: 2019/12/28
shelves:
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]]> 59716
As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.]]> 209 Virginia Woolf Peter 0 to-read 3.81 1927
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Peter
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1927
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/11/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 46164 Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character, Tender Is the Night is lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative.]]> 430 F. Scott Fitzgerald Peter 0 to-read 3.81 1934
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Peter
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1934
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/11/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6288
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,â€� are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.]]> 241 Cormac McCarthy 0307265439 Peter 5 3.99 2006
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Peter
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2019/11/04
date added: 2019/11/05
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]]> 8753823 The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by one of America's finest, most celebrated novelists.ÌęÌęSet is a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father.ÌęÌęTogether with Rattner's Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence, they enact a drama that seems born of the land itself.ÌęÌęAll three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization.From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 246 Cormac McCarthy 0307762505 Peter 4 3.23 1965
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Peter
average rating: 3.23
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at: 2019/10/30
date added: 2019/10/30
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]]> 29780253
Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parentsâ€� indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.]]> 289 Trevor Noah 0385689225 Peter 5 4.48 2016
author: Trevor Noah
name: Peter
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2019/10/16
date added: 2019/10/17
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]]> 27494 624 Walt Whitman Peter 4 4.12 1855
author: Walt Whitman
name: Peter
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1855
rating: 4
read at: 2019/10/12
date added: 2019/10/12
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]]> 16631 Steppenwolf is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hesse's searching philosophy and extraordinary sense of humanity as he tells of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope. Yet his novel can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of the intellectual hypocrisy of the period. As Hesse himself remarked, "Of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any of the others".]]> 256 Hermann Hesse 0140282580 Peter 4 4.15 1927
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Peter
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1927
rating: 4
read at: 2019/09/29
date added: 2019/09/29
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]]> 10979 Light in August, a novel that contrasts stark tragedy with hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, which features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, a lonely outcast haunted by visions of Confederate glory; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.]]> 507 William Faulkner 0679732268 Peter 5 3.93 1932
author: William Faulkner
name: Peter
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2019/09/09
date added: 2019/09/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 6186000 246 Joel McIver 1847727093 Peter 3 3.55 2009
author: Joel McIver
name: Peter
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2019/08/05
date added: 2019/08/11
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This book is awesome for extended quotes from band members on various topics, but it reads like an extended magazine article. Worth it if you like the band.
]]> 32767 At the Mountains of Madness. The deliberately told and increasingly chilling recollection of an Antarctic expedition's uncanny discoveries --and their encounter with an untold menace in the ruins of a lost civilization--is a milestone of macabre literature.

This Definitive Edition of At the Mountains of Madness (The Modern Library) also includes Lovecraft's long essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature."]]> 194 H.P. Lovecraft 0812974417 Peter 5 3.85 1931
author: H.P. Lovecraft
name: Peter
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1931
rating: 5
read at: 2019/07/27
date added: 2019/07/27
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]]> 77013 As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members -- including Addie herself -- as well as others; the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, As I Lay Dying is a true 20th-century classic.

This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.]]> 288 William Faulkner Peter 5 3.71 1930
author: William Faulkner
name: Peter
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1930
rating: 5
read at: 2019/07/20
date added: 2019/07/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 71943 201 Hermann Hesse 0312422636 Peter 0 to-read 3.90 1904
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Peter
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1904
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/07/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 414
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700Ìętitles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theÌęseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateÌętranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 385 Thomas Pynchon 0141180633 Peter 5 3.79 1990
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Peter
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at: 2019/06/28
date added: 2019/06/28
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]]> 7785194 The End of Faith, ignited a worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In the aftermath, Harris discovered that most people - from religious fundamentalists to non-believing scientists - agree on one point: science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. Indeed, our failure to address questions of meaning and morality through science has now become the most common justification for religious faith. It is also the primary reason why so many secularists and religious moderates feel obligated to "respect" the hardened superstitions of their more devout neighbors.

In this explosive new book, Sam Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values, arguing that most people are simply mistaken about the relationship between morality and the rest of human knowledge. Harris urges us to think about morality in terms of human and animal well-being, viewing the experiences of conscious creatures as peaks and valleys on a "moral landscape." Because there are definite facts to be known about where we fall on this landscape, Harris foresees a time when science will no longer limit itself to merely describing what people do in the name of "morality"; in principle, science should be able to tell us what we ought to do to live the best lives possible.

Bringing a fresh perspective to age-old questions of right and wrong and good and evil, Harris demonstrates that we already know enough about the human brain and its relationship to events in the world to say that there are right and wrong answers to the most pressing questions of human life. Because such answers exist, moral relativism is simply false - and comes at increasing cost to humanity. And the intrusions of religion into the sphere of human values can be finally repelled: for just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality.

Using his expertise in philosophy and neuroscience, along with his experience on the front lines of our "culture wars," Harris delivers a game-changing book about the future of science and about the real basis of human cooperation.]]> 291 Sam Harris 1439171211 Peter 5 3.90 2010
author: Sam Harris
name: Peter
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2019/06/27
date added: 2019/06/28
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]]> 45634
As William T. Vollmann tells the converging stories of these two peoples and of the Norsewomen Freydis and Gudrid, whose venomous rivalry brings frost into paradise he creates a tour-de-force of speculative history, a vivid amalgam of Icelandic saga, Inuit creation myth, and contemporary travel writing that yields a new an utterly original vision of our continent and its past.
--back cover]]> 415 William T. Vollmann 0140131965 Peter 0 to-read 3.98 1990
author: William T. Vollmann
name: Peter
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1990
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/06/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 17800 Alternate cover edition here.

High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic 13-year-old dropout with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem. Combine this offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose and out comes Dance Dance Dance.]]> 393 Haruki Murakami 0099448769 Peter 4 4.06 1988
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Peter
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2019/05/29
date added: 2019/05/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 21 544 Bill Bryson 076790818X Peter 4 4.21 2003
author: Bill Bryson
name: Peter
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2019/05/29
date added: 2019/05/29
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]]> 11298 353 Haruki Murakami 037571894X Peter 3 3.96 1982
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Peter
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1982
rating: 3
read at: 2019/05/16
date added: 2019/05/17
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]]> 17226619 Unnamable consists entirely of a disjointed monologue from the perspective of an unnamed (presumably unnamable) and immobile protagonist. There is no concrete plot or setting - and whether the other characters ("Mahood" (formerly "Basil") and "Worm") actually exist or whether they are facets of the narrator himself is debatable. The protagonist also claims authorship of the main characters in the two previous novels of the Trilogy and Beckett's earlier novels Murphy, Mercier and Camier, and Watt.

The novel is a mix of recollections and existential musings on the part of its narrator, many of which pertain specifically to the possibility that the narrator is constructed by the language he speaks. Other 'characters' (a stretch to call them distinctly different than the narrator) serve as the passive recipient of the dialogue and in many places (as the narrator suggests) the dialogue's genesis. The novel builds in its despairing tone until the ending, which consists mainly of very long run-on sentences. It closes with the phrase "I can't go on, I'll go on," which was later used as the title of an anthology of Beckett works.

The Unnamable is a 1953 novel by Samuel Beckett. It is the third and final entry in Beckett's "Trilogy" of novels, which begins with Molloy followed by Malone Dies. It was originally published in French as L'Innommable and later translated by the author into English. Grove Press published the English edition in 1958.]]> 176 Samuel Beckett 0571244645 Peter 5 4.07 1953
author: Samuel Beckett
name: Peter
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1953
rating: 5
read at: 2019/04/12
date added: 2019/04/12
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]]> 3835 Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. You haven't experienced Don Quixote in English until you've read this masterful translation.]]> 940 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 0060934344 Peter 0 to-read 4.12 1615
author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
name: Peter
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1615
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/04/07
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]]> 54042 Malone Dies is the second of his immediate post-war novels, written during what Beckett later referred to as ‘the siege in the roomâ€�.

‘Maloneâ€�, writes Malone, ‘is what I am called now.â€� On his deathbed, whittling away the time with stories and revisions of stories, the octogenarian Malone's account of his condition is contradictory and intermittent, shifting with the vagaries of the passing days: without mellowness, without elegiacs; wittier, jauntier, and capable of darker rages than his precursor Molloy. Malone promises silence, but as a storyteller he delivers irresistibly more.]]> 127 Samuel Beckett 0802151175 Peter 4 3.94 1951
author: Samuel Beckett
name: Peter
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1951
rating: 4
read at: 2019/04/04
date added: 2019/04/07
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]]> 40471 256 Cormac McCarthy 0330314920 Peter 4 3.88 1968
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Peter
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1968
rating: 4
read at: 2019/02/27
date added: 2019/04/02
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]]> 8146 Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories.

Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales—eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time—display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers an intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.

The Wood-Sprite
Russian Spoken Here
Sounds
Wingstroke
Gods
A Matter of Chance
The Seaport
Revenge
Beneficence
Details of A Sunset
The Thunderstorm
La Veneziana
Bachmann
The Dragon
Christmas
A Letter That Never Reached Russia
The Fight
The Return of Chorb
A Guide to Berlin
A Nursery Tale
Terror
Razor
The Passenger
The Doorbell
An Affair of Honor
The Christmas Story
The Potato Elf
The Aurelian
A Dashing Fellow
A Bad Day
The Visit to the Museum
A Busy Man
Terra Incognita
The Reunion
Lips to Lips
Orache
Music
Perfection
The Admiralty Spire
The Leonardo
In Memory of L.I. Shigaev
The Circle
A Russian Beauty
Breaking the News
Torpid Smoke
Recruiting
A Slice of Life
Spring in Fialta
Cloud, Castle, Lake
Tyrants Destroyed
Lik
Mademoiselle O
Vasiliy Shishkov
Ultima Thule
Solus Rex
The Assistant Producer
That in Aleppo Once
A Forgotten Poet
Time and Ebb
Conversation Piece, 1945
Signs and Symbols
First Love
Scenes From the Life of A Double Monster
The Vane Sisters
Lance]]> 685 Vladimir Nabokov Peter 0 to-read 4.31 1995
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Peter
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/03/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 446542 241 Samuel Beckett 0802151361 Peter 5 4.06 1951
author: Samuel Beckett
name: Peter
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1951
rating: 5
read at: 2019/03/29
date added: 2019/03/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 5955 315 Hermann Hesse 0312421672 Peter 0 to-read 4.16 1930
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Peter
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1930
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 22911 Amerika tells the story of the young immigrant Karl Rossmann who, after an embarrassing sexual misadventure, finds himself "packed off to America" by his parents. Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity, young Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzying reversals, strange escapades, and picaresque adventures.

Although Kafka never visited America, images of its vast landscape, dangers, and opportunities inspired this saga of the "golden land." Here is a startlingly modern, fantastic and visionary tale of America "as a place no one has yet seen, in a historical period that can't be identified," writes E. L. Doctorow in his new foreword. "Kafka made his novel from his own mind's mythic elements," Doctorow explains, "and the research data that caught his eye were bent like rays in a field of gravity."]]> 336 Franz Kafka 0805210644 Peter 4 3.77 1927
author: Franz Kafka
name: Peter
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1927
rating: 4
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date added: 2019/03/23
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]]> 17690 The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.]]> 255 Franz Kafka Peter 0 4.00 1925
author: Franz Kafka
name: Peter
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1925
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/03/18
shelves:
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]]> 17692 The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. This new edition is based upon the work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create a version that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.

In his brilliant translation, Breon Mitchell masterfully reproduces the distinctive poetics of Kafka's prose, revealing a novel as full of energy and power as when it was first written.]]> 276 Franz Kafka 0805209999 Peter 5 3.94 1925
author: Franz Kafka
name: Peter
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1925
rating: 5
read at: 2019/03/17
date added: 2019/03/18
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]]> 4799 Cannery Row is a book without much of a plot. Rather, it is an attempt to capture the feeling and people of a place, the cannery district of Monterey, California, which is populated by a mix of those down on their luck and those who choose for other reasons not to live "up the hill" in the more respectable area of town. The flow of the main plot is frequently interrupted by short vignettes that introduce us to various denizens of the Row, most of whom are not directly connected with the central story. These vignettes are often characterized by direct or indirect reference to extreme violence: suicides, corpses, and the cruelty of the natural world.

The "story" of Cannery Row follows the adventures of Mack and the boys, a group of unemployed yet resourceful men who inhabit a converted fish-meal shack on the edge of a vacant lot down on the Row.

Sweet Thursday is the sequel to Cannery Row.]]> 181 John Steinbeck 014200068X Peter 4 4.06 1943
author: John Steinbeck
name: Peter
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1943
rating: 4
read at: 2019/03/09
date added: 2019/03/09
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]]> 36531127 Including two new chapters on Alex Honnold’s free solo ascent of the iconic 3,000-foot El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

On June 3rd, 2017, Alex Honnold became the first person to free solo Yosemite's El Capitan—to scale the wall without rope, a partner, or any protective gear—completing what was described as "the greatest feat of pure rock climbing in the history of the sport" (National Geographic) and "one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever" (New York Times). Already one of the most famous adventure athletes in the world, Honnold has now been hailed as "the greatest climber of all time" (Vertical magazine).

Alone on the Wall recounts the most astonishing achievements of Honnold’s extraordinary life and career, brimming with lessons on living fearlessly, taking risks, and maintaining focus even in the face of extreme danger. Now Honnold tells, for the first time and in his own words, the story of his 3 hours and 56 minutes on the sheer face of El Cap, which Outside called "the moon landing of free soloing
a generation-defining climb. Bad ass and beyond words
one of the pinnacle sporting moments of all time."]]> 336 Alex Honnold 0393356140 Peter 0 to-read 3.87 2015
author: Alex Honnold
name: Peter
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/03/07
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]]> 848023
On the moon he becomes, of course, a super-cat, rescuing his master and finding surprising things in a cave. Children will love Flyball's story - grown-ups, reading it aloud, will see in it a slight take-off on the popular science-fiction thread.]]> 72 Ruthven Todd 0844665614 Peter 4 4.27 1952
author: Ruthven Todd
name: Peter
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1952
rating: 4
read at: 2019/03/03
date added: 2019/03/04
shelves:
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]]> 12857 The Gambler, Dostoevsky reaches the heights of drama with this stunning psychological portrait.]]> 188 Fyodor Dostoevsky Peter 5 3.95 1866
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Peter
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1866
rating: 5
read at: 2019/02/19
date added: 2019/02/19
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]]> 24292310
Inspired by 2,000 years of storytelling yet rooted in the concerns of our present moment, this is a spectacular achievement--enchanting, both very funny and terrifying. It is narrated by our descendants 1000 years hence, looking back on "The War of the Worlds" that began with "the time of the strangenesses": a simple gardener begins to levitate; a baby is born with the unnerving ability to detect corruption in people; the ghosts of two long-dead philosophers begin arguing once more; and storms pummel New York so hard that a crack appears in the universe, letting in the destructive djinns of myth (as well as some graphic superheroes). Nothing less than the survival of our world is at stake. Only one, a djinn princess who centuries before had learned to love humankind, resolves to help us: in the face of dynastic intrigue, she raises an army composed of her semi-magical great-great--etc.--grandchildren--a motley crew of endearing characters who come together to save the world in a battle waged for 1,001 nights--or, to be precise, two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights.]]> 304 Salman Rushdie 081299891X Peter 0 to-read 3.36 2015
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Peter
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/02/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 4492117 210 Aldous Huxley 0061729078 Peter 3 3.89 1956
author: Aldous Huxley
name: Peter
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1956
rating: 3
read at: 2019/02/14
date added: 2019/02/15
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]]> 36613747 Could psychedelic drugs change our worldview? One of America's most admired writers takes us on a mind-altering journey to the frontiers of human consciousness

When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT. Could these drugs in fact improve the lives of many people? Diving deep into this extraordinary world and putting himself forward as a guinea-pig, Michael Pollan has written a remarkable history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of the new generation of scientists fascinated by the implications of these drugs. How to Change Your Mind is a report from what could very well be the future of human consciousness.]]> 480 Michael Pollan 0241294223 Peter 5 4.25 2018
author: Michael Pollan
name: Peter
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2019/02/06
date added: 2019/02/06
shelves:
review:

]]>