Capability's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 05 Apr 2018 10:54:37 -0700 60 Capability's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Hiroshima in the Morning 8465962
In June 2001, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto went to Hiroshima in search of a deeper understanding of her war-torn heritage. She planned to spend six months there, interviewing the few remaining survivors of the atomic bomb. A mother of two young boys, she was encouraged to go by her husband, who quickly became disenchanted by her absence.

It is her first solo life adventure, immediately exhilarating for her, but her research starts off badly. Interviews with the hibakusha feel rehearsed, and the survivors reveal little beyond published accounts. Then the attacks on September 11 change everything. The survivors' carefully constructed memories are shattered, causing them to relive their agonizing experiences and to open up to Rizzuto in astonishing ways.

Separated from family and country while the world seems to fall apart, Rizzuto's marriage begins to crumble as she wrestles with her ambivalence about being a wife and mother. Woven into the story of her own awakening are the stories of Hiroshima in the survivors' own words. The parallel narratives explore the role of memory in our lives and show how memory is not history but a story we tell ourselves to explain who we are.]]> 336 Rahna Reiko Rizzuto 1558616675 Capability 3
Hiroshima in the Morning � a video from the author. Hiroshima in the Morning (click on the title for the video which is really well-done � I spent way too much time trying to get the Youtube video box to embed. I quit � just click on it.)

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the author and she is truly a writer. She is able to share her world in such beautiful language that I even dog-eared some pages so I would not lose the parts that I just had to re-read.

Here is an excerpt:

I can tell you the story but it won’t be true.
It won’t be the facts as they happened exactly, each day, each footstep, each breath. Time elides, events shift; sometimes we shift them on purpose and forget that we did. Memory is just how we choose to remember.

We choose. It begins in our house, on the top floors of a 19th century brownstone. I’m sitting at our long dining room table across from my husband Brian, my two, brightly-pajamaed sons asleep � finally � after slipping downstairs for water, and then just one more kiss between the banisters. The year is 2001, the place New York City, and in the quiet of the last, warming days of May, I am making a list.

I am a list maker, a super-organizer who measures her success in life by how many of the items she’s checked off. This is who I’ve always been, and it’s never occurred to me to question it. It occurs to me only that I have a goodbye party to throw for myself, which will involve a 25-pound pork butt, Hawaiian rock salt, and ten yards of purple plumeria-patterned fabric that I’ve ordered on the internet but has yet to arrive. If I think about plates, about feeding fifty of my dearest friends who will come to wish me well, I will not have to think of this trip of mine � my first trip away, my first trip alone, my six-month long “trip� to the other side of the world. Brian watches me busy myself. And then the question: “Why are you going to Japan?�

…In Brooklyn, in 2001, I was making a list. I knew I was leaving, but if I had known how thoroughly my life would shatter over the next six months, into gains just as astonishing as the losses; if I knew I was saying goodbye to the person I was that night, that decade, that lifetime; if I understood I was about to become someone new, too new, someone I was proud of, who I loved, but who was too different to fit here, in this particular, invisible narrative that I was sitting in but couldn’t feel, would I still have gotten on the airplane?

This is the question people will ask me. The question that curls, now, in the dark of the night. How do any of us decide to leave the people we love?

She shares her fears and doubts in a open honest account of her relationships that is rarely found even in our over-sharing world today. But I do have to confess that when I first read Ayelet Waldman‘s book blurb*, I took note � that is to say I was on high alert. Ms. Waldman has proven to be controversial (but never dull) and her own take on Motherhood has raised more than a few eyebrows…feminist or otherwise. I feared at first that this would be an anti-mothering screed that would make me uncomfortable. It is and it isn’t, it does and it doesn’t.

Ostensibly, it is the author’s journey to Japan to interview the surviving victims of Hiroshima and how her experience getting them to share is altered by 9/11 in that the people she is interviewing are suddenly more emotionally accessible after America also suffered a tragedy. The stories of the people who were in Hiroshima are heartbreaking and painful and raw. The stories are faithfully re-told and this part of the book I found moving and jarring and true.

While it isn’t a screed (a : a lengthy discourse b : an informal piece of writing (as a personal letter) c : a ranting piece of writing) � no wait, it kind of is one. It is a memoir of a woman who is searching for herself and her history and her relationships � past and present � and who is trying to see where she actually begins and ends…if that is at all possible.

While the writing is lovely, I got a little impatient with the author, a privileged person not unlike the heroine of Eat, Pray, Love. Oh, shut up. Julia Roberts is lovely and I am sure it was a nice movie (I read the book) but show me a real person (yes, you � the ones who bought the book or a ticket to the movie) who gets a major cash book advance, leaves her stultifying marriage and then pulls herself together by managing to finally (!) gain weight in Italy, meditate and hang out with some yogic cowboy in India and find love (I had something else here but this is a family blog) in an island paradise. But again, I digress.

The author, Rizzuto, has lots of time for self-reflection but isn’t very good at it. She comes across as the adolescent she refers to in her subway memory (only with a good vocabulary and a poetic way of writing about the world) and she is a pretty petulant one at that. I guess my biggest problem with the book is that after 9/11 and with her children and husband in New York City…the author didn’t go home. Okay? Really? How do you not go to your family? So there is some restriction that if she were out of the country for more than seven days it meant she would lose her grant. So…go home. The flight does not take seven days. That is why her husband was pissed � okay, that’s why I would have been pissed � Sorry for projecting.

I am not immune to wondering “Are you anything else when you are a mother or is that your defining role/characteristic/fate?� I get it. I don’t get making your child wait for the bathroom (he was three years old) until you eat the rest of your noodles because this would be the chance for you to come back to them emotionally . Huh? Total and complete disconnect for me. Take the kid to the G-D bathroom when he has to go.

Here is a nice review of her first book, Why She Left Us which I will read at some point but not just yet. I sense, ahem, a theme.

I liked the book enough to send it to my mother-in-law as a gift but I did have the furrowed brow thing going for parts of the book.

*”This searing and redemptive memoir is an explosive account of motherhood reconstructed. Pulling from the wreckage of two wars, as well as the loss of her own mother to Alzheimer’s, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto recasts her identity as a mother and a daughter, and finds a truer connection to her family.� � Ayelet Waldman

I updated this post today because it has been getting quite a bit of traffic and I wanted to make it easier to find. Also I figured out the you tube plug-in.
]]> 3.17 2010 Hiroshima in the Morning
author: Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
name: Capability
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2010/09/01
date added: 2018/04/05
shelves:
review:
I just finished reading a beautifully written book that I received as part of a blog book review tour from Feminist Press. Did you know that some younger women do not like to be called feminists? What is up with that? But I digress.

Hiroshima in the Morning � a video from the author. Hiroshima in the Morning (click on the title for the video which is really well-done � I spent way too much time trying to get the Youtube video box to embed. I quit � just click on it.)

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the author and she is truly a writer. She is able to share her world in such beautiful language that I even dog-eared some pages so I would not lose the parts that I just had to re-read.

Here is an excerpt:

I can tell you the story but it won’t be true.
It won’t be the facts as they happened exactly, each day, each footstep, each breath. Time elides, events shift; sometimes we shift them on purpose and forget that we did. Memory is just how we choose to remember.

We choose. It begins in our house, on the top floors of a 19th century brownstone. I’m sitting at our long dining room table across from my husband Brian, my two, brightly-pajamaed sons asleep � finally � after slipping downstairs for water, and then just one more kiss between the banisters. The year is 2001, the place New York City, and in the quiet of the last, warming days of May, I am making a list.

I am a list maker, a super-organizer who measures her success in life by how many of the items she’s checked off. This is who I’ve always been, and it’s never occurred to me to question it. It occurs to me only that I have a goodbye party to throw for myself, which will involve a 25-pound pork butt, Hawaiian rock salt, and ten yards of purple plumeria-patterned fabric that I’ve ordered on the internet but has yet to arrive. If I think about plates, about feeding fifty of my dearest friends who will come to wish me well, I will not have to think of this trip of mine � my first trip away, my first trip alone, my six-month long “trip� to the other side of the world. Brian watches me busy myself. And then the question: “Why are you going to Japan?�

…In Brooklyn, in 2001, I was making a list. I knew I was leaving, but if I had known how thoroughly my life would shatter over the next six months, into gains just as astonishing as the losses; if I knew I was saying goodbye to the person I was that night, that decade, that lifetime; if I understood I was about to become someone new, too new, someone I was proud of, who I loved, but who was too different to fit here, in this particular, invisible narrative that I was sitting in but couldn’t feel, would I still have gotten on the airplane?

This is the question people will ask me. The question that curls, now, in the dark of the night. How do any of us decide to leave the people we love?

She shares her fears and doubts in a open honest account of her relationships that is rarely found even in our over-sharing world today. But I do have to confess that when I first read Ayelet Waldman‘s book blurb*, I took note � that is to say I was on high alert. Ms. Waldman has proven to be controversial (but never dull) and her own take on Motherhood has raised more than a few eyebrows…feminist or otherwise. I feared at first that this would be an anti-mothering screed that would make me uncomfortable. It is and it isn’t, it does and it doesn’t.

Ostensibly, it is the author’s journey to Japan to interview the surviving victims of Hiroshima and how her experience getting them to share is altered by 9/11 in that the people she is interviewing are suddenly more emotionally accessible after America also suffered a tragedy. The stories of the people who were in Hiroshima are heartbreaking and painful and raw. The stories are faithfully re-told and this part of the book I found moving and jarring and true.

While it isn’t a screed (a : a lengthy discourse b : an informal piece of writing (as a personal letter) c : a ranting piece of writing) � no wait, it kind of is one. It is a memoir of a woman who is searching for herself and her history and her relationships � past and present � and who is trying to see where she actually begins and ends…if that is at all possible.

While the writing is lovely, I got a little impatient with the author, a privileged person not unlike the heroine of Eat, Pray, Love. Oh, shut up. Julia Roberts is lovely and I am sure it was a nice movie (I read the book) but show me a real person (yes, you � the ones who bought the book or a ticket to the movie) who gets a major cash book advance, leaves her stultifying marriage and then pulls herself together by managing to finally (!) gain weight in Italy, meditate and hang out with some yogic cowboy in India and find love (I had something else here but this is a family blog) in an island paradise. But again, I digress.

The author, Rizzuto, has lots of time for self-reflection but isn’t very good at it. She comes across as the adolescent she refers to in her subway memory (only with a good vocabulary and a poetic way of writing about the world) and she is a pretty petulant one at that. I guess my biggest problem with the book is that after 9/11 and with her children and husband in New York City…the author didn’t go home. Okay? Really? How do you not go to your family? So there is some restriction that if she were out of the country for more than seven days it meant she would lose her grant. So…go home. The flight does not take seven days. That is why her husband was pissed � okay, that’s why I would have been pissed � Sorry for projecting.

I am not immune to wondering “Are you anything else when you are a mother or is that your defining role/characteristic/fate?� I get it. I don’t get making your child wait for the bathroom (he was three years old) until you eat the rest of your noodles because this would be the chance for you to come back to them emotionally . Huh? Total and complete disconnect for me. Take the kid to the G-D bathroom when he has to go.

Here is a nice review of her first book, Why She Left Us which I will read at some point but not just yet. I sense, ahem, a theme.

I liked the book enough to send it to my mother-in-law as a gift but I did have the furrowed brow thing going for parts of the book.

*”This searing and redemptive memoir is an explosive account of motherhood reconstructed. Pulling from the wreckage of two wars, as well as the loss of her own mother to Alzheimer’s, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto recasts her identity as a mother and a daughter, and finds a truer connection to her family.� � Ayelet Waldman

I updated this post today because it has been getting quite a bit of traffic and I wanted to make it easier to find. Also I figured out the you tube plug-in.

]]> <![CDATA[Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood]]> 400256 196 Anne Enright 0099437627 Capability 5 3.55 2004 Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood
author: Anne Enright
name: Capability
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2012/04/10
shelves:
review:

]]> The Lovely Bones 12232938
So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her -- her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable tragedy and loss, The Lovely Bones succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even joy.]]> 372 Alice Sebold 0316166685 Capability 0 3.87 2002 The Lovely Bones
author: Alice Sebold
name: Capability
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/08/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Why They Cried 10002903 160 Jim Hanas 1554909961 Capability 0 to-read 3.93 2009 Why They Cried
author: Jim Hanas
name: Capability
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/07/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Let the Great World Spin 5941033
Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.

Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.� A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent� (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.]]> 351 Colum McCann 1400063736 Capability 5 currently-reading 3.95 2009 Let the Great World Spin
author: Colum McCann
name: Capability
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2011/05/21
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> A Million Miles from Boston 8605463 But this summer, nothing is the same. Ian, a boy from home in Boston, comes to Pierson Point with his family. Ian is loud, popular, and mean. He and Lucy can't stand each other. To top it off, Dad wants his girlfriend to become a bigger part of Lucy's life.
Karen Day's engaging novel shows that people aren't always what they seem, and that friendship can be found in the most unusual places.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 224 Karen Day 0385738994 Capability 5 3.84 2011 A Million Miles from Boston
author: Karen Day
name: Capability
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2011/05/21
shelves:
review:

]]> I See You Everywhere 3078805 Three Junes comes an intimate new work of fiction: a tale of two sisters, together and apart, told in their alternating voices over twenty-five years.

Louisa Jardine is the older one, the conscientious student, precise and careful: the one who yearns for a good marriage, an artistic career, a family. Clem, the archetypal youngest, is the rebel: uncontainable, iconoclastic, committed to her work but not to the men who fall for her daring nature. Louisa resents that the charismatic Clem has always been the favorite; yet as Clem puts it, “On the other side of the fence–mine–every expectation you fulfill . . . puts you one stop closer to that Grand Canyon rim from which you could one day rule the world–or plummet in very grand style.�

In this vivid, heartrending story of what we can and cannot do for those we love, the sisters grow closer as they move farther apart. Louis settles in New York while Clem, a wildlife biologist, moves restlessly about until she lands in the Rocky Mountains. Their complex bond, Louisa observes, is “like a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching.�

Alive with all the sensual detail and riveting characterization that mark Glass’s previous work, I See You Everywhere is a piercingly candid story of life and death, companionship and sorrow, and the nature of sisterhood itself.]]> 287 Julia Glass 0375422757 Capability 0 currently-reading 3.23 2008 I See You Everywhere
author: Julia Glass
name: Capability
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/05/21
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Borrowed Finery: A Memoir 172050 224 Paula Fox 0312425198 Capability 0 currently-reading 3.73 2000 Borrowed Finery: A Memoir
author: Paula Fox
name: Capability
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/05/21
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Like the Willow Tree: The Diary of Lydia Amelia Pierce, Portland, Maine, 1918 (Dear America)]]> 8151795
Suddenly orphaned by the Spanish flu epidemic in the fall of 1918, eleven-year-old Lydia Pierce and her fourteen-year-old brother, Daniel, of Portland, Maine, are taken by their uncle to be raised in the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake. Thrust into the Shakers' unfamiliar way of life, Lydia must grapple with a new world that is nothing like the one she used to know.

Now separated from her beloved brother, for men and women do not mix in this community, Lydia must adjust to many changes. But in time, and with her courageous spirit, she learns to find the joy in life again.]]> 224 Lois Lowry 0545144698 Capability 0 3.88 2011 Like the Willow Tree: The Diary of Lydia Amelia Pierce, Portland, Maine, 1918 (Dear America)
author: Lois Lowry
name: Capability
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/01/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Eating Animals 6604712 Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his life oscillating between enthusiastic carnivore and occasional vegetarian. Once he started a family, the moral dimensions of food became increasingly important.


Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain why we eat some animals and not others, Foer set out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them. Traveling to the darkest corners of our dining habits, Foer raises the unspoken question behind every fish we eat, every chicken we fry, and every burger we grill.


Part memoir and part investigative report, Eating Animals is a book that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, places Jonathan Safran Foer "at the table with our greatest philosophers."
]]> 341 Jonathan Safran Foer 0316069906 Capability 5 currently-reading 4.20 2009 Eating Animals
author: Jonathan Safran Foer
name: Capability
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2011/01/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium #1)]]> 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 Capability 0 currently-reading 4.17 2005 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium #1)
author: Stieg Larsson
name: Capability
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/01/04
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Away 217086 Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York's Lower East Side, to Seattle's Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom's work—her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart—come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.]]> 240 Amy Bloom 1400063566 Capability 0 3.37 2007 Away
author: Amy Bloom
name: Capability
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2011/01/04
date added: 2011/01/04
shelves:
review:
am reading this now - I keep getting distracted with other new books - thanks for the reminder that it is in my to read pile!
]]> <![CDATA[Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories]]> 6751343 The God of Animals was hailed as "reason for readers to rejoice" (USA Today), turns her gift for storytelling to the lives of girls and women in this spectacular collection. These eleven stories showcase Kyle’s keen eye for character, her humor, and her uncanny grasp of the loneliness, selfishness, and longing that underlie female experience. In "Nine," a young girl given to exaggeration escapes a humiliating ninth birthday celebration with the help of her father’s new girlfriend. The dubious benefits of sleeping with one’s boss are revealed when a bookstore manager defends an employee from an irate customer in the hilarious "Sex Scenes from a Chain Bookstore." A raid on a neighbor’s meth lab strengthens the unlikely friendship between a solitary woman and a Goth teenage girl in "Boys and Girls Like You and Me." And in a notable exception to the rule, "Captain’s Club" features a boy whose devotion to a lonely woman transforms his cruise vacation.

In moments electric with sudden harmony or ruthless indifference, the girls and women in this collection provoke, beguile, and entertain. Writing with remarkable tenderness and wisdom, Kyle gives us a collection radiant with bittersweet revelations and startling insights, and secures her reputation as a major young talent.]]> 240 Aryn Kyle 1416594809 Capability 0 to-read 3.75 2010 Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories
author: Aryn Kyle
name: Capability
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2011/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Half a Life 5853
"A masterpiece." � Los Angeles Times Book Review

The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portugese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray. Brilliantly orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul's career.]]> 224 V.S. Naipaul 037570728X Capability 0 to-read 3.25 2001 Half a Life
author: V.S. Naipaul
name: Capability
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Hourglass Door (Hourglass Door, #1)]]> 6217361 Abby's senior year of high school is textbook perfect, until she meets Dante Alexander, a foreign-exchange student from Italy. Time behaves differently when they are together - too fast or slow or seeming to stop.

When the band Zero Hour performs at the local hangout, they have a bizarre influence over their audience, and Abby's best friend, Valerie, is caught in their snare. Dante helped Leonardo Da Vinci build a time machine, then was sent 500+ years into the future as punishment when falsely accused of being a traitor. As past and present collide, Abby learns she holds a special power over time itself.]]> 400 Lisa Mangum 1606410938 Capability 0 to-read 3.83 2009 The Hourglass Door (Hourglass Door, #1)
author: Lisa Mangum
name: Capability
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> An Object of Beauty 7907803 292 Steve Martin 0446573647 Capability 5 3.77 2010 An Object of Beauty
author: Steve Martin
name: Capability
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2010/12/27
date added: 2010/12/27
shelves:
review:
Just got this book for Christmas and couldn't put it down. Loved it!
]]> Thirteen Reasons Why 1217100 You can’t stop the future.
You can’t rewind the past.
The only way to learn the secret . . . is to press play.

Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker–his classmate and crush–who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah’s voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he’ll find out why.

Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah’s pain, and as he follows Hannah’s recorded words throughout his town, what he discovers changes his life forever.]]> 288 Jay Asher 1595141715 Capability 0 to-read 4.00 2007 Thirteen Reasons Why
author: Jay Asher
name: Capability
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Young Mandela: The Revolutionary Years]]> 9204147
But Nelson Mandela was not always elderly or benign. And, in Young Mandela , award-winning journalist and author David James Smith takes us deep into the heart of racist South Africa to paint a portrait of the Mandela that many have the committed revolutionary who left his family behind to live on the run, adopting false names and disguises and organizing the first strikes to overthrow the apartheid state. Young Mandela lifts the curtain on an icon's first steps to greatness.]]> 416 David James Smith 0316035483 Capability 0 currently-reading 3.69 2010 Young Mandela: The Revolutionary Years
author: David James Smith
name: Capability
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/12/04
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Freedom 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 Capability 0 3.78 2010 Freedom
author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Capability
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/12/04
shelves:
review:
i need to have a discussion about this book
]]> <![CDATA[The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #2)]]> 28186
In this episode, The Sea of Monsters, Percy sets out to retrieve the Golden Fleece before his summer camp is destroyed, surpassing the first book's drama and setting the stage for more thrills to come.]]> 279 Rick Riordan 0786856866 Capability 0 to-read 4.25 2006 The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #2)
author: Rick Riordan
name: Capability
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2010/12/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1)]]> 28187 Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here

Percy Jackson is a good kid, but he can't seem to focus on his schoolwork or control his temper. And lately, being away at boarding school is only getting worse - Percy could have sworn his pre-algebra teacher turned into a monster and tried to kill him. When Percy's mom finds out, she knows it's time that he knew the truth about where he came from, and that he go to the one place he'll be safe. She sends Percy to Camp Half Blood, a summer camp for demigods (on Long Island), where he learns that the father he never knew is Poseidon, God of the Sea. Soon a mystery unfolds and together with his friends—one a satyr and the other the demigod daughter of Athena - Percy sets out on a quest across the United States to reach the gates of the Underworld (located in a recording studio in Hollywood) and prevent a catastrophic war between the gods.]]> 377 Rick Riordan 0786838655 Capability 0 to-read 4.31 2005 The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1)
author: Rick Riordan
name: Capability
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2005
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]]> Truman 2279
The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man—a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined—but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman’s story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman’s own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary “man from Missouri� who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history.]]> 1120 David McCullough 0671869205 Capability 0 to-read 4.15 1992 Truman
author: David McCullough
name: Capability
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1992
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]]> The Woman in White 5890 Librarian note: Alternate covers can be found here and here.

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

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

Matthew Sweet's introduction explores the phenomenon of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, and discusses Wilkie Collins's biographical and societal influences. Included in this edition are appendices on theatrical adaptations of the novel and its serialisation history.]]> 672 Wilkie Collins Capability 0 4.00 1859 The Woman in White
author: Wilkie Collins
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average rating: 4.00
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]]> Infected (Infected, #1) 2331954
Working under the government’s shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips crisscrosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common � they’ve been contaminated by a bioengineered parasite, shaped by a complexity far beyond the limits of known science.

Meanwhile Perry Dawsey � a hulking former football star now resigned to life as a cubicle-bound desk jockey � awakens one morning to find several mysterious welts growing on his body. Soon Perry finds himself acting and thinking strangely, hearing voices . . . he is infected.

The fate of the human race may well depend on the bloody war Perry must wage with his own body, because the parasites want something from him, something that goes beyond mere murder.]]> 342 Scott Sigler 0307406105 Capability 0 3.83 2008 Infected (Infected, #1)
author: Scott Sigler
name: Capability
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Wizard's First Rule (Sword of Truth, #1)]]> 43889
His world, his very beliefs, are shattered when ancient debts come due with thundering violence. In a dark age it takes courage to live, and more than mere courage to challenge those who hold dominion, Richard and Kahlan must take up that challenge or become the next victims. Beyond awaits a bewitching land where even the best of their hearts could betray them. Yet, Richard fears nothing so much as what secrets his sword might reveal about his own soul. Falling in love would destroy them—for reasons Richard can't imagine and Kahlan dare not say.

In their darkest hour, hunted relentlessly, tormented by treachery and loss, Kahlan calls upon Richard to reach beyond his sword—to invoke within himself something more noble. Neither knows that the rules of battle have just changed . . . or that their time has run out.

This is the beginning. One book. One Rule. Witness the birth of a legend.]]> 836 Terry Goodkind 0765346524 Capability 0 to-read 4.12 1994 Wizard's First Rule (Sword of Truth, #1)
author: Terry Goodkind
name: Capability
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals]]> 3109 What should we have for dinner? For omnivore like ourselves, this simple question has always posed a dilemma. When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods on offer might shorten your life. Today, buffered by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.
The Omnivore's Dilemma is groundbreaking book, in which one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves?
To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.
The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Ultimately, this is a book as much about visionary solutions as it is about problems, and Pollan contends that, when it comes to food, doing the right thing often turns out to be the tastiest thing an eater can do. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.]]> 450 Michael Pollan 1594200823 Capability 0 4.18 2006 The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
author: Michael Pollan
name: Capability
average rating: 4.18
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]]> The Secret (The Secret, #1) 52529 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781582701707.

The worldwide bestselling phenomenon that has helped millions tap the power of the law that governs all our lives to create—intentionally and effortlessly—a joyful life.

In 2006, a groundbreaking feature-length film revealed the great mystery of the universe�The Secret—and, later that year, Rhonda Byrne followed with a book that became a worldwide bestseller.

Fragments of a Great Secret have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions, and philosophies throughout the centuries. For the first time, all the pieces of The Secret come together in an incredible revelation that will be life-transforming for all who experience it.

In this book, you’ll learn how to use The Secret in every aspect of your life—money, health, relationships, happiness, and in every interaction you have in the world. You’ll begin to understand the hidden, untapped power that’s within you, and this revelation can bring joy to every aspect of your life.

The Secret contains wisdom from modern-day teachers—men and women who have used it to achieve health, wealth, and happiness. By applying the knowledge of The Secret, they bring to light compelling stories of eradicating disease, acquiring massive wealth, overcoming obstacles, and achieving what many would regard as impossible.]]> 199 Rhonda Byrne Capability 0 to-read 3.74 2006 The Secret (The Secret, #1)
author: Rhonda Byrne
name: Capability
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2006
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]]> The Devil in the White City 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 Capability 0 3.99 2003 The Devil in the White City
author: Erik Larson
name: Capability
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2003
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]]> American Psycho 28676 American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.]]> 399 Bret Easton Ellis 0679735771 Capability 0 to-read 3.82 1991 American Psycho
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Capability
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1991
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]]> Confessions 27037 Confessions is one of the most influential and most innovative works of Latin literature. Written in the author's early forties in the last years of the fourth century A.D. and during his first years as a bishop, they reflect on his life and on the activity of remembering and interpreting a life. Books I-IV are concerned with infancy and learning to talk, schooldays, sexual desire and adolescent rebellion, intense friendships and intellectual exploration. Augustine evolves and analyses his past with all the resources of the reading which shaped his mind: Virgil and Cicero, Neoplatonism and the Bible. This volume, which aims to be usable by students who are new to Augustine, alerts readers to the verbal echoes and allusions of Augustine's brilliant and varied Latin, and explains his theological and philosophical questioning of what God is and what it is to be human. The edition is intended for use by students and scholars of Latin literature, theology and Church history.]]> 341 Augustine of Hippo 0192833723 Capability 0 to-read 3.95 400 Confessions
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name: Capability
average rating: 3.95
book published: 400
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]]> The Elegance of the Hedgehog 2967752
We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.]]> 325 Muriel Barbery 1933372605 Capability 0 currently-reading 3.76 2006 The Elegance of the Hedgehog
author: Muriel Barbery
name: Capability
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2006
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]]> Pride and Prejudice 1885 Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work "her own darling child" and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen's radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679783268]]> 279 Jane Austen 1441341706 Capability 4 4.28 1813 Pride and Prejudice
author: Jane Austen
name: Capability
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1813
rating: 4
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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 Capability 0 4.03 2002 Middlesex
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Capability
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2002
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]]> Moby-Dick or, The Whale 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 Capability 0 3.53 1851 Moby-Dick or, The Whale
author: Herman Melville
name: Capability
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1851
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]]> Siddhartha 52036 152 Hermann Hesse Capability 0 4.07 1922 Siddhartha
author: Hermann Hesse
name: Capability
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1922
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]]> The Red Tent 4989 The Red Tent combines rich storytelling with a valuable achievement in modern fiction: a new view of biblical women's society.]]> 324 Anita Diamant 0312353766 Capability 0 4.21 1997 The Red Tent
author: Anita Diamant
name: Capability
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)]]> 2767052
Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun. . . .

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV.

Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.]]> 374 Suzanne Collins Capability 0 4.34 2008 The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Capability
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2008
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]]> War and Peace 656
War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men.

As Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature.


Tolstoy gave his personal approval to this translation, published here in a new single volume edition, which includes an introduction by Henry Gifford, and Tolstoy's important essay `Some Words about War and Peace'.]]> 1392 Leo Tolstoy 0192833987 Capability 0 4.14 1869 War and Peace
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Capability
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1869
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]]> The Brothers Karamazov 4934
This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remains true to the verbal inventiveness of Dostoevsky’s prose, preserving the multiple voices, the humor, and the surprising modernity of the original. It is an achievement worthy of Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel.]]> 796 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0374528373 Capability 0 to-read 4.36 1880 The Brothers Karamazov
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Capability
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1880
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]]> Emma 6969 The newest edition is here. Another alternate cover can be found here.

Emma Woodhouse is one of Austen's most captivating and vivid characters. Beautiful, spoilt, vain and irrepressibly witty, Emma organizes the lives of the inhabitants of her sleepy little village and plays matchmaker with devastating effect.]]> 474 Jane Austen 0141439580 Capability 4 4.05 1815 Emma
author: Jane Austen
name: Capability
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1815
rating: 4
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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 Capability 4 3.87 1943 The Fountainhead
author: Ayn Rand
name: Capability
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1943
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt, #1)]]> 252577
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

So begins the Pulitzer Prize winning memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.

Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.

Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.]]> 452 Frank McCourt 0007205236 Capability 0 4.15 1996 Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt, #1)
author: Frank McCourt
name: Capability
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1996
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]]> The Secret Garden 2998
Mary Lennox, a spoiled, ill-tempered, and unhealthy child, comes to live with her reclusive uncle in Misselthwaite Manor on England’s Yorkshire moors after the death of her parents. There she meets a hearty housekeeper and her spirited brother, a dour gardener, a cheerful robin, and her wilful, hysterical, and sickly cousin, Master Colin, whose wails she hears echoing through the house at night.

With the help of the robin, Mary finds the door to a secret garden, neglected and hidden for years. When she decides to restore the garden in secret, the story becomes a charming journey into the places of the heart, where faith restores health, flowers refresh the spirit, and the magic of the garden, coming to life anew, brings health to Colin and happiness to Mary.]]> 331 Frances Hodgson Burnett 0517189607 Capability 0 4.16 1911 The Secret Garden
author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
name: Capability
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1911
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]]> A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 14891 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness -- in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience.]]> 496 Betty Smith 0061120073 Capability 4 4.29 1943 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
author: Betty Smith
name: Capability
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1943
rating: 4
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]]> Water for Elephants 43641
Beautifully written, Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford.]]> 368 Sara Gruen 1565125606 Capability 0 4.11 2006 Water for Elephants
author: Sara Gruen
name: Capability
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2006
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]]> The Poisonwood Bible 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 Capability 5 4.10 1998 The Poisonwood Bible
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Capability
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1998
rating: 5
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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 Capability 0 4.42 1998 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Capability
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1998
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]]> A Prayer for Owen Meany 4473 637 John Irving 0552135399 Capability 5 4.24 1989 A Prayer for Owen Meany
author: John Irving
name: Capability
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1989
rating: 5
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]]> The Iliad 1371
Combining the skills of a poet and scholar, Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, brings the energy of contemporary language to this enduring heroic epic. He maintains the drive and metric music of Homer’s poetry, and evokes the impact and nuance of the Iliad’s mesmerizing repeated phrases in what Peter Levi calls “an astonishing performance.”]]> 614 Homer 0140275363 Capability 0 3.88 -800 The Iliad
author: Homer
name: Capability
average rating: 3.88
book published: -800
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]]> Atlas Shrugged 662 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.]]> 1168 Ayn Rand 0452011876 Capability 0 3.67 1957 Atlas Shrugged
author: Ayn Rand
name: Capability
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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]]> Green Eggs and Ham 23772
Originally created by Dr. Seuss, Beginner Books encourage children to read all by themselves, with simple words and illustrations that give clues to their meaning.]]> 64 Dr. Seuss 0394800168 Capability 5 4.31 1960 Green Eggs and Ham
author: Dr. Seuss
name: Capability
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1960
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)]]> 38447
Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.]]> 311 Margaret Atwood 038549081X Capability 0 4.15 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Capability
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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]]> Catch-22 168668
Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

This fiftieth-anniversary edition commemorates Joseph Heller’s masterpiece with a new introduction by Christopher Buckley; a wealth of critical essays and reviews by Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others; rare papers and photos from Joseph Heller’s personal archive; and much more. Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic of world literature.]]> 453 Joseph Heller 0684833395 Capability 4 3.99 1961 Catch-22
author: Joseph Heller
name: Capability
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1961
rating: 4
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]]> Anna Karenina 152
«Nos capítulos iniciais de Anna Karénina, somos conduzidos, uma e outra vez, a um sentido de analogia musical. Há efeitos de contraponto e harmonia no desenvolvimento das principais tramas do “prelúdio Oblonski� (o acidente na estação ferroviária, a zombadora discussão sobre o divórcio entre Vronski e a baronesa Chilton, o deslumbramento do fogo vermelho diante dos olhos de Anna). O método de Tolstoi é polifónico; mas as harmonias principais desen- volvem-se com uma tremenda força e amplitude. As técnicas musicais e linguísticas não podem comparar-se de um modo exato. Mas como poderíamos elucidar de outro modo o sentimento de que as novelas de Tolstoi surgem de um princípio interior de ordem e vitalidade, enquanto as dos escritores menos importantes parecem alinhavadas?»

«Anna Karénina morre no mundo do romance; mas cada vez que lemos o livro ela ressuscita, e mesmo depois de o termos acabado adquire outra vida na nossa recordação. Em cada personagem literária existe algo da Fénix imortal. Através das vidas perduráveis das suas personagens, a própria existência de Tolstoi teve a sua eternidade.» [George Steiner, Tolstoi ou Dostoievski]]]> 960 Leo Tolstoy Capability 4 3.96 1878 Anna Karenina
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Capability
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1878
rating: 4
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]]> Life of Pi 4214 460 Yann Martel 0770430074 Capability 4 3.94 2001 Life of Pi
author: Yann Martel
name: Capability
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
rating: 4
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]]> One Hundred Years of Solitude 320 417 Gabriel García Márquez Capability 0 4.10 1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Capability
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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]]> The Princess Bride 21787
As a boy, William Goldman claims, he loved to hear his father read the S. Morgenstern classic, The Princess Bride. But as a grown-up he discovered that the boring parts were left out of good old Dad's recitation, and only the "good parts" reached his ears.

Now Goldman does Dad one better. He's reconstructed the "Good Parts Version" to delight wise kids and wide-eyed grownups everywhere.

What's it about? Fencing. Fighting. True Love. Strong Hate. Harsh Revenge. A Few Giants. Lots of Bad Men. Lots of Good Men. Five or Six Beautiful Women. Beasties Monstrous and Gentle. Some Swell Escapes and Captures. Death, Lies, Truth, Miracles, and a Little Sex.

In short, it's about everything.]]> 429 William Goldman 0345418263 Capability 5 4.27 1973 The Princess Bride
author: William Goldman
name: Capability
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1973
rating: 5
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]]> Romeo and Juliet 18135 Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a violent world, in which two young people fall in love. It is not simply that their families disapprove; the Montagues and the Capulets are engaged in a blood feud.

In this death-filled setting, the movement from love at first sight to the lovers� final union in death seems almost inevitable. And yet, this play set in an extraordinary world has become the quintessential story of young love. In part because of its exquisite language, it is easy to respond as if it were about all young lovers.]]> 281 William Shakespeare 0743477111 Capability 0 3.74 1597 Romeo and Juliet
author: William Shakespeare
name: Capability
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1597
rating: 0
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]]> Lord of the Flies 7624 182 William Golding 0140283331 Capability 0 3.70 1954 Lord of the Flies
author: William Golding
name: Capability
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1954
rating: 0
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]]> Wuthering Heights 6185 You can find the redesigned cover of this edition HERE.

At the centre of this novel is the passionate love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff - recounted with such emotional intensity that a plain tale of the Yorkshire moors acquires the depth and simplicity of ancient tragedy.

This best-selling Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1847 first edition of the novel. For the Fourth Edition, the editor has collated the 1847 text with several modern editions and has corrected a number of variants, including accidentals. The text is accompanied by entirely new explanatory annotations.

New to the fourth Edition are twelve of Emily Bronte's letters regarding the publication of the 1847 edition of Wuthering Heights as well as the evolution of the 1850 edition, prose and poetry selections by the author, four reviews of the novel, and poetry selections by the author, four reviews of the novel, and Edward Chitham's insightful and informative chronology of the creative process behind the beloved work.

Five major critical interpretations of Wuthering Heights are included, three of them new to the Fourth Edition. A Stuart Daley considers the importance of chronology in the novel. J. Hillis Miller examines Wuthering Heights's problems of genre and critical reputation. Sandra M. Gilbert assesses the role of Victorian Christianity plays in the novel, while Martha Nussbaum traces the novel's romanticism. Finally, Lin Haire-Sargeant scrutinizes the role of Heathcliff in film adaptations of Wuthering Heights.

A Chronology and updated Selected Bibliography are also included.]]> 464 Emily Brontë Capability 0 3.89 1847 Wuthering Heights
author: Emily Brontë
name: Capability
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1847
rating: 0
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]]> Crime and Punishment 7144 671 Fyodor Dostoevsky Capability 0 4.26 1866 Crime and Punishment
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Capability
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1866
rating: 0
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]]> The Count of Monte Cristo 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 Capability 4 4.29 1846 The Count of Monte Cristo
author: Alexandre Dumas
name: Capability
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1846
rating: 4
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]]> The Time Traveler's Wife 14050 537 Audrey Niffenegger 0965818675 Capability 4 3.90 2003 The Time Traveler's Wife
author: Audrey Niffenegger
name: Capability
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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]]> The Giving Tree 370493
So begins a story of unforgettable perception, beautifully written and illustrated by the gifted and versatile Shel Silverstein.

Every day the boy would come to the tree to eat her apples, swing from her branches, or slide down her trunk...and the tree was happy. But as the boy grew older he began to want more from the tree, and the tree gave and gave and gave.

This is a tender story, touched with sadness, aglow with consolation. Shel Silverstein has created a moving parable for readers of all ages that offers an affecting interpretation of the gift of giving and a serene acceptance of another's capacity to love in return.]]> 64 Shel Silverstein 0060256656 Capability 5 4.38 1964 The Giving Tree
author: Shel Silverstein
name: Capability
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1964
rating: 5
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]]> The Little Prince 157993
Few stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as The Little Prince, presented here in a stunning new translation with carefully restored artwork. The definitive edition of a worldwide classic, it will capture the hearts of readers of all ages.]]> 96 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 0152023984 Capability 5 4.32 1943 The Little Prince
author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
name: Capability
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1943
rating: 5
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]]> The Great Gatsby 4671 The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald’s family and from his lifelong publisher.

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

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.]]> 180 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0743273567 Capability 4 3.93 1925 The Great Gatsby
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Capability
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 4
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]]> The Kite Runner 77203 371 Khaled Hosseini 159463193X Capability 5 4.34 2003 The Kite Runner
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Capability
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2003
rating: 5
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]]> Gone with the Wind 18405 1037 Margaret Mitchell 0446365386 Capability 5 4.30 1936 Gone with the Wind
author: Margaret Mitchell
name: Capability
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1936
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Little Women (Little Women, #1)]]> 1934 This is an alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780451529305.

Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women. Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War.

It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with "woman’s work,� including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the "girl’s book� her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.

]]> 449 Louisa May Alcott Capability 5 4.16 1868 Little Women (Little Women, #1)
author: Louisa May Alcott
name: Capability
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1868
rating: 5
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]]> The Giver (The Giver, #1) 3636 208 Lois Lowry 0385732554 Capability 5 4.12 1993 The Giver (The Giver, #1)
author: Lois Lowry
name: Capability
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1993
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1)]]> 3 309 J.K. Rowling 0439554934 Capability 5 4.47 1997 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Capability
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1997
rating: 5
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]]> The Diary of a Young Girl 48855
In 1942, with the Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, the Franks and another family lived cloistered in the “Secret Annexe� of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and surprisingly humorous, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.
--back cover]]> 283 Anne Frank Capability 5 4.19 1947 The Diary of a Young Girl
author: Anne Frank
name: Capability
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1947
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, #1)]]> 100915
Lucy is the first to find the secret of the wardrobe in the professor's mysterious old house. At first her brothers and sister don't believe her when she tells of her visit to the land of Narnia. But soon Edmund, then Peter and Susan step through the wardrobe themselves. In Narnia they find a country buried under the evil enchantment of the White Witch. When they meet the Lion Aslan, they realize they've been called to a great adventure and bravely join the battle to free Narnia from the Witch's sinister spell.]]> 206 C.S. Lewis Capability 0 4.24 1950 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, #1)
author: C.S. Lewis
name: Capability
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1950
rating: 0
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]]> The Catcher in the Rye 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

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

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

J.D. Salinger's (1919�2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Capability 0 3.81 1951 The Catcher in the Rye
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Capability
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 0
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]]> 1984 5470 328 George Orwell Capability 0 4.15 1949 1984
author: George Orwell
name: Capability
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1949
rating: 0
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]]> The Lord of the Rings 33 One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.

From Sauron's fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor, his power spread far and wide. Sauron gathered all the Great Rings to him, but always he searched for the One Ring that would complete his dominion.

When Bilbo reached his eleventy-first birthday he disappeared, bequeathing to his young cousin Frodo the Ruling Ring and a perilous quest: to journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom.

The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider.]]> 1216 J.R.R. Tolkien 0618640150 Capability 0 4.52 1954 The Lord of the Rings
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Capability
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1954
rating: 0
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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 Capability 0 4.25 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird
author: Harper Lee
name: Capability
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1960
rating: 0
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]]>