en-US Fri, 30 Aug 2024 16:52:32 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Reader 5 Excellent read 4.47 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Reader
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/30
shelves:
review:
Excellent read
]]> 48467 This is an alternate-cover edition for ISBN 9780374530631)

The American short story master Flannery O'Connor's haunting first novel of faith, false prophets, and redemptive wisdom.

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles.

This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.]]> 256 Flannery O'Connor 0374530637 Reader 5 3.84 1952
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Reader
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1952
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/30
shelves:
review:
Stunning, comic, profound, terrifying. I'm a slow reader and I burned through this in a few hours.
]]> 11908 586 Saul Bellow 0143039571 Reader 3 3.83 1953
author: Saul Bellow
name: Reader
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1953
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/30
shelves:
review:
Blasphemy! I am just not in the mood for a bildungsroman that packs in every last detail into every bit of possible silence. Too noisy for me right now. I should've read a sample before purchasing on Kindle. I read Herzog over thirty years ago and remember liking it, but don't remember anything about the pace. Seeking a more introspective book that takes place in a big city and slows it down and respects silence. Maybe southern, maybe I've never heard of.
]]> 676737 Beowulf, tells his side of the story in a book William Gass called "one of the finest of our contemporary fictions."]]> 174 John Gardner 0679723110 Reader 5 masterpiece 3.68 1971
author: John Gardner
name: Reader
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1971
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/04/02
shelves:
review:
masterpiece
]]> 30008702 Nutshell is a classic story of murder and deceit, told by a narrator with a perspective and voice unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master.

To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things.]]> 208 Ian McEwan Reader 5 3.65 2016
author: Ian McEwan
name: Reader
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/04/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 13079982 Sixty years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.� But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.]]> 194 Ray Bradbury Reader 5 3.97 1953
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Reader
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1953
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/04/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 77203 371 Khaled Hosseini 159463193X Reader 2 4.34 2003
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Reader
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2003
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2024/04/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 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 Reader 5 3.81 1951
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Reader
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/04/02
shelves:
review:

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

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

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.]]> 180 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0743273567 Reader 3 3.93 1925
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Reader
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/04/02
shelves:
review:

]]>