en-US Wed, 12 Feb 2014 11:14:51 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 3711 White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.]]> 448 Zadie Smith 0375703861 meg 4 3.80 2000
author: Zadie Smith
name: meg
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2000
rating: 4
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]]> 6748 Infinite Jest.]]> 353 David Foster Wallace 0316925284 meg 5 4.24 1996
author: David Foster Wallace
name: meg
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1996
rating: 5
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]]> 32071 "She was a brazen hussy."

"She wasn't. And she was pretty, wasn't she?"

"I didn't look ... And tell your girls, my son, that when they're running after you, they're not to come and ask your mother for you - tell them that - brazen baggages you meet at dancing classes"

The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, delicate Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul - determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is evitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp through relationships with women his own age. Set in Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, Sons and Lovers is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence and the clash of generations.]]> 654 D.H. Lawrence meg 2 3.65 1913
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: meg
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1913
rating: 2
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]]> 15622 Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.

Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.]]> 504 Richard Wright meg 4 4.03 1940
author: Richard Wright
name: meg
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1940
rating: 4
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]]> 378 Librarian's Note: For an alternate cover edition of the same ISBN, click here.

This beloved story -first published more than fifty years ago- introduces readers to Milo and his adventures in the Lands Beyond.

For Milo, everything’s a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only because he’s got nothing better to do. But on the other side, things seem different. Milo visits the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping), learns about time from a ticking watchdog named Tock, and even embarks on a quest to rescue Rhyme and Reason! Somewhere along the way, Milo realizes something astonishing. Life is far from dull. In fact, it’s exciting beyond his wildest dreams. . . .]]> 248 Norton Juster 0394820371 meg 5 4.19 1961
author: Norton Juster
name: meg
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1961
rating: 5
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]]> 11337 The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change—in painful, devastating ways.

With its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrison's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.]]> 216 Toni Morrison meg 4 4.13 1970
author: Toni Morrison
name: meg
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1970
rating: 4
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]]> 880196 Sozaboy describes the fortunes of a young naive recruit in the Nigerian Civil War: from the first proud days of recruitment to the disillusionment, confusion and horror that follows. The author's use of 'rotten English'—a mixture of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and idiomatic English—makes this a unique and powerful novel.]]> 200 Ken Saro-Wiwa 0582236991 meg 4 3.99 1985
author: Ken Saro-Wiwa
name: meg
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1985
rating: 4
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]]> 836746 A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952�1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers' tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested.]]> 247 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 0435909878 meg 4 3.89 1967
author: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
name: meg
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1967
rating: 4
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]]> 158674 204 Tsitsi Dangarembga 1580051340 meg 4 4.05 1988
author: Tsitsi Dangarembga
name: meg
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1988
rating: 4
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]]> 58177 192 Romain Gary 081120961X meg 5 4.24 1975
author: Romain Gary
name: meg
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1975
rating: 5
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]]> 264587 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is the novel that catapulted Ayi Kwei Armah into the limelight. The novel is generally a satirical attack on the Ghanaian society during Kwame Nkrumah’s regime and the period immediately after independence in the 1960s. It is often claimed to rank with Things Fall Apart as one of the high points of post-colonial African Literature.]]> 183 Ayi Kwei Armah 0435905406 meg 4 3.89 1968
author: Ayi Kwei Armah
name: meg
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1968
rating: 4
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]]> 387509 Houseboy, written in the form of Toundi's captivating diary and translated from the original French, discloses his awe of the white world and a web of unpredictable experiences. Early on, he escapes his father's angry blows by seeking asylum with his benefactor, the local European priest who meets an untimely death. Toundi then becomes "the Chief European's 'boy'--the dog of the King." Toundi's attempt to fulfill a dream of advancement and improvement opens his eyes to troubling realities. Gradually, preconceptions of the Europeans come crashing down on him as he struggles with his identity, his place in society, and the changing culture.]]> 122 Ferdinand Oyono 0435905325 meg 4 3.76 1956
author: Ferdinand Oyono
name: meg
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1956
rating: 4
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]]> 123748
'Ever since they left Thiès, the women had not stopped singing. As soon as one group allowed the refrain to die, another picked it up, and new verses were born at the hazard of chance or inspiration, one word leading to another and each finding, in its turn, its rhythm and its place. No one was very sure any longer where the song began, or if it had an ending. It rolled out over its own length, like the movement of a serpent. It was as long as a life.']]> 248 Ousmane Sembène 0435909592 meg 4 3.97 1960
author: Ousmane Sembène
name: meg
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1960
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/02/12
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]]> 57485
In exile now for more than twenty years, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has become one of the most widely read African writers of our time, the power and scope of his work garnering him international attention and praise. His aim in Wizard of the Crow is, in his own words,nothing less than “to sum up Africa of the twentieth century in the context of two thousand years of world history.�

Commencing in “our times� and set in the “Free Republic of Aburĩria,� the novel dramatizes with corrosive humor and keenness of observation a battle for control of the souls of the Aburĩrian people. Among the contenders: His High Mighty Excellency; the eponymous Wizard, an avatar of folklore and wisdom; the corrupt Christian Ministry; and the nefarious Global Bank. Fashioning the stories of the powerful and the ordinary into a dazzling mosaic, Wizard of the Crow reveals humanity in all its endlessly surprising complexity.

Informed by richly enigmatic traditional African storytelling, Wizard of the Crow is a masterpiece, the crowning achievement in Ngugl wa Thiong’o’s career thus far.]]> 768 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 037542248X meg 4 4.22 2004
author: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
name: meg
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2004
rating: 4
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]]> 18749 A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,� Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.

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

Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race—and the ways in which love can complicate them all. Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise and the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place, bringing us one of the most powerful, dramatic, and intensely emotional pictures of modern Africa that we have ever had.]]> 435 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 1400044162 meg 5 4.34 2006
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: meg
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2006
rating: 5
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]]> 41250
With job prospects few and far between. Elvis is tempted to a life of crime by the easy money his friend Redemption tells him is to be had in Lago's underworld. But the King of the Beggars, Elvis's enigmatic yet faithful adviser, intercedes. And so, torn by the frustration of unrealizable dreams and accompanied by an eclectic chorus of voices, Elvis must find a way to a Graceland of his own making.

Graceland is the story of a son and his father, and an examination of postcolonial Nigeria, where the trappings of American culture reign supreme.]]> 321 Chris Abani 0312425287 meg 4 3.79 2004
author: Chris Abani
name: meg
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 4
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]]> 17556265
For more than fifty years a dynamic modern literature has been developing in the Kiswahili language. The political weight that Kiswahili carries as the emerging national and pan-national language of many East African countries places this literature, much of it in the form of novels, at the centre of heated literary debates on the social function of literature in the context of rapid global social change.
Garnier provides new insights into the Swahili novel form with all its vibrancy and capacity for experimentation. Its obsession with social issues relates to larger, all-pervasive political debates running through East in its press, its streets, its public and private places. The novels both record and provoke these debates. Based on the study of more than 175 Swahili novels by almost 100 authors, Garnier brings to light a body of work much neglected by African literary critics, but which looks outwards to the wider world.

Xavier Garnier teaches African Literature at the Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and is former director of the Centre d'Etudes des Nouveaux Espaces Littéraires, Université Paris 13.]]> 201 Xavier Garnier 1847010792 meg 0 currently-reading 0.0 2013
author: Xavier Garnier
name: meg
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> 12757592 64 Ebrahim N Hussein meg 0 currently-reading 4.14 1971
author: Ebrahim N Hussein
name: meg
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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date added: 2014/02/12
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 155025 160 Alain Ricard 9976973810 meg 0 currently-reading 5.00 1995
author: Alain Ricard
name: meg
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 321539
“Fierce, phantasmagorical � a huge, sprawling, exuberant novel.” � The New York Times

Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.]]> 448 Salman Rushdie 0679744665 meg 5 3.91 1995
author: Salman Rushdie
name: meg
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1995
rating: 5
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]]> 16697
Chabon masterfully renders the funny, tender, and captivating first-person narrative of Art Bechstein, whose confusion and heartache echo the tones of literary forebears like The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield and The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh incontrovertibly established Chabon as a powerful force in contemporary fiction, even before his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay set the literary world spinning. An unforgettable story of coming of age in America, it is also an essential milestone in the movement of American fiction, from a novelist who has become one of the most important and enduring voices of this generation.]]> 320 Michael Chabon 0060790598 meg 4 3.65 1988
author: Michael Chabon
name: meg
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1988
rating: 4
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]]> 14283
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013]]> 246 Alice Munro 0375707484 meg 4 4.14 1974
author: Alice Munro
name: meg
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1974
rating: 4
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]]> 819 918 Neal Stephenson 0099410672 meg 5 4.19 1999
author: Neal Stephenson
name: meg
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2004/01/01
date added: 2009/12/16
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review:
i read this book ravenously. i was so sad when it was over.
]]> 61049 Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

"A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." -- The New York Times Book Review

"A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday."  -- The Village Voice

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

National book Critics Circle Award Finalist]]> 160 Anne Carson 037570129X meg 5 like one long poem 4.28 1998
author: Anne Carson
name: meg
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1998
rating: 5
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like one long poem
]]> 14836 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,� all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.

This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people–a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight� s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.]]> 647 Salman Rushdie 0099578514 meg 5 so good. 3.98 1981
author: Salman Rushdie
name: meg
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 1999/01/01
date added: 2009/12/16
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so good.
]]> 14282
The runaway of the title story is a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband. In "Passion," a country girl emerging into the larger world via a job in a resort hotel discovers in a single moment of stunning insight the limits and lies of that mysterious emotion. Three stories are about a woman named Juliet–in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls� school into a wild and irresistible love match; in the second she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose life and marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her child, caught, she mistakenly thinks, in the grip of a religious cult, vanishes into an unexplained and profound silence. In the final story, "Powers," a young woman with the ability to read the future sets off a chain of events that involves her husband-to-be and a friend in a lifelong pursuit of what such a gift really means, and who really has it.

Throughout this compelling collection, Alice Munro’s understanding of the people about whom she writes makes them as vivid as our own neighbors. Here are the infinite betrayals and surprises of love–between men and women, between friends, between parents and children–that are the stuff of all our lives. It is Alice Munro’s special gift to make these stories as vivid and real as our own.
(front flap)

Runaway -- Chance -- Soon -- Silence -- Passion -- Trespasses -- Tricks -- Powers.]]> 352 Alice Munro 140004281X meg 5 3.97 2004
author: Alice Munro
name: meg
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2004
rating: 5
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]]> 14251 342 Barbara Kingsolver 1568496923 meg 5 3.84 1990
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: meg
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1990
rating: 5
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date added: 2007/02/19
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]]> 30868 232 Barbara Kingsolver 0812474945 meg 5 an all time favorite. 4.00 1988
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: meg
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1988
rating: 5
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an all time favorite.
]]> 7244 The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.]]> 546 Barbara Kingsolver 0060786507 meg 5 4.10 1998
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: meg
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 1998/01/01
date added: 2007/02/19
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]]> 14837
Just before dawn one winter’s morning, a hijacked aeroplane blows apart high above the English Channel and two figures tumble, clutched in an embrace, towards the sea: Gibreel Farishta, India’s legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices.

Washed up, alive, on an English beach, their survival is a miracle. But there is a price to pay. Gibreel and Saladin have been chosen as opponents in the eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil. But chosen by whom? And which is which? And what will be the outcome of their final confrontation?]]> 547 Salman Rushdie meg 5 3.65 1988
author: Salman Rushdie
name: meg
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2007/02/19
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review:

]]> 3985 639 Michael Chabon 0312282990 meg 5 4.18 2000
author: Michael Chabon
name: meg
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2001/01/01
date added: 2007/02/19
shelves:
review:
i loved this book. after reading it i immediately bought it for everyone i knew. michael chabon is a brilliant storyteller.
]]>