en-US Tue, 16 Jan 2024 17:58:51 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 414
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700��titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the��series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date��translations by award-winning translators.]]> 385 Thomas Pynchon 0141180633 Joe 0 to-read 3.79 1990
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Joe
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/16
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]]> 23453099 So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys�� prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.]]> 260 Ottessa Moshfegh 1594206627 Joe 3 3.57 2015
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Joe
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/06
date added: 2024/01/06
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]]> 320 417 Gabriel García Márquez Joe 0 to-read 4.10 1967
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Joe
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/12
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]]> 153747 "It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it."

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

This edition of Moby-Dick, which reproduces the definitive text of the novel, includes invaluable explanatory notes, along with maps, illustrations, and a glossary of nautical terms.]]> 720 Herman Melville 0142437247 Joe 5 3.53 1851
author: Herman Melville
name: Joe
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1851
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/30
date added: 2023/11/30
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]]> 11926015 497 William Friedkin 0061775126 Joe 5 4.14 2012
author: William Friedkin
name: Joe
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/10
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]]> 57736
These mysterious words inspire Ray Kinsella to create a cornfield baseball diamond in honor of his hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson. What follows is a rich, nostalgic look at one of our most cherished national pastimes and a remarkable story about fathers and sons, love and family, and the inimitable joy of finding your way home.]]> 272 W.P. Kinsella 078572902X Joe 0 currently-reading 3.94 1982
author: W.P. Kinsella
name: Joe
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/19
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 59651372
Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.]]> 208 Bret Easton Ellis 0679781498 Joe 3 3.58 1985
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Joe
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1985
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/06
date added: 2023/08/06
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]]> 37708018
The Last Picture Show (1966) is both a rambunctious coming-of-age story and an elegy to a forlorn Texas town trying to keep its one movie house alive. Adapted into the Oscar-winning film, this masterpiece immortalizes the lives of the hardscrabble residents who are threatened by the inexorable forces of the modern world.]]> 246 Larry McMurtry 1631493604 Joe 4 4.24 1966
author: Larry McMurtry
name: Joe
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/25
date added: 2023/06/25
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]]> 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 Joe 4 4.00 2022
author: Hua Hsu
name: Joe
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/16
date added: 2023/06/16
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]]> 17674987 Eminent Hipsters, musician and songwriter Donald Fagen, best known as the co-founder of the rock band Steely Dan, presents an autobiographical portrait that touches on everything from the cultural figures that mattered the most to him as a teenager, to his years in the late 1960s at Bard College, to a hilarious account of a recent tour he made with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald.





Fagen begins by introducing the 'eminent hipsters' that spoke to him as he was growing up (and desperately yearning to be hip) in suburban New Jersey in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The figures who influenced him most were not the typical ones �� Miles Davis, say, or Jack Kerouac �� but rather people like Jean Shepherd, whose manic, acidic nightly radio broadcasts out of WOR-Radio had a tough realism about life and ‘enthralled a generation of alienated young people��; Henry Mancini, whose chilled-out, nourish soundtracks, especially to films by Blake Edwards utilised the unconventional, spare instrumentation associated with the cool jazz school; and Mort Fega, the laid back, knowledgeable all night jazz man at WEVD, who was like ‘the cool uncle you always wished you had��. He writes of how, growing up as a Cold War baby, one of his primary doors of escape became reading science fiction by such authors as Philip K. Dick, and of his regular trips into New York City to hear jazz. Other emblematic musical heroes Fagen writes about include Ray Charles, Ike Turner, and the Boswell Sisters, a trio from the 1920s and 30s whose subversive musical genius included trick phrasing and way out harmony.





‘Class of ��69�� recounts Fagen’s colourful tumultuous years at Bard College, the progressive university north of New York City that attracted a strange mix of applicants, including ‘desperate suburban misfits with impressive verbal skills but appalling high school records�� (like himself). It was at Bard that Fagen first met Walter Becker, with whom he would later form Steely Dan. The final section of the book, ‘With the Dukes of September��, offers a day-by-day account of a tour Fagen undertook last summer across America with Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald, performing a programme of old R&B and soul tunes as well as some of each of their own hits. Told in a weary, cranky, occasionally biting and always entertaining voice, Fagen brings to life the ups and downs and various indignities and anxieties of being on the road �� The Dukes were an admittedly ‘low-rent operation�� compared to a Steely Dan tour �� as well as communicating the challenges and joy of playing every night to a different crowd in a different city.]]> 176 Donald Fagen 0670025518 Joe 4 3.48 2013
author: Donald Fagen
name: Joe
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/01
date added: 2023/06/14
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]]> 60162230 Michael Mann, four-time-Oscar-nominated writer-director of The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider, Ali, Miami Vice, Collateral, and Heat teams up with Edgar Award–winning author Meg Gardiner to deliver Mann’s first novel, an explosive return to the universe and characters of his classic crime film—with an all-new story unfolding in the years before and after the iconic movie

One day after the end of Heat, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) is holed up in Koreatown, wounded, half delirious, and desperately trying to escape LA. Hunting him is LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Hours earlier, Hanna killed Shiherlis’s brother in arms Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) in a gunfight under the strobe lights at the foot of an LAX runway. Now Hanna’s determined to capture or kill Shiherlis, the last survivor of McCauley’s crew, before he ghosts out of the city.

In 1988, seven years earlier, McCauley, Shiherlis, and their highline crew are taking scores on the West Coast, the US-Mexican border, and now in Chicago. Driven, daring, they’re pulling in money and living vivid lives. And Chicago homicide detective Vincent Hanna—a man unreconciled with his history—is following his calling, the pursuit of armed and dangerous men into the dark and wild places, hunting an ultraviolent gang of home invaders.

Meanwhile, the fallout from McCauley’s scores and Hanna’s pursuit cause unexpected repercussions in a parallel narrative, driving through the years following Heat.

Heat 2projects its dimensional and richly drawn men and women into whole new worlds—from the inner sanctums of rival crime syndicates in a South American free-trade zone to transnational criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia. The novel brings you intimately into these lives. In Michael Mann’s Heat universe, they will confront new adversaries in lethal circumstances beyond all boundaries.

Heat 2 is engrossing, moving, and tragic—a masterpiece of crime fiction with the same extraordinary ambitions, scope, and rich characterizations as the epic film.]]> 470 Michael Mann 0062653318 Joe 4 4.19 2022
author: Michael Mann
name: Joe
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/01
date added: 2023/06/14
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]]> 29496076 ��
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.

In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, “the Phantom Terror,�� roamed �� virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four Osage, the newly created F.B.I. took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations. But the bureau was then notoriously corrupt and initially bungled the case. Eventually the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only Native American agents in the bureau. They infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest modern techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. The book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward Native Americans that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly riveting, but also emotionally devastating.]]> 359 David Grann 0385534256 Joe 3 4.12 2017
author: David Grann
name: Joe
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/29
date added: 2023/05/29
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]]> 29044 559 Donna Tartt 1400031702 Joe 5 4.17 1992
author: Donna Tartt
name: Joe
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/22
date added: 2023/03/22
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]]> 55071104 A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother.

The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere."

Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience.]]> 349 Marilynne Robinson Joe 5 3.82 1980
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Joe
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1980
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/12
date added: 2021/10/12
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]]> 166997
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.]]> 292 John Williams 1590171993 Joe 5 4.36 1965
author: John Williams
name: Joe
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1965
rating: 5
read at: 2021/10/04
date added: 2021/10/04
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]]> 7126 The epic tale of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge, in its definitive translation

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to use the treasure to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas�� epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.

Translated with an Introduction by Robin Buss

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here]]> 1276 Alexandre Dumas 0140449264 Joe 0 to-read 4.29 1846
author: Alexandre Dumas
name: Joe
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1846
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/09/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 4266011
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.

Don Delillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome—the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World—shades into the grim news that the Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb.

The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that follows. It takes the reader deeply into the lives of Nick and Klara and into modern memory and the soul of American culture—from Bronx tenements to grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam.

A generation's master spirits come and go. Lenny Bruce cracking jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connected materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs, and miracle sites on the Web.

Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times—Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.]]> 827 Don DeLillo 0684842696 Joe 0 to-read 3.96 1997
author: Don DeLillo
name: Joe
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/09/26
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]]> 18133 Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.]]> 317 Vladimir Nabokov Joe 5 3.97 1955
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Joe
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at: 2021/09/25
date added: 2021/09/25
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]]> 2187 Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967 before moving out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.]]> 529 Jeffrey Eugenides 0312422156 Joe 5 4.03 2002
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Joe
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2021/09/07
date added: 2021/09/07
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]]> 38651886 The National Bestseller from the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author of Middlesex and The Marriage Plot

With a New Introduction

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters--beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys--commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.]]> 243 Jeffrey Eugenides 1250303540 Joe 4 3.73 1993
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Joe
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/13
date added: 2021/08/13
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]]> 703
For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh's election is the first in a series of ruptures that threatens to destroy his small, safe corner of America - and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.]]> 391 Philip Roth 1400079497 Joe 5 3.79 2004
author: Philip Roth
name: Joe
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/22
date added: 2021/07/22
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]]> 55922484
RICK DALTON �� Once he had his own TV series, but now Rick’s a washed-up villain-of-the week drowning his sorrows in whiskey sours. Will a phone call from Rome save his fate or seal it?

CLIFF BOOTH �� Rick’s stunt double, and the most infamous man on any movie set because he’s the only one there who might have gotten away with murder. . . .

SHARON TATE �� She left Texas to chase a movie-star dream, and found it. Sharon’s salad days are now spent on Cielo Drive, high in the Hollywood Hills.

CHARLES MANSON �� The ex-con’s got a bunch of zonked-out hippies thinking he’s their spiritual leader, but he’d trade it all to be a rock ‘n�� roll star.

HOLLYWOOD 1969 �� YOU SHOULDA BEEN THERE]]> 400 Quentin Tarantino 0063112523 Joe 4 3.86 2021
author: Quentin Tarantino
name: Joe
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/07/11
date added: 2021/07/11
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]]> 527022 A major new novel of tremendous scope, ambition, and resonance for all Americans, from the author of White Noise

In his eight previous novels, Don DeLillo has taken on large tracts of the contemporary American experience and created a distinctive world where all the ambiguity, dread, and surpassing strangeness of our own time stand forth in high relief. In Libra, DeLillo has given us the novel the shaken American psyche has been awaiting for twenty-five years—a superbly veracious, artistically impeccable, and eerily convincing fictional speculation of the events leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The antihero of Libra is Lee Harvey Oswald, who is as hauntingly real in the book as he was elusive to us in reality. Here he is, as large and as small as life—joining the Marines, poring over Marxist texts, defecting to Russia, taking a potshot at General Edwin Walker, handing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba committee, imagining himself as an agent of history. Then, "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives, who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on JFK's life, one that could be linked to Fidel Castro, is the only way to put Cuba back into geopolitical play—and that Oswald is the perfect instrument for their ambitions. We are plunged into the strange half-world of Bay of Pigs veterans, rogue agents, right-wing fanatics, mafia thugs, the whole peculiar mélange from which emerged the most shattering event of postwar history. Oswald's sign was Libra, the scales—and how he tilts will determine whether Dallas will be just another stop on the political itinerary or the locus of exploded American dreams.

From its first page Libra grips the reader with inexorable fascination; the seams between fact and invention in this book never show, and the characters—both real and created—are imagined with a novelistic virtuosity that is uniquely Don DeLillo's. Libra is grave and haunting and brilliant—Don DeLillo's finest novel to date and surely one of the most important novels of the decade.]]> 456 Don DeLillo 0670823171 Joe 5 4.06 1988
author: Don DeLillo
name: Joe
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2021/06/27
date added: 2021/06/27
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]]> 374353 New York Times

Moll Robbins is a journalist in a rut. But then she gets wind of a very exciting story: it concerns a small piece of celluloid, a pornographic film purportedly shot in a bunker in the climactic days of Berlin's fall - with Hitler as its star. One person claims to have access to this unique piece of Naziana; inevitably, more than one wants it. Unfortunately for Moll, in the black-market world of erotica, the currency is blackmail, torture and corruption; and no price is too high. As the paranoia builds and the combatants lose sight of their motives, their souls, even the object itself, DeLillo reveals the terrible truth behind our acquisitiveness.

"This is a romantic novel in the gritty, precisionist, enigmatic modern mode ...a full pleasure to read" - New Yorker]]> 246 Don DeLillo 0394501438 Joe 4 3.81 1978
author: Don DeLillo
name: Joe
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/10
date added: 2021/06/10
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]]> 864319 325 Don DeLillo 0140997040 Joe 5 3.89 1985
author: Don DeLillo
name: Joe
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2021/05/29
date added: 2021/06/09
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]]> 1078745 Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.]]> 327 Cormac McCarthy 039454482X Joe 5 4.32 1985
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Joe
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2021/05/20
date added: 2021/06/09
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]]> 18071075 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.]]> 248 Flannery O'Connor Joe 4 3.80 1952
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Joe
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1952
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/01
date added: 2021/06/06
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]]> 421 The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.]]> 224 Joan Didion 0374532079 Joe 5 4.06 1979
author: Joan Didion
name: Joe
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1979
rating: 5
read at: 2021/06/06
date added: 2021/06/06
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]]> 18625064
Achieving eleven Top 10 albums (plus nine with the Smiths), his songs have been recorded by David Bowie, Nancy Sinatra, Marianne Faithfull, Chrissie Hynde, Thelma Houston, My Chemical Romance and Christy Moore, amongst others.

An animal protectionist, in 2006 Morrissey was voted the second greatest living British icon by viewers of the BBC, losing out to Sir David Attenborough. In 2007 Morrissey was voted the greatest northern male, past or present, in a nationwide newspaper poll. In 2012, Morrissey was awarded the Keys to the City of Tel-Aviv.

It has been said 'Most pop stars have to be dead before they reach the iconic status that Morrissey has reached in his lifetime.'

Autobiography covers Morrissey's life from his birth until the present day.]]> 457 Morrissey Joe 4 3.62 2013
author: Morrissey
name: Joe
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/05/05
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]]> 44527618 101 Mark Mallman 0986360759 Joe 5 4.28
author: Mark Mallman
name: Joe
average rating: 4.28
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2019/04/29
date added: 2019/04/29
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]]> 25430304 Don't do things you aren't proud of. But when she discovers that her new school has a secret Arson Club, she's willing to do anything to be a part of it, and her life is suddenly lit up. And as her fascination with the Arson Club grows, her story becomes one of misguided friendship and, ultimately, destruction.]]> 320 Jesse Ball 1101870583 Joe 4 3.57 2016
author: Jesse Ball
name: Joe
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2019/04/18
date added: 2019/04/18
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]]> 36203391
This story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs, designed to heal us from our alienation from this world, shows us how reasonable, even necessary, that alienation sometimes is. Blackly funny, both merciless and compassionate �� dangling its legs over the ledge of 9/11 �� this novel is a showcase for the gifts of one of America’s major young writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 1787330419 Joe 4 3.66 2018
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Joe
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/02/14
date added: 2019/02/14
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]]> 33898867 WTF with Marc Maron comes a book of intimate, hilarious and life changing conversations with some of the funniest, and most important people in the world like you’ve never heard them before. Waiting for the Punch features the stories and thoughts of such luminaries as Amy Schumer, Mel Brooks, Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler, Sir Ian McKellen, Lorne Michels, Judd Apatow, Lena Dunham, Jimmy Fallon, RuPaul, Louis CK, David Sedaris, Bruce Springsteen, and President Obama.

This book is not simply a collection of these interviews, but instead something more wondrous: a running narrative of the world’s most recognizable names working through the problems, doubts, joys, triumphs, and failures we all experience. With each chapter covering a different topic: parenting, childhood, relationships, sexuality, success, failures and others, Punch becomes a sort of everyman’s guide to life. Barack Obama candidly discusses the challenges of the presidency, and the bittersweet moments of seeing your children grow up. Amy Schumer recounts the pain of her parents�� divorce. Molly Shannon uproariously remembers the time she and her best friend hopped a plane from Ohio to New York City when they were twelve on a dare. Amy Poehler dishes on why just because you become a parent doesn’t mean you have to like anybody else’s kids but your own. Bruce Springsteen expounds on the dual nature of desperation to both motivate and devastate.

Full of stories that are at once laugh-out loud funny, heartbreakingly honest, joyous, tragic and powerful, Waiting for the Punch is a book to be read from cover to cover, but it is also one to return to again and again.]]> 416 Marc Maron 1250088887 Joe 4 3.97 2017
author: Marc Maron
name: Joe
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2018/12/29
date added: 2018/12/29
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]]> 1455073 205 Joe Soucheray 1567922147 Joe 0 to-read 4.36 1989
author: Joe Soucheray
name: Joe
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/12/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 36373407 Tragedy Plus Time is a love letter to every family that has ever felt messy, complicated, or (even momentarily) magnificent.

Meet the Magnificent Cayton-Hollands, a trio of brilliant, acerbic teenagers from Denver, Colorado, who were going to change the world. Anna, Adam, and Lydia were taught by their father, a civil rights lawyer, and mother, an investigative journalist, to recognize injustice and have their hearts open to the universe—the good, the bad, the heartbreaking (and, inadvertently, the anxiety-inducing and the obsessive-compulsive disorder-fueling).

Adam chose to meet life’s tough breaks and cruel realities with stand-up comedy; his older sister, Anna, chose law; while their youngest sister, Lydia, struggled to find her place in the world. Beautiful and whip-smart, Lydia was witty, extremely sensitive, fiercely stubborn, and always somewhat haunted. She and Adam bonded over comedy from a young age, running skits in their basement and obsessing over episodes of The Simpsons.

When Adam sunk into a deep depression in college, it was Lydia who was able to reach him and pull him out. But years later as Adam’s career takes off, Lydia’s own depression overtakes her, and, though he tries, Adam can’t return the favor. When she takes her own life, the family is devastated, and Adam throws himself into his stand-up, drinking, and rage. He struggles with disturbing memories of Lydia’s death and turns to EMDR therapy to treat his post-traumatic stress disorder when he realizes there’s a difference between losing and losing it.

Adam Cayton-Holland is a tremendously talented writer and comedian, uniquely poised to take readers to the edges of comedy and tragedy, brilliance and madness. Tragedy Plus Time is a revelatory, darkly funny, and poignant tribute to a lost sibling that will have you reaching for the phone to call your brother or sister by the last page.]]> 256 Adam Cayton-Holland 1501170163 Joe 3 4.12 2018
author: Adam Cayton-Holland
name: Joe
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2018/12/03
date added: 2018/12/03
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]]> 341879 Just Kids, Patti Smith's first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work--from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.]]> 304 Patti Smith Joe 0 to-read 4.19 2010
author: Patti Smith
name: Joe
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/11/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> 35297339 A singularly inventive and unforgettable debut novel about love, luck, and the inextricability of life and art, from 2017 Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday.

Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, Folly tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, Folly also suggests an aspiring novelist’s coming-of-age. By contrast, Madness is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.

A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is an urgent, important, and truly original work that will captivate any reader while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.]]> 277 Lisa Halliday 150116676X Joe 4 3.43 2018
author: Lisa Halliday
name: Joe
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2018/11/17
date added: 2018/11/17
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]]> 29744
©1993 Phillip Roth (P)2009]]> 320 Philip Roth 0679601597 Joe 4 3.88 1959
author: Philip Roth
name: Joe
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at: 2018/11/12
date added: 2018/11/12
shelves:
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]]> 34237826
Before the Civil War, Grant was flailing. His business ventures had been dismal, and despite distinguished service in the Mexican War, he ended up resigning from the army in disgrace amid recurring accusations of drunkenness. But in the Civil War, Grant began to realize his remarkable potential, soaring through the ranks of the Union army, prevailing at the Battle of Shiloh and in the Vicksburg campaign and ultimately defeating the legendary Confederate general Robert E. Lee after a series of unbelievably bloody battles in Virginia. Along the way Grant endeared himself to President Lincoln and became his most trusted general and the strategic genius of the war effort. His military fame translated into a two-term presidency, but one plagued by corruption scandals involving his closest staff. All the while Grant himself remained more or less above reproach. But, more importantly, he never failed to seek freedom and justice for black Americans, working to crush the Ku Klux Klan and earning the admiration of Frederick Douglass, who called him 'the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race." After his presidency, he was again brought low by a trusted colleague, this time a dashing young swindler on Wall Street, but he resuscitated his image by working with Mark Twain to publish his memoirs, which are recognized as a masterpiece of the genre.

With his famous lucidity, breadth, and meticulousness, Chernow finds the threads that bind these disparate stories together, shedding new light on the man whom Walt Whitman described as "nothing heroic... and yet the greatest hero." His probing portrait of Grant's lifelong struggle with alcoholism transforms our understanding of the man at the deepest level. This is America's greatest biographer, bringing movingly to life one of America's finest but most underappreciated presidents. The definitive biography, Grant is a grand synthesis of painstaking research and literary brilliance that makes sense of all sides of Grant's life, explaining how this simple Midwesterner could at once be so ordinary and so extraordinary.]]> 1074 Ron Chernow 159420487X Joe 0 to-read 4.46 2017
author: Ron Chernow
name: Joe
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/11/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 6759
Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.]]> 1088 David Foster Wallace Joe 0 to-read 4.26 1996
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Joe
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/11/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 41012533
Fear is the most intimate portrait of a sitting president ever published during the president’s first years in office. The focus is on the explosive debates and the decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence.

Woodward draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes, personal diaries, files and documents. Often with day-by-day details, dialogue and documentation, Fear tracks key foreign issues from North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, the Middle East, NATO, China and Russia. It reports in-depth on Trump’s key domestic issues particularly trade and tariff disputes, immigration, tax legislation, the Paris Climate Accord and the racial violence in Charlottesville in 2017.

Fear presents vivid details of the negotiations between Trump’s attorneys and Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia investigation, laying out for the first time the meeting-by-meeting discussions and strategies. It discloses how senior Trump White House officials joined together to steal draft orders from the president’s Oval Office desk so he would not issue directives that would jeopardize top secret intelligence operations.

“It was no less than an administrative coup d’état,�� Woodward writes, “a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.”]]> 448 Bob Woodward 1501175513 Joe 4 3.83 2018
author: Bob Woodward
name: Joe
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2018/10/21
date added: 2018/10/21
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]]> 3015764
It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad -- mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.

As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father’s fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.

Indignation, Philip Roth’s twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.]]> 235 Philip Roth 054705484X Joe 4 3.73 2008
author: Philip Roth
name: Joe
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2018/06/05
date added: 2018/06/05
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]]> 18715700 George Smiley is no one's idea of a spy--which is perhaps why he's such a natural. But Smiley apparently made a mistake. After a routine security interview, he concluded that the affable Samuel Fennan had nothing to hide. Why, then, did the man from the Foreign Office shoot himself in the head only hours later? Or did he?
The heart-stopping tale of intrigue that launched both novelist and spy, "Call for the Dead" is an essential introduction to le Carre's chillingly amoral universe.]]> 171 John Le Carré 1101603755 Joe 4 4.08 1961
author: John Le Carré
name: Joe
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2018/01/24
date added: 2018/01/24
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]]> 18774964
Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon, the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him the bitter neighbor from hell, but must Ove be bitter just because he doesn't walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time?

Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove's mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heartwarming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul. All of which will change one cranky old man and a local residents' association to their very foundations.]]> 337 Fredrik Backman 1476738017 Joe 4 4.35 2012
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Joe
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2017/12/17
date added: 2017/12/17
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]]> 27161156 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062300546.

Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story...

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class.

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.]]> 264 J.D. Vance Joe 2 3.81 2016
author: J.D. Vance
name: Joe
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2017/09/11
date added: 2017/09/11
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]]> 33155774
When Liv and Nora decide to take their families on a holiday cruise, everyone is thrilled. The ship's comforts and possibilities seem infinite. The children - two eleven-year-olds, an eight-year-old, and a six-year-old—love the nonstop buffet and the independence they have at the Kids' Club. But when they all go ashore in beautiful Central America, a series of minor misfortunes leads the families farther and farther from the ship's safety. One minute the children are there, and the next they're gone.

What follows is a riveting, revealing story told from the perspectives of the adults and the children, as the once-happy parents - now turning on one another and blaming themselves - try to recover their children and their lives.

Celebrated for her ability to write vivid, spare, moving fiction, Maile Meloy shows how quickly the life we count on can fall away, and how a crisis changes everyone's priorities. The fast-paced, gripping plot of Do Not Become Alarmed carries with it an insightful, provocative examination of privilege, race, guilt, envy, the dilemmas of modern parenthood, and the challenge of living up to our own expectations.]]> 352 Maile Meloy 0735216525 Joe 3 3.40 2017
author: Maile Meloy
name: Joe
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2017/08/06
date added: 2017/08/06
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]]> 24476 Shout at the Devil. The fifth-grade Chuck wasn't quite ready to rock -- his hair was too short and his farm was too quiet -- but he still found a way to bang his nappy little head. Before the journey was over, he would slow-dance to Poison, sleep innocently beneath satanic pentagrams, lust for Lita Ford, and get ridiculously intellectual about Guns N' Roses. C'mon and feel his noize.]]> 320 Chuck Klosterman 0743406567 Joe 0 3.82 2001
author: Chuck Klosterman
name: Joe
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/07/30
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]]> 9418327
She has seen both these dreams come true.

At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon—from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence.

Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've all suspected: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.]]> 283 Tina Fey Joe 0 3.97 2011
author: Tina Fey
name: Joe
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/07/30
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]]> 31934379 From the #1 bestselling author - the story of an award-winning comedian who decided to run for office and then discovered why award-winning comedians tend not to do that.

This is a book about an unlikely campaign that had an even more improbable ending: the closest outcome in history and an unprecedented eight-month recount saga, which is pretty funny in retrospect.


It's a book about what happens when the nation's foremost progressive satirist gets a chance to serve in the United States Senate and, defying the low expectations of the pundit class, actually turns out to be good at it.


It's a book about our deeply polarized, frequently depressing, occasionally inspiring political culture, written from inside the belly of the beast.


In this candid personal memoir, the honorable gentleman from Minnesota takes his army of loyal fans along with him from Saturday Night Live to the campaign trail, inside the halls of Congress, and behind the scenes of some of the most dramatic and/or hilarious moments of his new career in politics.


Has Al Franken become a true Giant of the Senate? Franken asks readers to decide for themselves.]]> 406 Al Franken 1455540412 Joe 5 4.25 2017
author: Al Franken
name: Joe
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2017/07/22
date added: 2017/07/22
shelves:
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]]> 5415 439 Stephen King 0965772411 Joe 3 4.13 1975
author: Stephen King
name: Joe
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1975
rating: 3
read at: 2017/05/06
date added: 2017/05/06
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]]> 9361 This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world and did. Was he a destroyer or the greatest of liberators?

Why did he have to fight his battle, not against his enemies, but against those who needed him most, and his hardest battle against the woman he loved? What is the world’s motor �� and the motive power of every man? You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the characters in this story.

Tremendous in its scope, this novel presents an astounding panorama of human life �� from the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy �� to the great steel industrialist who does not know that he is working for his own destruction �� to the philosopher who becomes a pirate �� to the composer who gives up his career on the night of his triumph �� to the woman who runs a transcontinental railroad �� to the lowest track worker in her Terminal tunnels.

You must be prepared, when you read this novel, to check every premise at the root of your convictions.

This is a mystery story, not about the murder �� and rebirth �� of man’s spirit. It is a philosophical revolution, told in the form of an action thriller of violent events, a ruthlessly brilliant plot structure and an irresistible suspense. Do you say this is impossible? Well, that is the first of your premises to check.]]> 1176 Ayn Rand 0525948929 Joe 1 4.03 1957
author: Ayn Rand
name: Joe
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1957
rating: 1
read at: 2008/08/01
date added: 2017/05/01
shelves:
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]]> 852714 304 Jim Walsh 076033062X Joe 3 3.81 2007
author: Jim Walsh
name: Joe
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2014/12/25
date added: 2014/12/25
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]]> 6224935 A riotously funny, emotionally raw New York Times bestselling novel about love, marriage, divorce, family, and the ties that bind—whether we like it or not.

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

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

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JASON BATEMAN, TINA FEY, JANE FONDA, AND ADAM DRIVER]]> 339 Jonathan Tropper 052595127X Joe 5 3.87 2003
author: Jonathan Tropper
name: Joe
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2014/08/17
date added: 2014/08/17
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]]> 16131189 Mo' Meta Blues is a punch-drunk memoir in which Everyone's Favorite Questlove tells his own story while tackling some of the lates, the greats, the fakes, the philosophers, the heavyweights, and the true originals of the music world. He digs deep into the album cuts of his life and unearths some pivotal moments in black art, hip hop, and pop culture.

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson is many things: virtuoso drummer, producer, arranger, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon bandleader, DJ, composer, and tireless Tweeter. He is one of our most ubiquitous cultural tastemakers, and in this, his first book, he reveals his own formative experiences--from growing up in 1970s West Philly as the son of a 1950s doo-wop singer, to finding his own way through the music world and ultimately co-founding and rising up with the Roots, a.k.a., the last hip hop band on Earth.

Mo' Meta Blues also has some (many) random (or not) musings about the state of hip hop, the state of music criticism, the state of statements, as well as a plethora of run-ins with celebrities, idols, and fellow artists, from Stevie Wonder to KISS to D'Angelo to Jay-Z to Dave Chappelle to...you ever seen Prince roller-skate?!?

But Mo' Meta Blues isn't just a memoir. It's a dialogue about the nature of memory and the idea of a post-modern black man saddled with some post-modern blues. It's a book that questions what a book like Mo' Meta Blues really is. It's the side wind of a one-of-a-kind mind.

It's a rare gift that gives as well as takes.

It's a record that keeps going around and around.]]> 288 Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson 1455501352 Joe 4 4.11 2013
author: Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson
name: Joe
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2013/07/06
date added: 2013/07/06
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]]> 33313 A deluxe, annotated edition of Kitchen Confidential to celebrate the life of Anthony Bourdain, featuring new photo inserts

Over two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,�� by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one’s appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. The article was a sensation, and the book it spawned, the now iconic Kitchen Confidential, became an even bigger sensation and megabestseller. Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic, and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business.

Fans will love to return to this deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade, laying out Bourdain’s more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine. Including a handwritten introduction and annotations done by Bourdain about a decade after the book was originally published, this edition also features previously unpublished photos to accompany the now-classic text.]]> 312 Anthony Bourdain 0060899220 Joe 5 4.17 2000
author: Anthony Bourdain
name: Joe
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2013/02/17
date added: 2013/02/17
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"Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride." - Anthony Bourdain
]]> 386331
The World According to Garp is a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation.]]> 609 John Irving Joe 5 4.05 1978
author: John Irving
name: Joe
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1978
rating: 5
read at: 2008/11/01
date added: 2013/02/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 9439303 576 Keith Richards 0297854399 Joe 5 3.88 2010
author: Keith Richards
name: Joe
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2012/12/06
date added: 2012/12/06
shelves:
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Keith has a wonderful sense of humor. One of my very favorite musicians. A very enjoyable read.
]]> 13586786 Déjà vu, and writing the song, “Ohio;�� life at his secluded ranch in the redwoods of Northern California and the pot-filled jam sessions there; falling in love with his wife, Pegi, and the birth of his three children; and finally, finding the contemplative paradise of Hawaii. Astoundingly candid, witty, and as uncompromising and true as his music, Waging Heavy Peace is Neil Young’s journey as only he can tell it.]]> 512 Neil Young 0399159460 Joe 5 3.60 2012
author: Neil Young
name: Joe
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2012/10/07
date added: 2012/10/07
shelves:
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]]> 13260188 WITH AN IRREPRESSIBLE TASTE for adventure, candor, and a vivid sense of place, award-winning travel writer and actor Andrew McCarthy takes us on a deeply personal journey played out amid some of the world’s most evocative locales.

Unable to commit to his fiancée of nearly four years—and with no clear understanding of what’s holding him back—Andrew McCarthy finds himself at a crossroads, plagued by doubts that have clung to him for a lifetime. Something in his character has kept him always at a distance, preventing him from giving himself wholeheartedly to the woman he loves and from becoming the father that he knows his children deserve. So before he loses everything he cares about, Andrew sets out to look for answers.

Hobbling up the treacherous slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro, dodging gregarious passengers aboard an Amazonian riverboat, and trudging through dense Costa Rican rain forests—Andrew takes us on exotic trips to some of the world’s most beautiful places, but his real journey is one of the spirit.

On his soul-searching voyages, Andrew traces the path from his New Jersey roots, where acting saved his life—and early fame almost took it away—to his transformation into a leading travel writer. He faces the real costs of his early success and lays bare the evolving nature of his relationships with women. He explores a strained bond with his father, and how this complex dynamic shapes his own identity as a parent. Andrew charts his journey from ambivalence to confidence, from infidelity and recklessness to acceptance and a deeper understanding of the internal conflicts of his life.

A gifted writer with an unsparing eye, Andrew relishes bizarre encounters with the characters whom he encounters, allowing them to challenge him in unexpected ways. He gets into peculiar, even dangerous situations that put him to the test—with mixed results. Disarmingly likable, Andrew is open, honest, and authentic on every page, and what emerges is an intimate memoir of self-discovery and an unforgettable love song to the woman who would be his wife.]]> 288 Andrew McCarthy 1451667485 Joe 3 3.60 2012
author: Andrew McCarthy
name: Joe
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2012/10/04
date added: 2012/10/04
shelves:
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]]> 13331179 From the prizewinning author of The Nine, a gripping insider's account of the momentous ideological war between the John Roberts Supreme Court and the Obama administration.

From the moment John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, blundered through the Oath of Office at Barack Obama's inauguration, the relationship between the Supreme Court and the White House has been confrontational. Both men are young, brilliant, charismatic, charming, determined to change the course of the nation—and completely at odds on almost every major constitutional issue. One is radical; one essentially conservative. The surprise is that Obama is the conservative—a believer in incremental change, compromise, and pragmatism over ideology. Roberts—and his allies on the Court—seek to overturn decades of precedent: in short, to undo the ultimate victory FDR achieved in the New Deal.
������This ideological war will crescendo during the 2011-2012 term, in which several landmark cases are on the Court's docket—most crucially, a challenge to Obama's controversial health-care legislation. With four new justices joining the Court in just five years, including Obama's appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, this is a dramatically—and historically—different Supreme Court, playing for the highest of stakes.
������No one is better positioned to chronicle this dramatic tale than Jeffrey Toobin, whose prize-winning bestseller The Nine laid bare the inner workings and conflicts of the Court in meticulous and entertaining detail. As the nation prepares to vote for President in 2012, the future of the Supreme Court will also be on the ballot.]]> 12 Jeffrey Toobin 0449013677 Joe 4 3.97 2012
author: Jeffrey Toobin
name: Joe
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2012/09/29
date added: 2012/09/29
shelves:
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]]> 77203 371 Khaled Hosseini 159463193X Joe 4 4.34 2003
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Joe
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2012/08/01
date added: 2012/09/29
shelves:
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]]> 2429135
An international publishing sensation, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.]]> 480 Stieg Larsson 0670069019 Joe 4 4.17 2005
author: Stieg Larsson
name: Joe
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2012/09/29
shelves:
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]]> 7905092
But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbor," an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?

In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.
(jacket)]]> 562 Jonathan Franzen 0374158460 Joe 5 3.78 2010
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Joe
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2010/12/01
date added: 2011/01/03
shelves:
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]]> 21996
Erik Larson's gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America's rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair's brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country's most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his "World's Fair Hotel" just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium. Burnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.

The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. In this book the smoke, romance, and mystery of the Gilded Age come alive as never before.]]> 496 Erik Larson 0739303406 Joe 4 3.99 2003
author: Erik Larson
name: Joe
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2010/12/01
date added: 2011/01/03
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]]> 5822347 Down.��

Unfortunately, Mishna didn’t quite fit in with the neighborhood kids: she couldn’t dance, she couldn’t sing, she couldn’t double dutch and she was the worst player on her all-black basketball team.�� She was shy, uncool and painfully white.�� And yet when she was suddenly sent to a rich white school, she found she was too “black�� to fit in with her white classmates.��

I’m Down is a hip, hysterical and at the same time beautiful memoir that will have you howling with laughter, recommending it to friends and questioning what it means to be black and white in America.]]> 288 Mishna Wolff 0312378556 Joe 4 3.69 2009
author: Mishna Wolff
name: Joe
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2010/10/01
date added: 2011/01/03
shelves:
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]]> 176000
First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century. The novel tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch—saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud’s, ether addict and abortionist. This is also the story of Dr. Larch’s favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.

Praise for The Cider House Rules

�� [Irving] is among the very best storytellers at work today. At the base of Irving’s own moral concerns is a rare and lasting regard for human kindness.�� �� The Philadelphia Inquirer

�� Superb in scope and originality, a novel as good as one could hope to find from any author, anywhere, anytime. Engrossing, moving, thoroughly satisfying.�� —Joseph Heller

�� An old-fashioned, big-hearted novel . . . with its epic yearning caught in the nineteenth century, somewhere between Trollope and Twain.�� �� Boston Sunday Globe]]> 640 John Irving 0345417941 Joe 4 4.11 1985
author: John Irving
name: Joe
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2008/12/01
date added: 2009/02/06
shelves:
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