Maria's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 06 Jun 2015 06:24:25 -0700 60 Maria's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Life of Pi 170453
The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea.]]> 326 Yann Martel 0156027321 Maria 0 to-read 3.88 2001 Life of Pi
author: Yann Martel
name: Maria
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2015/06/06
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]]> <![CDATA[The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)]]> 85266 This item does not meet our catalog guidelines and can no longer be rated or reviewed.
Please add this edition to your shelf instead:
The da Vinci Code]]> 454 Dan Brown Maria 1 3.81 2003 The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)
author: Dan Brown
name: Maria
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2003
rating: 1
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date added: 2014/06/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6)]]> 1 652 J.K. Rowling Maria 4 4.57 2005 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Maria
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/04/28
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]]> Ruby 18282970 The epic, unforgettable story of a man determined to protect the woman he loves from the town desperate to destroy her—this beautiful and devastating debut heralds the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.

Ephram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby, “the kind of pretty it hurt to look at,� has suffered beyond imagining, so as soon as she can, she flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York. Ruby quickly winds her way into the ripe center of the city--the darkened piano bars and hidden alleyways of the Village--all the while hoping for a glimpse of the red hair and green eyes of her mother. When a telegram from her cousin forces her to return home, thirty-year-old Ruby Bell finds herself reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. With the terrifying realization that she might not be strong enough to fight her way back out again, Ruby struggles to survive her memories of the town’s dark past. Meanwhile, Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who raised him and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since he was a boy.

Full of life, exquisitely written, and suffused with the pastoral beauty of the rural South, Ruby is a transcendent novel of passion and courage. This wondrous page-turner rushes through the red dust and gossip of Main Street, to the pit fire where men swill bootleg outside Bloom’s Juke, to Celia Jennings’s kitchen where a cake is being made, yolk by yolk, that Ephram will use to try to begin again with Ruby. Utterly transfixing, with unforgettable characters, riveting suspense, and breathtaking, luminous prose, Ruby offers an unflinching portrait of man’s dark acts and the promise of the redemptive power of love.]]> 330 Cynthia Bond 0804139091 Maria 5 3.73 2014 Ruby
author: Cynthia Bond
name: Maria
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2014
rating: 5
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date added: 2014/04/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man and Life's Greatest Lesson]]> 546384
Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you?

Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying of ALS - or motor neurone disease - Mitch visited Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final 'class': lessons in how to live.]]> 192 Mitch Albom Maria 4 4.19 1997 Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man and Life's Greatest Lesson
author: Mitch Albom
name: Maria
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1997
rating: 4
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date added: 2012/10/15
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]]> <![CDATA[The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time]]> 1618 226 Mark Haddon 1400032717 Maria 4 3.89 2003 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
author: Mark Haddon
name: Maria
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/12/17
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This was one of those crazy books that you gotta love. Written in the first person by quite the little detective on the rise. It reads as though you are inside his mind, looking out. And what a mind to be looking out of...
]]> The Sound and the Fury 10975 366 William Faulkner Maria 4 3.86 1929 The Sound and the Fury
author: William Faulkner
name: Maria
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1929
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/12/17
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Why I fell in love with William Faulkner.....
]]> I Know This Much Is True 77278
Oprah Book Club® Selection, June 1998.]]> 897 Wally Lamb 0060391626 Maria 4 4.04 1998 I Know This Much Is True
author: Wally Lamb
name: Maria
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1998
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/12/17
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Another great by Wally Lamb. I think the characters he chooses are fancinating. This time around we read about a man who has an indentical, schizophrenic twin brother. Let the madness ensue...
]]> She's Come Undone 5227
In his extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch an incredible ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. At once a fragile girl and a hard-edged cynic, so tough to love yet so inimitably loveable, Dolores is as poignantly real as our own imperfections.]]> 416 Wally Lamb 0684860090 Maria 4 3.72 1992 She's Come Undone
author: Wally Lamb
name: Maria
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1992
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/12/17
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I think it's fancinating, borderline creepy how well Mr. Lamb can write about the inner workings of a female mind, from childhood through teens through adulthood. He does a wonderful job.
]]> <![CDATA[Life Is So Good: One Man's Extraordinary Journey through the 20th Century and How he Learned to Read at Age 98]]> 933231 260 George Dawson 0141001682 Maria 0 to-read 4.19 2000 Life Is So Good: One Man's Extraordinary Journey through the 20th Century and How he Learned to Read at Age 98
author: George Dawson
name: Maria
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/08/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> Of Mice and Men 40698
Laborers in California’s dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie’s unswerving obedience to the things George taught him.

--back cover]]> 107 John Steinbeck Maria 4 3.84 1937 Of Mice and Men
author: John Steinbeck
name: Maria
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1937
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/07/20
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]]> The Grapes of Wrath 4395 The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

First published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book—which takes its title from the first verse: "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s fictional chronicle of the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s is perhaps the most American of American Classics.]]> 455 John Steinbeck Maria 3 3.88 1939 The Grapes of Wrath
author: John Steinbeck
name: Maria
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1939
rating: 3
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date added: 2007/07/20
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I really should read this one again. I think I was about 16 when I read it the first time and I really didn't dig it....or maybe I just didn't get it.
]]> The Glass Castle 7445 THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

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

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

The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.]]> 288 Jeannette Walls 074324754X Maria 3 4.32 2005 The Glass Castle
author: Jeannette Walls
name: Maria
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2005
rating: 3
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date added: 2007/07/20
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]]> <![CDATA[The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference]]> 9356 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here]]> 279 Malcolm Gladwell 0349113467 Maria 0 to-read 3.88 2002 The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
author: Malcolm Gladwell
name: Maria
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7)]]> 136251
In this final, seventh installment of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling unveils in spectacular fashion the answers to the many questions that have been so eagerly awaited.]]> 759 J.K. Rowling Maria 0 to-read 4.61 2007 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Maria
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/19
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]]> The Kite Runner 77203 371 Khaled Hosseini 159463193X Maria 4 4.34 2003 The Kite Runner
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Maria
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/07/19
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]]> Interpreter of Maladies 243714 Wall Street Journal). In stories that travel from India to America and back again, Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Honored as "Debut of the Year" by the New Yorker and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, Interpreter of Maladies introduces a young writer of astonishing maturity and insight who "breathes unpredictable life into the page" (New York Times).

~from back cover]]> 198 Jhumpa Lahiri Maria 0 to-read 4.14 1999 Interpreter of Maladies
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Maria
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wicked Years #1)]]> 10750 When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?

Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then there is the little green-skinned girl named Elphaba, who will grow up to be the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, a smart, prickly and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil.

]]> 409 Gregory Maguire 0060745908 Maria 4 3.44 1995 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wicked Years #1)
author: Gregory Maguire
name: Maria
average rating: 3.44
book published: 1995
rating: 4
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]]> The Secret Life of Bees 37435 The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.]]> 302 Sue Monk Kidd 0142001740 Maria 4 4.10 2001 The Secret Life of Bees
author: Sue Monk Kidd
name: Maria
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2001
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/07/19
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]]> Nine Stories 683063 0 J.D. Salinger 0613174062 Maria 5 4.00 1953 Nine Stories
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Maria
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1953
rating: 5
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]]> Franny and Zooey 714775 J.D. Salinger Maria 4 4.01 1957 Franny and Zooey
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Maria
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1957
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/07/19
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]]> Letting Loose the Hounds 938668
These are sad/sweet stories, moving from the familiar to surprising destinations. But even when disaster looms, Brady Udall's fine comic sense keeps bubbling up, sustaining his men and women in their sometimes extravagant efforts to connect and cope. Plunged in the moment, these stories have velocity; they spray gravel as they take off.]]> 224 Brady Udall 039304033X Maria 0 to-read 4.39 1997 Letting Loose the Hounds
author: Brady Udall
name: Maria
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/19
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]]> <![CDATA[The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint]]> 347964 If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close.

With these words Edgar Mint, half-Apache and mostly orphaned, makes his unshakable claim on our attention. In the course of Brady Udall’s high-spirited, inexhaustibly inventive novel, Edgar survives not just this bizarre accident, but a hellish boarding school for Native American orphans, a well-meaning but wildly dysfunctional Mormon foster-family, and the loss of most of the illusions that are supposed to make life bearable.

What persists is Edgar’s innate goodness, his belief in the redeeming power of language, and his determination to find and forgive the man who almost killed him. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a miracle of storytelling, bursting with heartache and hilarity and inhabited by characters as outsized as the landscape of the American West.]]> 428 Brady Udall 0375719180 Maria 4 3.93 2001 The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint
author: Brady Udall
name: Maria
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2001
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/07/19
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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 Maria 0 to-read 4.44 2007 A Thousand Splendid Suns
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Maria
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/19
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]]> The Stranger 49552 The Stranger has long been considered a classic of twentieth-century literature. Le Monde ranks it as number one on its "100 Books of the Century" list. Through this story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."]]> 123 Albert Camus Maria 5 4.04 1942 The Stranger
author: Albert Camus
name: Maria
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1942
rating: 5
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]]> The Plague 11989
It tells the story from the point of view of a narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown until the start of the last chapter, chapter 5 of part 5. The novel presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author's distinctive absurdist point of view.

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

The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus' objection to the label. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their destinies. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka's, especially in The Trial, whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings; the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.]]> 308 Albert Camus Maria 5 4.05 1947 The Plague
author: Albert Camus
name: Maria
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1947
rating: 5
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]]> The Bell Jar 410276 The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under - maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
--back cover]]> 264 Sylvia Plath 0060930187 Maria 0 to-read 3.99 1963 The Bell Jar
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Maria
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/19
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]]> Fahrenheit 451 119787 Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future.

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. 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 then 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.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.]]> 179 Ray Bradbury Maria 0 to-read 3.94 1953 Fahrenheit 451
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Maria
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2)]]> 15881
And strike it does. For in Harry’s second year at Hogwarts, fresh torments and horrors arise, including an outrageously stuck-up new professor and a spirit who haunts the girls� bathroom. But then the real trouble begins � someone is turning Hogwarts students to stone. Could it be Draco Malfoy, a more poisonous rival than ever? Could it possibly be Hagrid, whose mysterious past is finally told? Or could it be the one everyone at Hogwarts most suspects� Harry Potter himself!]]> 352 J.K. Rowling Maria 3 4.42 1998 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Maria
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1998
rating: 3
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5)]]> 2
Harry has had enough. He is beginning to think he must do something, anything, to change his situation, when the summer holidays come to an end in a very dramatic fashion. What Harry is about to discover in his new year at Hogwarts will turn his world upside down...]]> 912 J.K. Rowling Maria 4 4.50 2003 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Maria
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4)]]> 6 734 J.K. Rowling 0439139597 Maria 4 4.56 2000 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Maria
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2000
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1)]]> 3 309 J.K. Rowling 0439554934 Maria 3 4.47 1997 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Maria
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1997
rating: 3
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Unbearable Lightness of Being]]> 96573 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers.]]> 314 Milan Kundera 0060914653 Maria 0 to-read 3.99 1984 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
author: Milan Kundera
name: Maria
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close]]> 4588
The key belonged to his father, he's sure of that. But which of New York's 162 million locks does it open?

So begins a quest that takes Oskar - inventor, letter-writer and amateur detective - across New York's five boroughs and into the jumbled lives of friends, relatives, and complete strangers. He gets heavy boots, he gives himself little bruises and he inches ever nearer to the heart of a family mystery that stretches back fifty years. But will it take him any closer to, or further from, his lost father?]]> 326 Jonathan Safran Foer 0618711651 Maria 0 to-read 3.98 2005 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
author: Jonathan Safran Foer
name: Maria
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> <![CDATA[A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius]]> 4953 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an instant classic that will be read for decades to come.]]> 530 Dave Eggers 0375725784 Maria 4 3.70 2000 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
author: Dave Eggers
name: Maria
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2000
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> East of Eden 4406
Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.

First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.]]> 601 John Steinbeck 0142000655 Maria 5 4.41 1952 East of Eden
author: John Steinbeck
name: Maria
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1952
rating: 5
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> The Fountainhead 2122
This modern classic is the story of intransigent young architect Howard Roark, whose integrity was as unyielding as granite...of Dominique Francon, the exquisitely beautiful woman who loved Roark passionately, but married his worst enemy...and of the fanatic denunciation unleashed by an enraged society against a great creator. As fresh today as it was then, Rand’s provocative novel presents one of the most challenging ideas in all of fiction—that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress...

“A writer of great power. She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly...This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.”—The New York Times]]> 704 Ayn Rand Maria 0 to-read 3.87 1943 The Fountainhead
author: Ayn Rand
name: Maria
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1943
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> The Time Traveler's Wife 14050 537 Audrey Niffenegger 0965818675 Maria 0 to-read 3.90 2003 The Time Traveler's Wife
author: Audrey Niffenegger
name: Maria
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> 1984 5470 328 George Orwell Maria 0 to-read 4.15 1949 1984
author: George Orwell
name: Maria
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> To Kill a Mockingbird 2657 "Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man's struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

"To Kill A Mockingbird" became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film.]]> 323 Harper Lee 0060935464 Maria 5 4.25 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird
author: Harper Lee
name: Maria
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1960
rating: 5
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> As I Lay Dying 77013 As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members -- including Addie herself -- as well as others; the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, As I Lay Dying is a true 20th-century classic.

This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.]]> 288 William Faulkner Maria 5 3.71 1930 As I Lay Dying
author: William Faulkner
name: Maria
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1930
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream]]> 1175483 Paulo Coelho 0606204741 Maria 0 to-read 4.03 1988 The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream
author: Paulo Coelho
name: Maria
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> The Pilgrimage 1424 263 Paulo Coelho 006251279X Maria 0 currently-reading 3.41 1987 The Pilgrimage
author: Paulo Coelho
name: Maria
average rating: 3.41
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/18
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting]]> 26115 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970's. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than just its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed and experienced.]]> 228 Milan Kundera 0571203876 Maria 0 to-read 3.82 1979 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
author: Milan Kundera
name: Maria
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/07/18
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]]> Youth in Revolt 10050 Six months in the life of the world's most dangerous teenager.

Youth in Revolt is the journals of Nick Twisp, California's most precocious diarist, whose ongoing struggles to make sense out of high school, deal with his divorced parents, and lose his virginity result in his transformation from an unassuming fourteen-year-old to a modern youth in open revolt.

As his family splinters, worlds collide, and the police block all routes out of town, Nick must cope with economic deprivation, homelessness, the gulag of the public schools, a competitive Type-A father, murderous canines (in triplicate), and an inconvenient hair trigger on his erectile response—all while vying ardently for the affections of the beauteous Sheeni Saunders, teenage goddess and ultimate intellectual goad.]]> 512 C.D. Payne 0385481969 Maria 0 to-read 4.04 1993 Youth in Revolt
author: C.D. Payne
name: Maria
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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]]> The Virgin Suicides 851753 249 Jeffrey Eugenides 0374284385 Maria 3 3.83 1993 The Virgin Suicides
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Maria
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1993
rating: 3
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]]> Middlesex 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 Maria 5 4.03 2002 Middlesex
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Maria
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2002
rating: 5
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This was one of my favorite books all year. It's always one of the first ones that I will recommend to people.
]]> 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 Maria 5 3.81 1951 The Catcher in the Rye
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Maria
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 5
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