hay's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 10 Apr 2025 17:27:24 -0700 60 hay's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Later 54798187
Later is Stephen King at his finest, a terrifying and touching story of innocence lost and the trials that test our sense of right and wrong. With echoes of King's classic novel IT, Later is a powerful, haunting, unforgettable exploration of what it takes to stand up to evil in all the faces it wears.]]>
264 Stephen King 1789096499 hay 0 to-read 3.98 2021 Later
author: Stephen King
name: hay
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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Motherthing 60097451 A darkly funny domestic horror novel about a woman who must take drastic measures to save her husband and herself from the vengeful ghost of her mother-in-law.

When Ralph and Abby Lamb move in with Ralph’s mother, Laura, Abby hopes it’s just what she and her mother-in-law need to finally connect. After a traumatic childhood, Abby is desperate for a mother figure, especially now that she and Ralph are trying to become parents themselves. Abby just has so much love to give—to Ralph, to Laura, and to Mrs. Bondy, her favorite resident at the long-term care home where she works. But Laura isn’t interested in bonding with her daughter-in-law. She’s venomous and cruel, especially to Abby, and life with her is hellish.

When Laura takes her own life, her ghost haunts Abby and Ralph in very different ways: Ralph is plunged into depression, and Abby is terrorized by a force intent on destroying everything she loves. To make matters worse, Mrs. Bondy’s daughter is threatening to move Mrs. Bondy from the home, leaving Abby totally alone. With everything on the line, Abby comes up with a chilling plan that will allow her to keep Mrs. Bondy, rescue Ralph from his tortured mind, and break Laura's hold on the family for good. All it requires is a little ingenuity, a lot of determination, and a unique recipe for chicken à la king
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288 Ainslie Hogarth 0593467027 hay 0 to-read 3.65 2022 Motherthing
author: Ainslie Hogarth
name: hay
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2022
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<![CDATA[Something Wicked This Way Comes]]> 248596 Something Wicked This Way Comes, now featuring a new introduction and material about its longstanding influence on culture and genre.

For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. A calliope’s shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. Two boys will discover the secret of its smoke, mazes, and mirrors; two friends who will soon know all too well the heavy cost of wishes
and the stuff of nightmares.

Few novels have endured in the heart and memory as has Ray Bradbury’s unparalleled literary masterpiece Something Wicked This Way Comes. Scary and suspenseful, it is a timeless classic in the American canon.]]>
293 Ray Bradbury 0380729407 hay 0 to-read 3.92 1962 Something Wicked This Way Comes
author: Ray Bradbury
name: hay
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1962
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The Idiot 30962053 A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.

At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.]]>
423 Elif Batuman 1594205612 hay 0 to-read 3.67 2017 The Idiot
author: Elif Batuman
name: hay
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2017
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Either/Or 58890783 From the acclaimed and bestselling author of The Idiot, the continuation of beloved protagonist Selin's quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood

Selin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's sophomore year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin's elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan's weird ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with Selin? On the plus side, it feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel--a life worthy of becoming a novel--without becoming a crazy abandoned woman oneself?

Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice--no matter what the cost. Next on the list: international travel.

Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either/Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.]]>
368 Elif Batuman 0525557598 hay 0 to-read 4.01 2022 Either/Or
author: Elif Batuman
name: hay
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2022
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The Maidens 45300567
Mariana Andros is a brilliant but troubled group therapist who becomes fixated on The Maidens when one member, a friend of Mariana’s niece Zoe, is found murdered in Cambridge.

Mariana, who was once herself a student at the university, quickly suspects that behind the idyllic beauty of the spires and turrets, and beneath the ancient traditions, lies something sinister. And she becomes convinced that, despite his alibi, Edward Fosca is guilty of the murder. But why would the professor target one of his students? And why does he keep returning to the rites of Persephone, the maiden, and her journey to the underworld?

When another body is found, Mariana’s obsession with proving Fosca’s guilt spirals out of control, threatening to destroy her credibility as well as her closest relationships. But Mariana is determined to stop this killer, even if it costs her everything—including her own life.]]>
337 Alex Michaelides 1250304458 hay 0 to-read 3.61 2021 The Maidens
author: Alex Michaelides
name: hay
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2021
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Martyr! 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]>
331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 hay 0 to-read 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: hay
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
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Milk Fed 54304105 The Pisces and So Sad Today.

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.]]>
304 Melissa Broder 1982142499 hay 0 to-read 3.56 2021 Milk Fed
author: Melissa Broder
name: hay
average rating: 3.56
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The Women 127305853 From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The Women—at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided.

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankieâ€� McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets—and becomes one of—the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.

But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.]]>
471 Kristin Hannah 1250178630 hay 0 to-read 4.59 2024 The Women
author: Kristin Hannah
name: hay
average rating: 4.59
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Ripe 62919394
Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, a miniature black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, its size changing in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever-closer as the world around her unravels.

When her CEO’s demands cross an illegal threshold and she ends up unexpectedly pregnant, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are really worth it. Sharp but vulnerable, funny yet unsettling, Ripe portrays one millennial woman’s journey through a late-capitalist hellscape and offers an incisive look at the absurdities of modern life.]]>
288 Sarah Rose Etter 1668011638 hay 0 to-read 3.60 2023 Ripe
author: Sarah Rose Etter
name: hay
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
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A Thousand Splendid Suns 128029
With the passing of time comes Taliban rule over Afghanistan, the streets of Kabul loud with the sound of gunfire and bombs, life a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear, the women's endurance tested beyond their worst imaginings. Yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways, lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism. In the end it is love that triumphs over death and destruction.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a portrait of a wounded country and a story of family and friendship, of an unforgiving time, an unlikely bond, and an indestructible love.]]>
372 Khaled Hosseini 1594489505 hay 0 to-read 4.44 2007 A Thousand Splendid Suns
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: hay
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante hay 0 to-read 4.08 2011 My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: hay
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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Blue Sisters 195430687 Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.]]>
342 Coco Mellors 0593723767 hay 0 to-read 3.94 2024 Blue Sisters
author: Coco Mellors
name: hay
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
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The Midnight Library 52578297
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.

The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren't always what she imagined they'd be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.

Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?]]>
288 Matt Haig 0525559477 hay 0 to-read 3.96 2020 The Midnight Library
author: Matt Haig
name: hay
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
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<![CDATA[What You Are Looking For Is in the Library]]> 91274427 For fans of The Midnight Library and Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this charming Japanese novel shows how the perfect book recommendation can change a reader's life.

What are you looking for?

This is the famous question routinely asked by Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. Like most librarians, Komachi has read every book lining her shelves—but she also has the unique ability to read the souls of her library guests. For anyone who walks through her door, Komachi can sense exactly what they’re looking for in life and provide just the book recommendation they never knew they needed to help them find it.

Each visitor comes to her library from a different juncture in their careers and dreams, from the restless sales attendant who feels stuck at her job to the struggling working mother who longs to be a magazineÌęeditor. The conversation that they have with Sayuri Komachi—and the surprise book she lends each of them—will have life-altering consequences.

With heartwarming charm and wisdom, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is a paean to the magic of libraries, friendship and community, perfect for anyone who has ever found themselves at an impasse in their life and in need of a little inspiration.]]>
304 Michiko Aoyama 1335005625 hay 0 to-read 4.07 2020 What You Are Looking For Is in the Library
author: Michiko Aoyama
name: hay
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2020
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Piranesi 49255502 Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has.

In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls.

On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. At other times he brings tributes of food and waterlilies to the Dead. But mostly, he is alone.

Messages begin to appear, scratched out in chalk on the pavements. There is someone new in the House. But who are they and what do they want? Are they a friend or do they bring destruction and madness as the Other claims?

Lost texts must be found; secrets must be uncovered. The world that Piranesi thought he knew is becoming strange and dangerous.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.]]>
245 Susanna Clarke 1526622424 hay 0 currently-reading, library 4.27 2020 Piranesi
author: Susanna Clarke
name: hay
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Passenger (The Passenger #1)]]> 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 hay 0 to-read 3.58 2022 The Passenger (The Passenger #1)
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: hay
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Stella Maris (The Passenger, #2)]]> 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 hay 0 to-read 3.83 2022 Stella Maris (The Passenger, #2)
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: hay
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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The Road 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 hay 0 to-read 3.99 2006 The Road
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: hay
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[When You Are Engulfed in Flames]]> 5421888 The Christian Science Monitor) is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this remarkable new book.Ìę
Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to a hilariously uncomfortable memory of buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina. In essay after essay, Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life-having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger on a plane or armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds-to the most deeply resonant human truths.Ìę Culminating in a brilliant account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris's sixth essay collection is a new masterpiece of comic writing from "a writer worth treasuring" (Seattle Times).Ìę

Table of Contents:

It's Catching
Keeping Up
The Understudy
This Old House
Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie?
Road Trips
What I Learned
That's Amore
The Monster Mash
In the Waiting Room
Solutions to Saturday's Puzzle
Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool
Memento Mori
All the Beauty You Will Ever Need
Town and Country
Aerial
The Man in the Hut
Of Mice and Men
April in Paris
Crybaby
Old Faithful
The Smoking Section




Source: hachettebookgroup.com]]>
323 David Sedaris 0316154687 hay 0 to-read 3.96 2005 When You Are Engulfed in Flames
author: David Sedaris
name: hay
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2005
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<![CDATA[The Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Lecter, #2)]]> 23807
Dr. Lecter is a former psychiatrist with a grisly history, unusual tastes, and an intense curiosity about the darker corners of the mind. His intimate understanding of the killer and of Clarice herself form the core of "The Silence of the Lambs"—an ingenious, masterfully written book and an unforgettable classic of suspense fiction.]]>
421 Thomas Harris hay 0 to-read 4.25 1988 The Silence of the Lambs  (Hannibal Lecter, #2)
author: Thomas Harris
name: hay
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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Celtic Fairy Tales 2743565
Includes "Celtic Fairy Tales" and "More Celtic Fairy Tales". First book spans pages 1-267; second book restarts page numbering from 1-234.]]>
501 Joseph Jacobs 1859580238 hay 0 currently-reading 3.40 1893 Celtic Fairy Tales
author: Joseph Jacobs
name: hay
average rating: 3.40
book published: 1893
rating: 0
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The Secret Garden 231815 The Secret Garden celebrates a cherished classic with Tasha Tudor's wonderful illustrations throughout, an extended author biography, games, activities, and more!

When orphaned Mary Lennox comes to live at her uncle's great house on the Yorkshire Moors, she finds it full of secrets. The mansion has nearly one hundred rooms, and her uncle keeps himself locked up. And at night, she hears the sound of crying down one of the long corridors.

The gardens surrounding the large property are Mary's only escape. Then, Mary discovers a secret garden, surrounded by walls and locked with a missing key. One day, with the help of two unexpected companions, she discovers a way in. Is everything in the garden dead, or can Mary bring it back to life?]]>
358 Frances Hodgson Burnett 006440188X hay 0 to-read 4.14 1911 The Secret Garden
author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
name: hay
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1911
rating: 0
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The Little Prince 157993
Few stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as The Little Prince, presented here in a stunning new translation with carefully restored artwork. The definitive edition of a worldwide classic, it will capture the hearts of readers of all ages.]]>
96 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 0152023984 hay 0 to-read 4.32 1943 The Little Prince
author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
name: hay
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia, #2)]]> 65645 They open a door and enter a world

NARNIA...the land beyond the wardrobe, the secret country known only to Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy...the place where the adventure begins.

Lucy is the first to find the secret of the wardrobe in the professor's mysterious old house. At first, no one believes her when she tells of her adventures in the land of Narnia. But soon Edmund and then Peter and Susan discover the Magic and meet Aslan, the Great Lion, for themselves. In the blink of an eye, their lives are changed forever.]]>
206 C.S. Lewis hay 0 to-read 4.14 1950 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia, #2)
author: C.S. Lewis
name: hay
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1950
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Oz, #1)]]> 236093 Come along, Toto, she said. We will go to the Emerald City and ask the Great Oz how to get back to Kansas again.

Swept away from her home in Kansas by a tornado, Dorothy and her dog Toto find themselves stranded in the fantastical Land of Oz. As instructed by the Good Witch of the North and the Munchkins, Dorothy sets off on the yellow brick road to try and find her way to the Emerald City and the Wizard of Oz, who can help her get home. With her companions the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion, Dorothy experiences an adventure full of friendship, magic and danger. A much-loved children's classic, The Wizard of Oz continues to delight readers young and old with its enchanting tale of witches, flying monkeys and silver shoes.

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154 L. Frank Baum 0140621679 hay 0 to-read 4.00 1900 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Oz, #1)
author: L. Frank Baum
name: hay
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1900
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass]]> 24213
When Alice sees a white rabbit take a watch out of its waistcoat pocket she decides to follow it, and a sequence of most unusual events is set in motion. This mini book contains the entire topsy-turvy stories of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, accompanied by practical notes and Martina Pelouso's memorable full-colour illustrations.]]>
239 Lewis Carroll hay 0 to-read 4.07 1871 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
author: Lewis Carroll
name: hay
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1871
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<![CDATA[The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women]]> 31409135 The incredible true story of the women who fought America's Undark danger

The Curies' newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.

Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" are the luckiest alive—until they begin to fall mysteriously ill.

But the factories that once offered golden opportunities are now ignoring all claims of the gruesome side effects, and the women's cries of corruption. And as the fatal poison of the radium takes hold, the brave shining girls find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of America's early 20th century, and in a groundbreaking battle for workers' rights that will echo for centuries to come.

Written with a sparkling voice and breakneck pace, The Radium Girls fully illuminates the inspiring young women exposed to the "wonder" substance of radium, and their awe-inspiring strength in the face of almost impossible circumstances. Their courage and tenacity led to life-changing regulations, research into nuclear bombing, and ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

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479 Kate Moore 149264935X hay 0 to-read 4.13 2016 The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women
author: Kate Moore
name: hay
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
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Station Eleven 22662956
One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theatre troupe known as the Travelling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains-this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame and the beauty of the world as we know it.]]>
333 Emily St. John Mandel 1443434868 hay 0 to-read 4.13 2014 Station Eleven
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: hay
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/02
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The Girl on the Train 22105022 Ìę
The debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives, from the author of Into the Water .
Ìę
“Nothing is more addicting thanÌę The Girl on the Train. ”â€� Vanity Fair

â€� The Girl on the Train Ìęhas more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller sinceÌę Gone Girl . . . . [It] is liable to draw a large, bedazzled readership.”â€� The New York Times
Ìę
“Marries movie noir with novelistic trickery. . . hang on tight. You'll be surprised by what horrors lurk around the bend.”â€� USA Today
Ìę
“Like its train, the story blasts through the stagnation of these lives in suburban London and the reader cannot help but turn pages.”â€� The Boston Globe

â€� Gone GirlÌę fans will devour this psychological thriller.”â€� People Ìę

EVERY DAY THE SAME
Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning and night. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She's even started to feel like she knows them. Jess and Jason, she calls them. Their life--as she sees it--is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.

UNTIL TODAY
And then she sees something shocking. It's only a minute until the train moves on, but it's enough. Now everything's changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel goes to the police. But is she really as unreliable as they say? Soon she is deeply entangled not only in the investigation but in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?]]>
316 Paula Hawkins 038568231X hay 0 to-read 3.78 2015 The Girl on the Train
author: Paula Hawkins
name: hay
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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11/22/63 13547452 Dallas, 11/22/63: Three shots ring out.
President John F. Kennedy is dead.

Life can turn on a dime—or stumble into the extraordinary, as it does for Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in a Maine town. While grading essays by his GED students, Jake reads a gruesome, enthralling piece penned by janitor Harry Dunning: fifty years ago, Harry somehow survived his father’s sledgehammer slaughter of his entire family. Jake is blown away . . . but an even more bizarre secret comes to light when Jake’s friend Al, owner of the local diner, enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination. How? By stepping through a portal in the diner’s storeroom, and into the era of Ike and Elvis, of big American cars, sock hops, and cigarette smoke. . . . Finding himself in warmhearted Jodie, Texas, Jake begins a new life. But all turns in the road lead to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald. The course of history is about to be rewritten . . . and become heart-stoppingly suspenseful.
(back cover)

------------------------------------------------------------

The following is the Library of Congress Summary

On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? The author's new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination. In this novel that is a tribute to a simpler era, he sweeps readers back in time to another moment, a real life moment, when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history. Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students, a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night fifty years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. Not much later, Jake's friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane, and insanely possible, mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake's life, a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

------------------------------------------------------------

This is the full sized trade paperback, nearly identical to the first hardback edition. The back of the dust jacket from the hardcover edition, became page one on this full sized trade paperback.

~]]>
849 Stephen King 1451627297 hay 0 to-read 4.46 2011 11/22/63
author: Stephen King
name: hay
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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Firestarter 233667 This a previously-published edition of ISBN 0451167805.

The Department of Scientific Intelligence (aka "The Shop") never anticipated that two participants in their research program would marry and have a child. Charlie McGee inherited pyrokinetic powers from her parents, who had been given a low-grade hallucinogen called "Lot Six" while at college. Now the government is trying to capture young Charlie and harness her powerful firestarting skills as a weapon.
--stephenking.com]]>
564 Stephen King hay 0 to-read 3.92 1980 Firestarter
author: Stephen King
name: hay
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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The Dead Zone 13445
Johnny Smith, the small-town schoolteacher who spun the wheel of fortune and won a four-and-a-half year trip into THE DEAD ZONE.

John Smith, who awakened from an interminable coma with an accursed power--the power to see the future and the terrible fate awaiting mankind in THE DEAD ZONE.
--back cover]]>
402 Stephen King 0451093380 hay 0 to-read 3.89 1979 The Dead Zone
author: Stephen King
name: hay
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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Bluebeard 525912 304 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. hay 0 to-read 4.02 1987 Bluebeard
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: hay
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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łÒČč±ôĂĄ±èČčČ”ŽÇČő 425069 łÒČč±ôĂĄ±èČčČ”ŽÇČő takes the readerÌęÌęback one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simpleÌęvacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionaryÌęjourney. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group ofÌęsurvivors stranded on the łÒČč±ôĂĄ±èČčČ”ŽÇČő Islands are aboutÌęto become the progenitors of a brave new andÌętotally different human race. Here, America's masterÌęsatirist looks at our world and shows us all that isÌęsadly, madly awry -- and all that is worth saving.]]> 295 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 0440127793 hay 0 to-read 3.77 1985 łÒČč±ôĂĄ±èČčČ”ŽÇČő
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: hay
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/16
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Daisy Jones & The Six 40597810 Everyone knows DAISY JONES & THE SIX, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’nâ€� roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.]]>
368 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1524798622 hay 0 to-read 4.20 2019 Daisy Jones & The Six
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: hay
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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Dune (Dune #1) 1000049
An awesome world where gods and adventurers clash.

Where mile-long sandworms rule the desert.

Where the ancient dream of immortality comes true.

This is the magnificent setting for the bestselling science fiction novel of all time, a mind-jolting story of power politics and strange adventure.]]>
605 Frank Herbert 0450011844 hay 0 to-read 4.22 1965 Dune (Dune #1)
author: Frank Herbert
name: hay
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/09
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Howl and Other Poems 6295
Howl and Other Poems is a collection of Ginsberg's finest work, including "Howl," one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as "A Supermarket in California," "Transcription of Organ Music," "Sunflower Sutra," "America," "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound," and some of his earlier works.Ìę]]>
56 Allen Ginsberg 0872863107 hay 0 to-read 4.14 1956 Howl and Other Poems
author: Allen Ginsberg
name: hay
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
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The Blind Owl 860409 128 Sadegh Hedayat 0330235672 hay 0 to-read 4.19 1937 The Blind Owl
author: Sadegh Hedayat
name: hay
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1937
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/07
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<![CDATA[Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties]]> 52588583
In 1999, when Tom O'Neill was assigned a magazine piece about the thirtieth anniversary of the Manson murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Weren't the facts indisputable? Charles Manson had ordered his teenage followers to commit seven brutal murders, and in his thrall, they'd gladly complied. But when O'Neill began reporting the story, he kept finding holes in the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's narrative, long enshrined in the best-selling Helter Skelter. Before long, O'Neill had questions about everything from the motive to the manhunt. Though he'd never considered himself a conspiracy theorist, the Manson murders swallowed the next two decades of his career. He was obsessed.

Searching but never speculative, CHAOS follows O'Neill's twenty-year effort to rebut the "official" story behind Manson. Who were his real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties? Why didn't law enforcement act on their many chances to stop him? And how did he turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers? O'Neill's hunt for answers leads him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from the Summer of Love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with cover-ups and coincidences.

Featuring hundreds of new interviews and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, CHAOS mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. In those two dark nights in Los Angeles, O'Neill finds the story of California in the sixties: when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia-or dystopia-was just an acid trip away.



]]>
521 Tom O'Neill 0316477540 hay 0 to-read 4.16 2019 Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
author: Tom O'Neill
name: hay
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/07
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The Stepford Wives 52350
At once a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a savage commentary on a media-driven society that values the pursuit of youth and beauty at all costs, The Stepford Wives is a novel so frightening in its final implications that the title itself has earned a place in the American lexicon.]]>
144 Ira Levin 0060080841 hay 0 to-read 3.85 1972 The Stepford Wives
author: Ira Levin
name: hay
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/07
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<![CDATA[Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner]]> 180930 240 Scott Cunningham 0875421180 hay 0 to-read 4.02 1988 Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner
author: Scott Cunningham
name: hay
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/02
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Blindness 60388894 From Nobel Prize–winning author JosĂ© Saramago, a magnificent, mesmerizing parable of loss

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.]]>
326 José Saramago hay 0 2025 4.00 1995 Blindness
author: José Saramago
name: hay
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: 2025
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<![CDATA[Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)]]> 41161349
Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' pain.

Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith...and a startling vision of human destiny.

This highly acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from award-winning author Octavia E. Butler “pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid's Taleâ€� (John Green, New York Times)—now with a new foreword by N. K. Jemisin.]]>
329 Octavia E. Butler 1538732181 hay 0 to-read 4.17 1993 Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1)
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: hay
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/24
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Severance 41556003 Maybe it's the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma's offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance.

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she's had her fill of uncertainty. She's content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.

So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won't be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They're traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma's Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it's a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.]]>
291 Ling Ma 1250214998 hay 0 to-read 3.97 2018 Severance
author: Ling Ma
name: hay
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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The Catcher in the Rye 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

J.D. Salinger's (1919�2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]>
277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 hay 0 to-read 3.81 1951 The Catcher in the Rye
author: J.D. Salinger
name: hay
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 0
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The Bell Jar 599649 Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only novel. Renowned for its intensity and outstandingly vivid prose, it broke existing boudaries between fiction and reality and helped to make Plath an enduring feminist icon.
It was published under a pseudonym a few weeks before the author's suicide.]]>
257 Sylvia Plath 0571200338 hay 0 to-read 4.10 1963 The Bell Jar
author: Sylvia Plath
name: hay
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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The Picture of Dorian Gray 489732 'The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled that marvellous beauty'

Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The Picture of Dorian Gray was a succĂšs de scandale. Early readers were shocked by its hints at unspeakable sins, and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895.

This definitive edition includes a selection of contemporary reviews condemning the novel's immorality, and the introduction to the first Penguin Classics edition by Peter Ackroyd.]]>
253 Oscar Wilde 0141439572 hay 0 to-read 4.21 1890 The Picture of Dorian Gray
author: Oscar Wilde
name: hay
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1890
rating: 0
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The Passion According to G.H. 13082436 220 Clarice Lispector 0811219682 hay 0 to-read 4.19 1964 The Passion According to G.H.
author: Clarice Lispector
name: hay
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1964
rating: 0
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The Myth of Sisyphus 39947376 The Myth of Sisyphus—featured here in a stand-alone edition—is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide--the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.]]> 160 Albert Camus 0525564454 hay 0 to-read 4.09 1942 The Myth of Sisyphus
author: Albert Camus
name: hay
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1942
rating: 0
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Notes from Underground 586666
“I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man,â€� the irascible voice of a nameless narrator cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the brutal self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn and iconoclasm of alienated individual who has become one of the greatest antiheroes in all literature. Notes From Underground , published in 1864, marks a tuming point in Dostoevsky's it announces the moral political, and social ideas he will treat on a monumental scale in Crime And Punishment , The Idiot , and The Brothers Karamazov . And it remains to this day one of the most searingly honest and universal testaments to human despair ever penned.]]>
158 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0553211447 hay 0 to-read 4.06 1864 Notes from Underground
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: hay
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1864
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/18
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Crossing the Water 295148 64 Sylvia Plath 0060907894 hay 0 to-read 4.12 1971 Crossing the Water
author: Sylvia Plath
name: hay
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/17
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Letters Home 31421 502 Sylvia Plath 0571201156 hay 0 to-read 4.23 1975 Letters Home
author: Sylvia Plath
name: hay
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams]]> 1829267 352 Sylvia Plath 0061549479 hay 0 to-read 4.01 1977 Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
author: Sylvia Plath
name: hay
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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The Colossus and Other Poems 11627 84 Sylvia Plath 0375704469 hay 0 to-read 4.19 1960 The Colossus and Other Poems
author: Sylvia Plath
name: hay
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1960
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom: A Story]]> 42980964
Written while Sylvia Plath was a student at Smith College in 1952, Mary Ventura and The Ninth Kingdom tells the story of a young woman's fateful train journey.

Lips the color of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like "guilt, and guilt, and guilt" these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom.

"But what is the ninth kingdom?" she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. "It is the kingdom of the frozen will," comes the reply. "There is no going back."

Sylvia Plath's strange, dark tale of female agency and independence, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.]]>
64 Sylvia Plath 006294083X hay 0 to-read 3.97 2019 Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom: A Story
author: Sylvia Plath
name: hay
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2019
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The Apple in the Dark 88564029 Martim, fleeing from a murder he believes he committed, plunges into the dark nocturnal stumbling along, in a state of both fear and wonder, eventually he comes to a remote, quiet ranch and finds work with the two women who own it. The women are tranquil enough before his arrival, but are affected by his radical mystery. Soaked through with Martim’s inner night (his soul is in the darkness where everything is created), the novel vibrates with his perpetual searching state of vigil. Often he feels close to an “for the first time he was present in the moment in which whatever is happening is happening.â€� Yet such flashes flicker out, so he’s ever on the watch for “life to take on the dimensions of a destiny.â€�
In an interview, Lispector once “I am Martim.â€� As she puts it in The Apple in the Dark : “All I’ve got is hunger. And that unstable way of grasping an apple in the dark―without letting it fall.â€� Ìę]]>
384 Clarice Lispector 0811226751 hay 0 to-read 4.01 1961 The Apple in the Dark
author: Clarice Lispector
name: hay
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces]]> 6514271 317 Franz Kafka hay 0 to-read 4.01 1918 The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces
author: Franz Kafka
name: hay
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1918
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/16
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Invisible Man 176958 'One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century' The Times

'It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves'

Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison's invisible man - from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot - go far beyond the story of one individual to give voice to the experience of an entire generation of black Americans.

This edition includes Ralph Ellison's introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, a fascinating account of the novel's seven-year gestation.

With an Introduction by John F. Callahan

'Brilliant' Saul Bellow]]>
581 Ralph Ellison hay 0 to-read 3.94 1952 Invisible Man
author: Ralph Ellison
name: hay
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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All the Names 2528
The loneliness of people's lives, the effects of chance, the discovery of love-all coalesce in this extraordinary novel that displays the power and art of José Saramago in brilliant form.]]>
245 José Saramago 0156010593 hay 0 to-read 3.92 1997 All the Names
author: José Saramago
name: hay
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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The Double 826799 304 José Saramago 009946165X hay 0 to-read 3.78 2002 The Double
author: José Saramago
name: hay
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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Crime and Punishment 21045225 'Will I really - I mean, really - actually take an axe, start bashing her on the head, smash her skull to pieces? . . . Will I really slip in sticky, warm blood, force the lock, steal, tremble, hide, all soaked in blood . . .axe in hand? . . . Lord, will I really?'

A troubled young man commits the perfect crime - the murder of a vile pawnbroker whom no one will miss. Raskolnikov is desperate for money, but convinces himself that his motive for the murder is to benefit mankind. So begins one of the greatest novels ever written, a journey into the criminal mind, a police thriller, and a philosophical meditation on morality and redemption.

Oliver Ready's new translation of Dostoevsky's 'psychological record of a crime' gives his dark masterpiece of murder and pursuit a renewed vitality, expressing its jagged, staccato urgency and fevered atmosphere as never before.]]>
702 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0141192801 hay 0 to-read 4.43 1866 Crime and Punishment
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: hay
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1866
rating: 0
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The Secret History 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 hay 0 to-read 4.17 1992 The Secret History
author: Donna Tartt
name: hay
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 42365935
The American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century.

From the moment she entered the world, Francie needed to be made of stern stuff, for the often harsh life of Williamsburg demanded fortitude, precocity, and strength of spirit. Often scorned by neighbors for her family's erratic and eccentric behavior--such as her father Johnny's taste for alcohol and Aunt Sissy's habit of marrying serially without the formality of divorce--no one, least of all Francie, could say that the Nolans' life lacked drama. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the Nolans' daily experiences are tenderly threaded with family connectedness and raw with honesty. Betty Smith has, in the pages of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, captured the joys of humble Williamsburg life-from "junk day" on Saturdays, when the children of Francie's neighborhood traded their weekly take for pennies, to the special excitement of holidays, bringing cause for celebration and revelry. Betty Smith has artfully caught this sense of exciting life in a novel of childhood, replete with incredibly rich moments of universal experiences--a truly remarkable achievement for any writer.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.]]>
493 Betty Smith hay 0 to-read 4.47 1943 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
author: Betty Smith
name: hay
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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Normal People 49833634
A year later, they're both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.]]>
305 Sally Rooney 1984822187 hay 0 to-read 3.76 2018 Normal People
author: Sally Rooney
name: hay
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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Norwegian Wood 11297
A magnificent blending of the music, the mood, and the ethos that was the sixties with the story of one college student's romantic coming of age, Norwegian Wood brilliantly recaptures a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.]]>
296 Haruki Murakami 0375704027 hay 0 to-read 4.01 1987 Norwegian Wood
author: Haruki Murakami
name: hay
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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The Mustache 1725958 146 Emmanuel CarrĂšre 0020188706 hay 0 to-read 3.79 1986 The Mustache
author: Emmanuel CarrĂšre
name: hay
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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On the Road 315233 310 Jack Kerouac 0140185216 hay 0 to-read 3.53 1957 On the Road
author: Jack Kerouac
name: hay
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/06
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Native Son 2804337 464 Richard Wright 0140034811 hay 0 to-read 4.18 1940 Native Son
author: Richard Wright
name: hay
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1940
rating: 0
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Darkness at Noon 30672
Darkness at Noon (from the German: Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best-known work tells the tale of Rubashov, a Bolshevik 1917 revolutionary who is cast out, imprisoned and tried for treason by the Soviet government he'd helped create.]]>
216 Arthur Koestler 0553265954 hay 0 to-read 4.09 1940 Darkness at Noon
author: Arthur Koestler
name: hay
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1940
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Book Of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)]]> 25242102 544 Fernando Pessoa 024120013X hay 0 to-read 4.35 1982 The Book Of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)
author: Fernando Pessoa
name: hay
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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Metaphysics 208036 365 Aristotle 1888009039 hay 0 to-read 4.08 -330 Metaphysics
author: Aristotle
name: hay
average rating: 4.08
book published: -330
rating: 0
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Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 56953435
Kim Jiyoung is a female preyed upon by male teachers at school. Kim Jiyoung is a daughter whose father blames her when she is harassed late at night.

Kim Jiyoung is a good student who doesn't get put forward for internships. Kim Jiyoung is a model employee but gets overlooked for promotion. Kim Jiyoung is a wife who gives up her career and independence for a life of domesticity.

Kim Jiyoung has started acting strangely.

Kim Jiyoung is depressed.

Kim Jiyoung is mad.

Kim Jiyoung is her own woman.

Kim Jiyoung is every woman.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is the life story of one young woman born at the end of the twentieth century and raises questions about endemic misogyny and institutional oppression that are relevant to us all. Riveting, original and uncompromising, this is the most important book to have emerged from South Korea since Han Kang's The Vegetarian.]]>
163 Cho Nam-Joo 1471184307 hay 0 to-read 4.22 2016 Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
author: Cho Nam-Joo
name: hay
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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Another Country 334170 Another Country is a novel of passions—sexual, racial, political, artistic—that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the late 1950s.]]> 436 James Baldwin 0679744711 hay 0 to-read 4.30 1962 Another Country
author: James Baldwin
name: hay
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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Jonathan Livingston Seagull 71728
Jonathan Livingston Seagull is no ordinary bird. He believes it is every gull's right to fly, to reach the ultimate freedom of challenge and discovery, finding his greatest reward in teaching younger gulls the joy of flight and the power of dreams. The special 20th anniversary release of this spiritual classic!]]>
112 Richard Bach 0743278909 hay 0 to-read 3.87 1970 Jonathan Livingston Seagull
author: Richard Bach
name: hay
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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A Certain Hunger 57073124
But there is something within Dorothy that's different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself. Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels show us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority.

A satire of early foodieism, a critique of how gender is defined, and a showcase of virtuoso storytelling, Chelsea G. Summers' A Certain Hunger introduces us to the food world's most charming psychopath and an exciting new voice in fiction.]]>
254 Chelsea G. Summers 1951213432 hay 0 to-read 3.78 2019 A Certain Hunger
author: Chelsea G. Summers
name: hay
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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Bunny (Bunny, #1) 53285047 We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library]]>
305 Mona Awad 0525559752 hay 0 to-read 3.43 2019 Bunny (Bunny, #1)
author: Mona Awad
name: hay
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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Nightbitch 60093251
One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else...

An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms.

As the mother's symptoms intensify, and her temptation to give in to her new dog impulses peak, she struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret. Seeking a cure at the library, she discovers the mysterious academic tome which becomes her bible, A Field Guide to Magical A Mythical Ethnography , and meets a group of mommies involved in a multilevel-marketing scheme who may also be more than what they seem.

An outrageously original novel of ideas about art, power, and womanhood wrapped in a satirical fairy tale, Nightbitch will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. And you should. You should howl as much as you want.]]>
256 Rachel Yoder 0593312147 hay 0 to-read 3.49 2021 Nightbitch
author: Rachel Yoder
name: hay
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Perks of Being a Wallflower]]> 44696835 Alternate cover edition of isbn10: 0671027344 / isbn13: 9780671027346


standing on the fringes of life...
offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see
what it looks like from the dance floor.

This haunting novel about the dilemma of passivity vs. passion marks the stunning debut of a provocative new voice in contemporary fiction: The Perks of Being A WALLFLOWER

This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular and unique, hilarious and devastating. We may not know where he lives. We may not know to whom he is writing. All we know is the world he shares. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it puts him on a strange course through uncharted territory. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that the perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite.

Through Charlie, Stephen Chbosky has created a deeply affecting coming-of-age story, a powerful novel that will spirit you back to those wild and poignant roller coaster days known as growing up.

(back cover)]]>
213 Stephen Chbosky hay 0 to-read 4.37 1999 The Perks of Being a Wallflower
author: Stephen Chbosky
name: hay
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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The Anthropologists 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,â€� chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.â€� Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]>
192 AysegĂŒl Savas 163973306X hay 0 to-read 3.88 2024 The Anthropologists
author: AysegĂŒl Savas
name: hay
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Housekeeper and the Professor]]> 3181564
She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper’s shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.]]>
180 Yƍko Ogawa 0312427808 hay 0 to-read 4.04 2003 The Housekeeper and the Professor
author: Yƍko Ogawa
name: hay
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/01
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The Memory Police 50349968 A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses--until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.]]>
274 Yƍko Ogawa 1101911816 hay 0 to-read 3.84 1994 The Memory Police
author: Yƍko Ogawa
name: hay
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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Tess of the D’Urbervilles 32261 here and here.

When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her ‘cousinâ€� Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future.]]>
518 Thomas Hardy hay 0 to-read 3.83 1891 Tess of the D’Urbervilles
author: Thomas Hardy
name: hay
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1891
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1)]]> 6490587 Things Fall Apart tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around Okonkwo, a “strong manâ€� of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first of these stories traces Okonkwo's fall from grace with the tribal world in which he lives, and in its classical purity of line and economical beauty it provides us with a powerful fable about the immemorial conflict between the individual and society.

The second story, which is as modern as the first is ancient, and which elevates the book to a tragic plane, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world through the arrival of aggressive, proselytizing European missionaries. These twin dramas are perfectly harmonized, and they are modulated by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul. Things Fall Apart is the most illuminating and permanent monument we have to the modern African experience as seen from within.]]>
209 Chinua Achebe 0385667833 hay 0 to-read 3.62 1958 Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1)
author: Chinua Achebe
name: hay
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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The Woman in White 16058113 This is an alternate cover edition for The Woman in White. A reprint can be found here.

'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop... There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth...stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter becomes embroiled in the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with pyschological realism.

Matthew Sweet's introduction explores the phenomenon of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, and discusses Wilkie Collins's biographical and societal influences. Included in this edition are appendices on theatrical adaptations of the novel and its serialisation history.]]>
672 Wilkie Collins hay 0 to-read 4.06 1859 The Woman in White
author: Wilkie Collins
name: hay
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1859
rating: 0
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Alone with You in the Ether 65213706 From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, comes an intimate and contemporary study of time, space, and the nature of love. Alone with You in the Ether explores what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you're not broken.

CHICAGO, SOMETIME�
Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story about endings.

For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision.

To Aldo, the world feels disturbingly chaotic. He gets through his days by erecting a wall of routine: a backbeat of rules and formulas that keep him going. Without them, the entire framework of his existence would collapse.

For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability—until the two meet. Could six conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire simulation?]]>
288 Olivie Blake 1250888182 hay 0 to-read 3.77 2020 Alone with You in the Ether
author: Olivie Blake
name: hay
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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Transformations 918429 112 Anne Sexton 039512722X hay 0 to-read 4.03 1971 Transformations
author: Anne Sexton
name: hay
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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Women Who Run With the Wolves 241823
In "Women Who Run With the Wolves," Dr Estes unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairytales and stories, many from her own family, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine. Dr Estes has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.]]>
537 Clarissa Pinkola Estés 0345409876 hay 0 to-read 4.12 1992 Women Who Run With the Wolves
author: Clarissa Pinkola Estés
name: hay
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking]]> 13642916 The book that started the Quiet Revolution

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society.Ìę

In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.

Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content.]]>
352 Susan Cain 0307352153 hay 0 to-read 4.21 2012 Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
author: Susan Cain
name: hay
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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Possession 41219 A beautiful hardback edition of the Booker Prize-winning novel. A romance, a literary quest, a modern classic.

A pair of young scholars investigate the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time. Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story.]]>
555 A.S. Byatt 0679735909 hay 0 to-read 3.89 1991 Possession
author: A.S. Byatt
name: hay
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
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Island 16037811 295 Aldous Huxley hay 0 to-read 3.62 1962 Island
author: Aldous Huxley
name: hay
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Waste Land and Other Poems]]> 400412 Librarian Note: Also available as an Alternate Cover Edition.

“And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
I will show you fear in a handful of dust�


When The Waste Land was published in 1922, initial reaction to the poem was decidedly negative. Critics attacked the poem's "kaleidoscopic" design, and nearly everyone disagreed furiously about its meaning. The poem was even rumored to a hoax. Eventually, though, The Waste Land went on to become what many regard as the most influential poem written in English in the twentieth century.

"In ten years' time," wrote Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle (1931), "Elliot has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in English." In 1948, T.S. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Price "for his work as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry."

In addition to the title poem, this selection includes "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Geronition," "Ash-Wednesday," and other poems from Eliot's early and middle work.

Includes:
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- Preludes
- Gerontion
- Sweeney Among the Nightingales
- The Waste Land:
I. The Burial of the Dead
II. A Game of Chess
III. The Fire Sermon
IV. Death by Water
V. What the Thunder Said
Notes on 'The Waste Land'
- Ash-Wednesday
-J ourney of the Magi
- Marina
- Landscapes:
I. New Hampshire
II. Virginia
III. USK
- Two Choruses from 'The Rock'
]]>
88 T.S. Eliot hay 0 to-read 4.24 1922 The Waste Land and Other Poems
author: T.S. Eliot
name: hay
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1922
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/25
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<![CDATA[The Romance of Tristan and Iseult]]> 2641698 The Romance of Tristan and Iseult is one of the most resonant works of Western literature, as well as the basis for our enduring idea of romance. The story of the Cornish knight and the Irish princess who meet by deception, fall in love by magic, and pursue that love in defiance of heavenly and earthly law has inspired artists from Matthew Arnold to Richard Wagner. But nowhere has it been retold with greater eloquence and dignity than in Joseph BĂ©dier’s edition, which weaves several medieval sources into a seamless whole, elegantly translated by Hilaire Belloc and Paul Rosenfeld.]]> 151 Joseph BĂ©dier hay 0 to-read 3.60 1170 The Romance of Tristan and Iseult
author: Joseph BĂ©dier
name: hay
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1170
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Foucault’s Pendulum 17841
On a lark, the editors begin randomly feeding esoteric bits of knowledge into an incredible computer capable of inventing connections between all their entries. What they believe they are creating is a long, lazy game - until the game starts taking over...

Here is an incredible journey of thought and history, memory and fantasy, a tour de force as enthralling as anything Umberto Eco—or indeed anyone—has ever devised.]]>
623 Umberto Eco 015603297X hay 0 to-read 3.92 1988 Foucault’s Pendulum
author: Umberto Eco
name: hay
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1988
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Mary 6644772 Mary is a gripping tale of youth, first love, and nostalgia--Nabokov's first novel.ÌęÌęIn a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian Ă©migrĂ©s, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair.ÌęÌęHis memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia.ÌęÌęIn stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin's, who, he discovers, is Mary's husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution but expecting her imminent arrival from Russia.]]> 116 Vladimir Nabokov 0141191473 hay 0 to-read 3.61 1926 Mary
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: hay
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1926
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<![CDATA[Modern Man in Search of a Soul]]> 646175 A provocative and enlightening look at spiritual unease and its contribution to the void in modern civilization

Considered by many to be one of the most important books in the field of psychology, Modern Man in Search of a Soul is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of Carl Gustav Jung. In this book, Jung examines some of the most contested and crucial areas in the field of analytical psychology, including dream analysis, the primitive unconscious, and the relationship between psychology and religion. Additionally, Jung looks at the differences between his theories and those of Sigmund Freud, providing a valuable basis for anyone interested in the fundamentals of psychoanalysis.
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244 C.G. Jung 0156612062 hay 0 to-read 4.20 1931 Modern Man in Search of a Soul
author: C.G. Jung
name: hay
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1931
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Song of Solomon 5216 "Song of Solomon" begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings as another enters premature labor. The child born of that labor, Macon (Milkman) Dead, will eventually come to discover, through his complicated progress to maturity, the meaning of the drama that marked his birth. Toni Morrison's novel is at once a romance of self-discovery, a retelling of the black experience in America that uncovers the inalienable poetry of that experience, and a family saga luminous in its depth, imaginative generosity, and universality. It is also a tribute to the ways in which, in the hands of a master, the ancient art of storytelling can be used to make the mysterious and invisible aspects of human life apparent, real, and firm to the touch.]]> 337 Toni Morrison 0452260116 hay 0 to-read 4.10 1977 Song of Solomon
author: Toni Morrison
name: hay
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1977
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The Idiot 226383 Crime and Punishment, which explored the mind of a murderer, Dostoevsky produced another masterpiece, The Idiot. This time the author portrays a truly beautiful soul—a character he found difficult to bring to life because, as he wrote, "beauty is the ideal, and neither my country, nor civilized Europe, know what that ideal of beauty is.â€� The result was one of Dostoevsky’s greatest characters—Prince Myshkin, a saintly, Christ-like, yet deeply human figure.

The story begins when Myshkin arrives on Russian soil after a stay in a Swiss sanatorium. Scorned by St. Petersburg society as an idiot for his generosity and innocence, the prince finds himself at the center of a struggle between a rich, kept woman and a beautiful, virtuous girl, who both hope to win his affection. Unfortunately, Myshkin’s very goodness seems to bring disaster to everyone he meets. The shocking denouement tragically reveals how, in a world obsessed with money, power, and sexual conquest, a sanatorium is the only place for a saint.Ìę]]>
619 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0140440542 hay 0 to-read 4.02 1869 The Idiot
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: hay
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1869
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<![CDATA[If Cats Disappeared from the World]]> 40740914
Because how do you decide what makes life worth living? How do you separate out what you can do without from what you hold dear? In dealing with the Devil our narrator will take himself â€� and his beloved cat â€� to the brink. Genki Kawamura's If Cats Disappeared from the World is a story of loss and reconciliation, of one man’s journey to discover what really matters in modern life.

This beautiful tale is translated from the Japanese by Eric Selland, who also translated The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide. Fans of The Guest Cat and The Travelling Cat Chronicles will also surely love If Cats Disappeared from the World.]]>
202 Genki Kawamura 1509889175 hay 0 to-read 3.77 2012 If Cats Disappeared from the World
author: Genki Kawamura
name: hay
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2012
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