Margaret's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 02 Mar 2025 18:57:53 -0800 60 Margaret's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Ulysses Annotated 10543 Ulysses. Annotations in this edition are keyed both to the reading text of the new critical edition of Ulysses published in 1984 and to the standard 1961 Random House edition and the current Modern Library and Vintage texts.

Gifford has incorporated over 1,000 additions and corrections to the first edition. The introduction and headnotes to sections provide general geographical, biographical and historical background. The annotations gloss place names, define slang terms, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, trace literary allusions and references to other cultures.

The suggestive potential of minor details was enormously fascinating to Joyce, and the precision of his use of detail is a most important aspect of his literary method. The annotations in this volume illuminate details which are not in the public realm for most of us.]]> 698 James Joyce 0520067452 Margaret 5 4.20 1922 Ulysses Annotated
author: James Joyce
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1922
rating: 5
read at: 2001/11/01
date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> <![CDATA[Paradise Lost (Norton Critical Editions)]]> 16005 HERE

Gordon Teskey's freshly edited text of Milton's masterpiece is accompanied by a new introduction and substantial explanatory annotations. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized, the latter, importantly, within the limits imposed by Milton's syntax. "Sources and Backgrounds" collects relevant passages from the Bible and Milton's prose writings, including selections from The Reason of Church Government and the full text of Areopagitica. "Criticism" brings together classic interpretations by Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Victor Hugo, and T. S. Eliot, among others, and the most important recent criticism and scholarship surrounding the epic, including essays by Northrop Frye, Barbara Lewalski, Christopher Ricks, and Helen Vendler. A Glossary and Selected Bibliography are also included.]]> 590 John Milton 0393924289 Margaret 5 3.94 1667 Paradise Lost (Norton Critical Editions)
author: John Milton
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1667
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/08/04
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]]> Dandelion Wine 76776
The only god living in Green Town, Illinois, that Douglas Spaulding knew of.

The facts about John Huff, aged twelve, are simple and soon stated.

� He could pathfind more trails than any Choctaw or Cherokee since time began.
� Could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine.
� Could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream.
� Could hit baseballs into apple trees, knocking down harvests.
� Could jump six-foot orchard walls.
� Ran laughing.
� Sat easy.
� Was not a bully.
� Was kind.
� Knew the words to all the cowboy songs and would teach you if you asked.
� Knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise or set and when the tides came in or out.

He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of.

“[Ray] Bradbury is an authentic original.”� Time]]> 239 Ray Bradbury 0553277537 Margaret 0 to-read 4.13 1957 Dandelion Wine
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1957
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> Wuthering Heights 12703

This edition has an introduction by Alice Hoffman.]]> 322 Emily Brontë 0451529251 Margaret 3 3.66 1847 Wuthering Heights
author: Emily Brontë
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1847
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2020/12/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West]]> 28715 Blood Meridian is an epic tale of the violence and corruption that attended America’s westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the “Wild West.� Its wounded hero, the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean, must confront the extraordinary brutality of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians. Seeming to preside over this nightmarish world is the diabolical Judge Holden, one of the most unforgettable characters in American fiction.

Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian represents a genius vision of the historical West, one whose stature has only grown in the twenty-five years since its publication.]]> 351 Cormac McCarthy 0679641041 Margaret 5 4.25 1985 Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2009/03/01
date added: 2020/11/13
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]]> The Annotated Lolita 7606
The Annotated Lolita is the definitive annotated text of the modern classic, written by one of the most punning and allusive writers in English since James Joyce. It assiduously glosses Lolita's extravagant wordplay and its frequent literary allusions, parodies, and cross references.
--back cover]]> 457 Vladimir Nabokov 0679727299 Margaret 5 4.20 1955 The Annotated Lolita
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at: 2003/01/01
date added: 2020/02/29
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]]> Hamlet 1432 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN13:9780743477123, Hamlet.

Hamlet is the story of the Prince of Denmark who learns of the death of his father at the hands of his uncle, Claudius. Claudius murders Hamlet's father, his own brother, to take the throne of Denmark and to marry Hamlet's widowed mother. Hamlet is sunk into a state of great despair as a result of discovering the murder of his father and the infidelity of his mother. Hamlet is torn between his great sadness and his desire for the revenge of his father's murder.

Each Folger edition includes:

- Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
- Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play
- Scene-by-scene plot summaries
- A key to famous lines and phrases
- An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language
- An essay by an outstanding scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
- Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books]]> 342 William Shakespeare Margaret 4 plays 4.05 1601 Hamlet
author: William Shakespeare
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1601
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/04/14
shelves: plays
review:

]]> The Old Man and the Sea 61130 99 Ernest Hemingway 0099908409 Margaret 0 to-read 3.74 1952 The Old Man and the Sea
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/12/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> Passing 12408 584 Nella Larsen 0393979164 Margaret 4 3.89 1929 Passing
author: Nella Larsen
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1929
rating: 4
read at: 2000/10/01
date added: 2018/01/26
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]]> <![CDATA[One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest]]> 11220 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.

This edition includes a new forward by Kesey, a new text introduction by Robert Faggan, and line drawings the author made when writing the book, many never before published.

Cover illustration by Paul Wearing

--back cover]]> 281 Ken Kesey 0141181222 Margaret 3 4.11 1962 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
author: Ken Kesey
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1962
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2016/10/11
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]]> <![CDATA[Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Penguin Drop Caps)]]> 471966 Haroun and the Sea of Stories inhabits the same imaginative space as Gulliver's Travels, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz. In this captivating novel, Haroun sets out on an adventure to restore the poisoned source of the sea of stories. On the way, he encounters many foes, all intent on draining the sea of all its storytelling powers.]]> 216 Salman Rushdie 0140157379 Margaret 3 4.00 1990 Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Penguin Drop Caps)
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2016/09/05
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]]> As I Lay Dying 10974 As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren's family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Told through multiple voices, As I Lay Dying vividly brings to life Faulkner's imaginary South, one of literature's great invented landscapes, and is replete with the poignant, impoverished, violent, and hypnotically fascinating characters that were his trademark.

Along with a new foreword by E. L. Doctorow, this edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Faulkner expert Noel Polk.]]> 231 William Faulkner 0375504524 Margaret 5 3.83 1930 As I Lay Dying
author: William Faulkner
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1930
rating: 5
read at: 2001/01/01
date added: 2014/07/22
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]]> In Cold Blood 9920
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

Five years, four months and twenty-nine days later, on April 14, 1965, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged thirty-three, and Perry Edward Smith, aged thirty-six, were hanged for the crime on a gallows in a warehouse at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas.

In Cold Blood is the story of the lives and deaths of these six people. It has already been hailed as a masterpiece.]]> 343 Truman Capote 0375507906 Margaret 4 4.15 1966 In Cold Blood
author: Truman Capote
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2014/05/10
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]]> King Lear 12939 224 William Shakespeare 019832054X Margaret 5 plays 3.91 1605 King Lear
author: William Shakespeare
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1605
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/03/09
shelves: plays
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Julius Caesar (Penguin Popular Classics)]]> 56779
"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune"

Following a successful campaign in Spain, Julius Caesar returns to Rome and is offered the crown. Fearing for the Republic, Cassius heads a conspiracy to murder Caesar, enlisting the noble Brutus to his ranks.

With Caesar dead, Mark Anthony turns popular opinion against the conspirators, leaving the audience to question the nature of honour, ambition and integrity as depicted in the characters of Caesar and Brutus.


This edition of the text contains notes, a glossary, and an introduction.]]> 128 William Shakespeare 0140621504 Margaret 3 plays 3.70 1599 Julius Caesar (Penguin Popular Classics)
author: William Shakespeare
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1599
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2014/03/09
shelves: plays
review:

]]> Ariel: The Restored Edition 11625 Sylvia Plath's famous collection, as she intended it.

When Sylvia Plath died, she not only left behind a prolific life but also her unpublished literary masterpiece, Ariel. When her husband, Ted Hughes, first brought this collection to life, it garnered worldwide acclaim, though it wasn't the draft Sylvia had wanted her readers to see. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, Plath's original manuscript—including handwritten notes—and her own selection and arrangement of poems. This edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of her poem "Ariel," which provide a rare glimpse into the creative process of a beloved writer. This publication introduces a truer version of Plath's works, and will no doubt alter her legacy forever.]]> 256 Sylvia Plath 0060732601 Margaret 4 4.30 2004 Ariel: The Restored Edition
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/11/15
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]]> Billy Bud 365644 200 Herman Melville 1583960961 Margaret 2 2.52 1924 Billy Bud
author: Herman Melville
name: Margaret
average rating: 2.52
book published: 1924
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2012/10/26
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]]> Catch-22 26121 416 Joseph Heller 0684865130 Margaret 5 4.08 1961 Catch-22
author: Joseph Heller
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2011/07/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The Complete Plays: The Hostage / The Quare Fellow / Richard's Cork Leg / Moving Out / A Garden Party / The Big House]]> 75235
Contains the three famous full-length plays: The Quare Fellow, set in an Irish prison ("In Brendan Behan's tremendous new play language is out on a spree, ribald, dauntless and spoiling for a fight ... with superb dramatic tact, the tragedy is concealed beneath layer after layer of rough comedy" Observer); The Hostage, set in a Dublin lodging-house of doubtful repute where a young English soldier is being kept prisoner, "shouts, sings, thunders and stamps with life...a masterpiece" (The Times); and Richard's Cork Leg, set in a graveyard, "a joyous celebration of life" (Guardian). The volume also contains three one-act plays, originally written for radio and all intensely autobiographical, Moving Out, A Garden Party and The Big House.]]> 384 Brendan Behan 0413387801 Margaret 4 plays 3.95 1978 The Complete Plays: The Hostage / The Quare Fellow / Richard's Cork Leg / Moving Out / A Garden Party / The Big House
author: Brendan Behan
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2011/04/06
shelves: plays
review:

]]> A Doll's House 37793

A Doll's House (1879), is a masterpiece of theatrical craft which, for the first time portrayed the tragic hypocrisy of Victorian middle class marriage on the stage. The play ushered in a new social era and "exploded like a bomb into contemporary life".

The Student Edition contains these exclusive features:

· A chronology of the playwright's life and work

· An introduction giving the background of the play

· Commentary on themes, characters. language and style

· Notes on individual words and phrases in the text

· Questions for further study

· Bibliography for further reading.

]]> 122 Henrik Ibsen 1406914835 Margaret 5 plays 3.76 1879 A Doll's House
author: Henrik Ibsen
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1879
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2010/02/14
shelves: plays
review:

]]> The Path of Minor Planets 707329 288 Andrew Sean Greer 0312306059 Margaret 2
but, eh, other than that - a little soap opera-ish, and, for me, when someone chooses to write ABOUT love - it had better be as moving as the real thing is, at least... and i'd like to learn something.]]> 3.46 2001 The Path of Minor Planets
author: Andrew Sean Greer
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
review:
the best thing i can say about this book is that it had some really good soundbytes.

but, eh, other than that - a little soap opera-ish, and, for me, when someone chooses to write ABOUT love - it had better be as moving as the real thing is, at least... and i'd like to learn something.
]]> <![CDATA[The Sexual Life of Catherine M.]]> 414343 A national best-seller that was featured on such lists as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, and Publishers Weekly, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. was the controversial sleeper hit of the year. Since her youth, Catherine Millet, the eminent editor of Art Press, has led an extraordinarily active and free sexual life -- from al fresco encounters in Italy to a gang bang on the edge of the Bois du Boulogne to a high-class orgy at a chichi Parisian restaurant. A graphic account of sex stripped of sentiment, of a life of physical gratification and a relentlessly honest look at the consequences -- both liberating and otherwise -- have created this candid, powerful, and deeply intelligent depiction of unfettered sexuality.]]> 224 Catherine Millet 0802139868 Margaret 3 2.85 2000 The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
author: Catherine Millet
name: Margaret
average rating: 2.85
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2003/12/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
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i felt very french and rebellious while i was reading this.
]]> Grits 702033 496 Niall Griffiths 0099285177 Margaret 5 3.88 2000 Grits
author: Niall Griffiths
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2001/02/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
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everyone so often i read a book that i get totally lost in, and this was one of them. i maybe didn't learn much about life or humanity, but it was definitely an escape.
]]> <![CDATA[Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights]]> 255301
Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life.
Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights. Though we have come to some consensus against penalizing people for differences based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, we still routinely deny equal treatment to people who refuse to downplay differences along these lines. Racial minorities are pressed to “act white� by changing their names, languages, or cultural practices. Women are told to “play like men� at work. Gays are asked not to engage in public displays of same-sex affection. The devout are instructed to minimize expressions of faith, and individuals with disabilities are urged to conceal the paraphernalia that permit them to function. In a wide-ranging analysis, Yoshino demonstrates that American civil rights law has generally ignored the threat posed by these covering demands. With passion and rigor, he shows that the work of civil rights will not be complete until it attends to the harms of coerced conformity.
At the same time, Yoshino is responsive to the American exasperation with identity politics, which often seems like an endless parade of groups asking for state and social solicitude. He observes that the ubiquity of the covering demand provides an opportunity to lift civil rights into a higher, more universal register. Since we all experience the covering demand, we can all make common cause around a new civil rights paradigm based on our desire for authenticity–a desire that brings us together rather than driving us apart.
Yoshino’s argument draws deeply on his personal experiences as a gay Asian American. He follows the Romantics in his belief that if a human life is described with enough particularity, the universal will speak through it. The result is a work that combines one of the most moving memoirs written in years with a landmark manifesto on the civil rights of the future.

“This brilliantly argued and engaging book does two things at once, and it does them both astonishingly well. First, it's a finely grained memoir of young man’s struggles to come to terms with his sexuality, and second, it's a powerful argument for a whole new way of thinking about civil rights and how our society deals with difference. This book challenges us all to confront our own unacknowledged biases, and it demands that we take seriously the idea that there are many different ways to be human. Kenji Yoshino is the face and the voice of the new civil rights.� -Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed

“Kenji Yoshino has not only given us an important, compelling new way to understand civil rights law, a major accomplishment in itself, but with great bravery and honesty, he has forged his argument from the cauldron of his own experience. In clear, lyrical prose, Covering quite literally brings the law to life. The result is a book about our
public and private selves as convincing to the spirit as it is to the
mind.� -Adam Haslett, author of You Are Not A Stranger Here

“Kenji Yoshino's work is often moving and always clarifying. Covering elaborates an original, arresting account of identity and authenticity in American culture.�
-Anthony Appiah, author of The Ethics of Identity and Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor Of Philosophy at Princeton University

“This stunning book introduces three faces of the remarkable Kenji Yoshino: a writer of poetic beauty; a soul of rare reflectivity and decency; and a brilliant lawyer and scholar, passionately committed to uncovering human rights. Like W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, this book fearlessly blends gripping narrative with insightful analysis to further the cause of human emancipation. And like those classics, it should explode into America's consciousness.�
-Harold Hongju Koh Dean, Yale Law School and former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights

�Covering is a magnificent work - so eloquently and powerfully written I literally could not put it down. Sweeping in breadth, brilliantly argued, and filled with insight, humor, and erudition, it offers a fundamentally new perspective on civil rights and discrimination law. This extraordinary book is many things at once: an intensely moving personal memoir; a breathtaking historical and cultural synthesis of assimilation and American equality law; an explosive new paradigm for transcending the morass of identity politics; and in parts, pure poetry. No one interested in civil rights, sexuality, discrimination - or simply human flourishing - can afford to miss it.�
-Amy Chua, author of World on Fire

“In this stunning, original book, Kenji Yoshino demonstrates that the struggle for gay rights is not only a struggle to liberate gays---it is a struggle to free all of us, straight and gay, male and female, white and black, from the pressures and temptations to cover vital aspects of ourselves and deprive ourselves and others of our full humanity. Yoshino is both poet and lawyer, and by joining an exquisitely observed personal memoir with a historical analysis of civil rights, he shows why gay rights is so controversial at present,
why “covering� is the issue of contention, and why the “covering demand,� universal in application, is the civil rights issue of our time. This is a beautifully written, brilliant and hopeful book, offering a new understanding of what is at stake in our fight for
human rights.�
-Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice]]> 282 Kenji Yoshino 0375760210 Margaret 3 4.12 2006 Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights
author: Kenji Yoshino
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2006/11/01
date added: 2009/12/16
shelves:
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I thought less about law and more about my own personal experiences - or the experiences of those close to me. Ultimately, I think I have a better understanding of identity, and one's ability to feel loved.
]]> Gravity’s Rainbow 415 776 Thomas Pynchon 0143039946 Margaret 0 to-read 4.01 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2008/04/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Never Let Me Go 6334
Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.]]> 288 Kazuo Ishiguro 1400078776 Margaret 4 3.85 2005 Never Let Me Go
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2007/07/01
date added: 2007/12/28
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]]> Machete Season 189296 272 Jean Hatzfeld 0312425031 Margaret 3 4.02 2003 Machete Season
author: Jean Hatzfeld
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2005/04/01
date added: 2007/12/28
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]]> The Reluctant Fundamentalist 88815
Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.

But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.

"Extreme times call for extreme reactions, extreme writing. Hamid has done something extraordinary with this novel." —Washington Post

"One of those achingly assured novels that makes you happy to be a reader." —Junot Diaz

"Brief, charming, and quietly furious . . . a resounding success." —Village Voice

A Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Notable Book]]> 184 Mohsin Hamid 0151013047 Margaret 3 3.69 2007 The Reluctant Fundamentalist
author: Mohsin Hamid
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2007/12/01
date added: 2007/12/28
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]]> Ethan Frome 5246
Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena's vivacious cousin enters their household as a hired girl, Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.

In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read book.]]> 99 Edith Wharton Margaret 3 "pickle dish" 3.42 1911 Ethan Frome
author: Edith Wharton
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1911
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2007/12/10
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"pickle dish"
]]> <![CDATA[The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries]]> 17682 272 Marilyn Johnson 0060758767 Margaret 2 3.40 2006 The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries
author: Marilyn Johnson
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2007/12/10
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]]> <![CDATA[740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building]]> 80878
For seventy-five years, it’s been Manhattan’s richest apartment building, and one of the most lusted-after addresses in the world. One apartment had 37 rooms, 14 bathrooms, 43 closets, 11 working fireplaces, a private elevator, and his-and-hers saunas; another at one time had a live-in service staff of 16. To this day, it is steeped in the purest luxury, the kind most of us could only imagine, until now.

The last great building to go up along New York’s Gold Coast, construction on 740 Park finished in 1930. Since then, 740 has been home to an ever-evolving cadre of our wealthiest and most powerful families, some of America’s (and the world’s) oldest money—the kind attached to names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Bouvier, Chrysler, Niarchos, Houghton, and Harkness—and some whose names evoke the excesses of today’s monied Kravis, Koch, Bronfman, Perelman, Steinberg, and Schwarzman. All along, the building has housed titans of industry, political power brokers, international royalty, fabulous scam-artists, and even the lowest scoundrels.

The book begins with the tumultuous story of the building’s construction. Conceived in the bubbling financial, artistic, and social cauldron of 1920’s Manhattan, 740 Park rose to its dizzying heights as the stock market plunged in 1929—the building was in dire financial straits before the first apartments were sold. The builders include the architectural genius Rosario Candela, the scheming businessman James T. Lee (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s grandfather), and a raft of financiers, many of whom were little more than white-collar crooks and grand-scale hustlers.

Once finished, 740 became a magnet for the richest, oldest families in the the Brewsters, descendents of the leader of the Plymouth Colony; the socially-registered Bordens, Hoppins, Scovilles, Thornes, and Schermerhorns; and top executives of the Chase Bank, American Express, and U.S. Rubber. Outside the walls of 740 Park, these were the people shaping America culturally and economically. Within those walls, they were indulging in all of the Seven Deadly Sins.

As the social climate evolved throughout the last century, so did 740 after World War II, the building’s rulers eased their more restrictive policies and began allowing Jews (though not to this day African Americans) to reside within their hallowed walls. Nowadays, it is full to bursting with new money, people whose fortunes, though freshly-made, are large enough to buy their way in.

At its core this book is a social history of the American rich, and how the locus of power and influence has shifted haltingly from old bloodlines to new money. But it’s also much more than filled with meaty, startling, often tragic stories of the people who lived behind 740’s walls, the book gives us an unprecedented access to worlds of wealth, privilege, and extraordinary folly that are usually hidden behind a scrim of money and influence. This is, truly, how the other half—or at least the other one hundredth of one percent—lives.]]> 576 Michael Gross 0767917448 Margaret 3 3.27 2005 740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building
author: Michael Gross
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2007/01/01
date added: 2007/12/10
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]]> Against the Day 409
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

--Thomas Pynchon

About the Author:
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland and, most recently, Mason and Dixon. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.]]> 1085 Thomas Pynchon 159420120X Margaret 0 currently-reading 4.01 2006 Against the Day
author: Thomas Pynchon
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/12/10
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> What Is the What 4952 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children —the so-called Lost Boys—was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges. Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that illuminates the lives of millions through one extraordinary man.
-back cover]]> 475 Dave Eggers 1932416641 Margaret 4 to-read 4.14 2006 What Is the What
author: Dave Eggers
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2006
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Absurdistan 70509 Absurdistan and meet outsize Misha Vainberg, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, lover of large portions of food and drink, lover and inept performer of rap music, and lover of a South Bronx Latina whom he longs to rejoin in New York City, if only the American INS will grant him a visa. But it won't, because Misha's late Beloved Papa whacked an Oklahoma businessman of some prominence. Misha is paying the price of exile from his adopted American homeland. He's stuck in Russia, dreaming of his beloved Rouenna and the Oz of NYC.

Salvation may lie in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan, where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as Minister of Multicultural Affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century.

Populated by curvaceous brown-eyed beauties, circumcision-happy Hasidic Jews, a loyal manservant who never stops serving, and scheming oil execs from a certain American company whose name rhymes with Malliburton, Absurdistan is a strange, oddly true-to-life look at how we live now, from a writer who should know.]]> 333 Gary Shteyngart 0812971671 Margaret 0 to-read 3.32 2006 Absurdistan
author: Gary Shteyngart
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Black Book 11692
“A glorious flight of dark, fantastic invention.� � The Washington Post

Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel–loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband or Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl's identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.

With its cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul, The Black Book is a brilliantly unconventional mystery, and a provocative meditation on identity. For Turkish literary readers it is the cherished cult novel in which Orhan Pamuk found his original voice, but it has largely been neglected by English-language readers. Now, in Maureen Freely’s beautiful translation, they, too, may encounter all its riches.

A Translation and Afterword by Maureen Freely]]> 466 Orhan Pamuk 1400078652 Margaret 0 to-read 3.91 1990 The Black Book
author: Orhan Pamuk
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/06/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Everything is Illuminated 256566 276 Jonathan Safran Foer 0060529709 Margaret 5
brod is one of my favorite characters ever. mysticism and fantasy aside, she real and relatable and accurate.

i was totally entertained, moved, saddened, impressed, and awed. i'm still thinking about the themes - and have been, since i finished the book.

one of the reviews i read inside the cover (can't remember who it was) said that "you can feel the life beating in this book" [to paraphrase]... but that is a REALLY good way of describing how i felt when i read it. the book was ALIVE, which is a wonderful accomplishment considering the implications of what he's writing about and how he chose to write about it.]]> 3.91 2002 Everything is Illuminated
author: Jonathan Safran Foer
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2007/06/01
date added: 2007/06/30
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review:
i know everyone in the world has read this book already - but i only just did. i LOVED it. i actually cried on the subway towards the end of it - and i can't remember the last time that happened. it was whimsical and sad and so insightful. safran foer really understands sadness - both in a more definitional, grander sense and, also, just as profoundly in the personal sense.

brod is one of my favorite characters ever. mysticism and fantasy aside, she real and relatable and accurate.

i was totally entertained, moved, saddened, impressed, and awed. i'm still thinking about the themes - and have been, since i finished the book.

one of the reviews i read inside the cover (can't remember who it was) said that "you can feel the life beating in this book" [to paraphrase]... but that is a REALLY good way of describing how i felt when i read it. the book was ALIVE, which is a wonderful accomplishment considering the implications of what he's writing about and how he chose to write about it.
]]> <![CDATA[The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls]]> 150749
"Fascinating ... riveting ... Women and girls should read this fine book together."� The New York Times Book Review

A hundred years ago, women were lacing themselves into corsets and teaching their daughters to do the same. The ideal of the day, however, was inner a focus on good deeds and a pure heart. Today American women have more social choices and personal freedom than ever before. But fifty-three percent of our girls are dissatisfied with their bodies by the age of thirteen, and many begin a pattern of weight obsession and dieting as early as eight or nine. Why?

In The Body Project , historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg answers this question, drawing on diary excerpts and media images from 1830 to the present. Tracing girls' attitudes toward topics ranging from breast size and menstruation to hair, clothing, and cosmetics, she exposes the shift from the Victorian concern with character to our modern focus on outward appearance—in particular, the desire to be model-thin and sexy. Compassionate, insightful, and gracefully written, The Body Project explores the gains and losses adolescent girls have inherited since they shed the corset and the ideal of virginity for a new world of sexual freedom and consumerism—a world in which the body is their primary project.]]> 214 Joan Jacobs Brumberg 0679735291 Margaret 3 3.82 1997 The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls
author: Joan Jacobs Brumberg
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1997
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2007/05/12
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]]> <![CDATA[The Invisibles: A Tale of the Eunuchs of India]]> 521761


"A magnificent journey. Jaffrey writes about this fascinating and delicate subject with human understanding and warmth."--Ryszard Kapuscinski


"Sensitively written...eloquent...and compassionate."--New York Times Book Review]]> 316 Zia Jaffrey 067974228X Margaret 0 to-read 3.26 1996 The Invisibles: A Tale of the Eunuchs of India
author: Zia Jaffrey
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.26
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/05/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Complete Maus 15195
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust� (The New York Times).

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.]]> 296 Art Spiegelman 0141014083 Margaret 0 to-read 4.57 1980 The Complete Maus
author: Art Spiegelman
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2007/04/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Spoon River Anthology 527297 Edgar Lee Masters 142092799X Margaret 3 plays 3.96 1915 Spoon River Anthology
author: Edgar Lee Masters
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1915
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2007/04/28
shelves: plays
review:

]]> Henry V 37526
The authoritative edition of Henry V from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes:

-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play

-Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play

-Scene-by-scene plot summaries

-A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases

-An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language

-An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play

-Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books

-An annotated guide to further reading]]> 294 William Shakespeare 0743484878 Margaret 4 plays 3.84 1599 Henry V
author: William Shakespeare
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1599
rating: 4
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]]> A Separate Peace 603241 A Separate Peace. A great bestseller for over thirty years - one of themost starkly moving parables ever written of the dark forces that brood over the tortured world of adolescence.]]> 196 John Knowles 0553280414 Margaret 3 3.56 1959 A Separate Peace
author: John Knowles
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1959
rating: 3
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date added: 2007/04/28
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]]> The Vagina Monologues 104734 185 V (formerly Eve Ensler) 1860499260 Margaret 2 3.88 1996 The Vagina Monologues
author: V (formerly Eve Ensler)
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1996
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2007/04/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Clocks (Hercule Poirot, #39)]]> 278205 384 Agatha Christie 0007121091 Margaret 2 3.56 1963 The Clocks (Hercule Poirot, #39)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1963
rating: 2
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date added: 2007/04/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Hickory Dickory Dock (Hercule Poirot, #34)]]> 31299 196 Agatha Christie 1572705647 Margaret 3 3.78 1955 Hickory Dickory Dock (Hercule Poirot, #34)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1955
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[A Murder Is Announced (Miss Marple, #4)]]> 16298
The novel was promoted on both sides of the Atlantic as Agatha Christie's 50th book and published in 1950 by William Collins.

Librarian's note: this entry is for the novel, "A Murder is Announced." Collections and other Miss Marple stories are located elsewhere on ŷ. The series includes 12 novels and 20 short stories. Entries for the short stories can be found by searching ŷ for: "a Miss Marple Short Story."]]> 288 Agatha Christie 1579126294 Margaret 2 4.01 1950 A Murder Is Announced (Miss Marple, #4)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1950
rating: 2
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]]> And Then There Were None 16299
"Ten little boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine. Nine little boys sat up very late; One overslept himself and then there were eight. Eight little boys traveling in Devon; One said he'd stay there then there were seven. Seven little boys chopping up sticks; One chopped himself in half and then there were six. Six little boys playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five. Five little boys going in for law; One got in Chancery and then there were four. Four little boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three. Three little boys walking in the zoo; A big bear hugged one and then there were two. Two little boys sitting in the sun; One got frizzled up and then there was one. One little boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none."

When they realize that murders are occurring as described in the rhyme, terror mounts. One by one they fall prey. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. Who has choreographed this dastardly scheme? And who will be left to tell the tale? Only the dead are above suspicion.]]> 264 Agatha Christie 0312330871 Margaret 3 4.28 1939 And Then There Were None
author: Agatha Christie
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1939
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot, #10)]]> 16304 322 Agatha Christie 0425200450 Margaret 3 4.16 1934 Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot, #10)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1934
rating: 3
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date added: 2007/04/28
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]]> Jumpers 319694 89 Tom Stoppard 0802151000 Margaret 3 plays 3.47 1972 Jumpers
author: Tom Stoppard
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1972
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2007/04/28
shelves: plays
review:

]]> Asleep 50143 177 Banana Yoshimoto 0571205372 Margaret 2 3.83 1989 Asleep
author: Banana Yoshimoto
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1989
rating: 2
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date added: 2007/04/28
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]]> Kitchen 50144 Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, is an enchantingly original and deeply affecting book about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine of Kitchen, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, she is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who was once his father), Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale that recalls early Marguerite Duras. Kitchen and its companion story, "Moonlight Shadow," are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul.]]> 160 Banana Yoshimoto 0802142443 Margaret 2 3.91 1988 Kitchen
author: Banana Yoshimoto
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1988
rating: 2
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date added: 2007/04/28
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]]> The Joy Luck Club 7763 Alternate cover editions of ISBN 9780143038092 can be found here.

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives � until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts.

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.]]> 288 Amy Tan Margaret 3 3.96 1989 The Joy Luck Club
author: Amy Tan
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1989
rating: 3
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date added: 2007/04/28
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]]> The Portable Coleridge 733154 The Portable Coleridge faithfully represents all facets of this complex, haunted genius, including his poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, and Dejection; letters to friends and colleagues such as Robert Southey and William Godwin; selections from Notebooks and Table Talk; political and philosophical writings; literary criticism; and extensive excerpts from Biographia Literaria, in which Coleridge interweaves aesthetics, metaphysics, and disarmingly candid autobiography. Edited and with an introduction by the critic I.A. Richards, this volume vastly expands our understanding of a writer of visionary insight and protean range.

]]> 630 I.A. Richards 014015048X Margaret 4 4.03 1950 The Portable Coleridge
author: I.A. Richards
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1950
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/04/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Joy of Funerals: A Novel in Stories]]> 733097
Written with raw wit, mordant humor and a uniquely penetrating voice, Strauss turns the spotlight on loss and grief. In the vein of Six Feet Under , this is a provocative look into the inner world of those left behind, and those still holding on.

"The desire for human connection runs throughout Alix Strauss's dark and spirited novel, The Joy of Funerals ." - Vanity Fair]]> 259 Alix Strauss 031230918X Margaret 2 3.13 2003 The Joy of Funerals: A Novel in Stories
author: Alix Strauss
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2003
rating: 2
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]]> Animal Farm 7613
The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, however, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon.

One night, all the animals at Mr. Jones' Manor Farm assemble in a barn to hear old Major, a pig, describe a dream he had about a world where all animals live free from the tyranny of their human masters. Old Major dies soon after the meeting, but the animals � inspired by his philosophy of Animalism � plot a rebellion against Jones.

Two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, prove themselves important figures and planners of this dangerous enterprise. When Jones forgets to feed the animals, the revolution occurs, and Jones and his men are chased off the farm. Manor Farm is renamed Animal Farm, and the Seven Commandments of Animalism are painted on the barn wall...]]> 129 George Orwell Margaret 3 3.90 1945 Animal Farm
author: George Orwell
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1945
rating: 3
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]]> Triomf 273284 528 Marlene van Niekerk 1585676497 Margaret 0 to-read 3.85 1994 Triomf
author: Marlene van Niekerk
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/04/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives (PostSecret)]]> 87640 New York TimesBestseller

The project that captured a nation's imagination.

The instructions were simple, but the results were extraordinary.

You are invited to anonymously contribute a secret to a group art project. Your secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything -- as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before. Be brief. Be legible. Be creative.

It all began with an idea Frank Warren had for a community art project. He began handing out postcards to strangers and leaving them in public places -- asking people to write down a secret they had never told anyone and mail it to him, anonymously.

The response was overwhelming. The secrets were both provocative and profound, and the cards themselves were works of art -- carefully and creatively constructed by hand. Addictively compelling, the cards reveal our deepest fears, desires, regrets, and obsessions. Frank calls them "graphic haiku," beautiful, elegant, and small in structure but powerfully emotional.

As Frank began posting the cards on his website, PostSecret took on a life of its own, becoming much more than a simple art project. It has grown into a global phenomenon, exposing our individual aspirations, fantasies, and frailties -- our common humanity.

Every day dozens of postcards still make their way to Frank, with postmarks from around the world, touching on every aspect of human experience. This extraordinary collection brings together the most powerful, personal, and beautifully intimate secrets Frank Warren has received -- and brilliantly illuminates that human emotions can be unique and universal at the same time.]]> 278 Frank Warren 0060899190 Margaret 1 3.99 2005 PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives (PostSecret)
author: Frank Warren
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2005
rating: 1
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date added: 2007/04/28
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I gave this book one star because I don't believe that they're real - and refuse to be convinced otherwise. For example (from PostSecret, though I'm paraphrasing): "Everyone I used to know believes I died in 911"... COME ON, PEOPLE... interesting and all, but I'm not a believer.
]]> 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 Margaret 4 3.93 1925 The Great Gatsby
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 4
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]]> A Farewell to Arms 10799 A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield - the weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertion—this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep. Ernest Hemingway famously said that he rewrote his ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right.]]> 293 Ernest Hemingway 0099910101 Margaret 4 3.83 1929 A Farewell to Arms
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1929
rating: 4
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]]> Rising Sun 85453
On the forty-sixth floor, in an empty conference room, the dead body of a beautiful young woman is discovered.

The investigation begins ... and immediately becomes a headlong chase through a twisting maze of industrial intrigue ... a no-holds-barred conflict in which control of a vital American technology is the fiercely coveted prize—and the Japanese saying "business is war" takes on a terrifying reality ...]]> 399 Michael Crichton 0345380371 Margaret 2 3.43 1992 Rising Sun
author: Michael Crichton
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1992
rating: 2
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]]> Jamaica Inn 50244 302 Daphne du Maurier 0380725398 Margaret 2 3.80 1936 Jamaica Inn
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1936
rating: 2
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]]> Rebecca 636993
So the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter remembered the chilling events that led her down the turning drive past the beeches, white and naked, to the isolated gray stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast. With a husband she barely knew, the young bride arrived at this immense estate, only to be inexorably drawn into the life of the first Mrs. de Winter, the beautiful Rebecca, dead but never forgotten...her suite of rooms never touched, her clothes ready to be worn, her servant -- the sinister Mrs. Danvers -- still loyal. And as an eerie presentiment of the evil tightened around her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter began her search for the real fate of Rebecca...for the secrets of Manderley.]]> 380 Daphne du Maurier 0380778556 Margaret 2 4.17 1938 Rebecca
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1938
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2007/04/28
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review:

]]> A Midsummer Night's Dream 7009 • An extensive overview of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet
• A special introduction to the play by the editor, Wolfgang Clemen, University of Munich
• A note on the sources from which Shakespeare derived A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by William Hazlitt, John Russell Brown, Frank Kermode, Linda Bamber, Camille Wells Slights
• A comprehensive stage and screen history of notable actors, directors, and productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, then and now
• Text, notes, and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type
• Up-to-date list of recommended readings]]> 162 William Shakespeare 0451526961 Margaret 4 plays 3.90 1595 A Midsummer Night's Dream
author: William Shakespeare
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1595
rating: 4
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]]> The Winter's Tale 44133 You can find an alternative cover for this ISBN here.

The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems and an extensive introduction. The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's most varied, theatrically self-conscious, and emotionally wide-ranging plays. Much of the play's copiousness inheres in its generic intermingling of tragedy, comedy, romance, pastoral, and the history play. In addition to dates and sources, the introduction attends to iterative patterns, the nature and cause of Leontes' jealousy, the staging and meaning of the bear episode, and the thematic and structural implications of the figure of Time. Special attention is paid to the ending and its tempered happiness. Performance history is integrated throughout the introduction and commentary. Appendices include the theatrical practice of doubling.]]> 306 William Shakespeare 0521293731 Margaret 4 plays 3.70 1623 The Winter's Tale
author: William Shakespeare
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1623
rating: 4
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]]> The Tempest 12985
Each edition includes:
� Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play

� Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play

� Scene-by-scene plot summaries

� A key to famous lines and phrases

� An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language

� An essay by an outstanding scholar providing a modern perspective on the play

� Illustrations from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books]]> 218 William Shakespeare Margaret 5 plays 3.79 1611 The Tempest
author: William Shakespeare
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1611
rating: 5
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date added: 2007/04/28
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]]> Macbeth 8852
This shocking tragedy - a violent caution to those seeking power for its own sake - is, to this day, one of Shakespeare’s most popular and influential masterpieces.]]> 249 William Shakespeare 0743477103 Margaret 5 plays 3.90 1623 Macbeth
author: William Shakespeare
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1623
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 Margaret 3 plays 3.74 1597 Romeo and Juliet
author: William Shakespeare
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1597
rating: 3
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]]> The Scarlet Letter 12296 279 Nathaniel Hawthorne 0142437263 Margaret 3 3.43 1850 The Scarlet Letter
author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1850
rating: 3
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]]> A Christmas Carol 5328 A Christmas Carol is a novella by English author Charles Dickens. It was first published by Chapman & Hall on 19 December 1843. It tells the story of a bitter old miser named Ebenezer Scrooge and his transformation resulting from a supernatural visit by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Yet to Come.

The novella met with instant success and critical acclaim. The book was written and published in early Victorian era Britain, a period when there was strong nostalgia for old Christmas traditions together with the introduction of new customs, such as Christmas trees and greeting cards. Dickens' sources for the tale appear to be many and varied, but are, principally, the humiliating experiences of his childhood, his sympathy for the poor, and various Christmas stories and fairy tales.]]> 112 Charles Dickens 1580495796 Margaret 2 4.03 1843 A Christmas Carol
author: Charles Dickens
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1843
rating: 2
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]]> A Tale of Two Cities 1953 A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens’s great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author’s novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores many of his enduring themes—imprisonment, injustice, social anarchy, resurrection, and the renunciation that fosters renewal.]]> 489 Charles Dickens 0141439602 Margaret 2 3.86 1859 A Tale of Two Cities
author: Charles Dickens
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1859
rating: 2
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]]> The Complete English Poems 134025
This volume, superbly edited by Professor Smith, is the first complete edition to make a serious attempt to guide the reader closely through the complexities of Donne's poetry. Considerable attention has been paid to the text, and a selection of the important manuscript variants are included. This edition is also the first to make use of the newly discovered manuscript of the verse letter to Lady Carey and Mistress Essex Rich.]]> 688 John Donne 0140422099 Margaret 4 4.14 1633 The Complete English Poems
author: John Donne
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1633
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Five Plays: Ivanov / The Seagull / Uncle Vanya / The Three Sisters / The Cherry Orchard]]> 79652 336 Anton Chekhov Margaret 4 plays 4.22 1887 Five Plays: Ivanov / The Seagull / Uncle Vanya / The Three Sisters / The Cherry Orchard
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1887
rating: 4
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]]> The Virgin Suicides 10956 250 Jeffrey Eugenides 0747560595 Margaret 3 3.81 1993 The Virgin Suicides
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1993
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996]]> 77457 The Figured Wheel fully collects the first four books of poetry, as well as twenty-one new poems, by Robert Pinsky, the former U.S. Poet Laureate.

Critic Hugh Kenner, writing about Pinsky's first volume, described this poet's work as "nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience." Both the transformation of the familiar and the uttering of what has been hitherto mute or implicit in our culture continue to be central to Pinsky's art. New poems like "Avenue" and "The City Elegies" envision the urban landscape's mysterious epitome of human pain and imagination, forces that recur in "Ginza Samba," an astonishing history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell," a jazz-like work that intertwines elegy with both the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes. A final section of translations includes Pinsky's renderings of poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan, and others, as well as the last canto of his award-winning version of the Inferno.]]> 320 Robert Pinsky 0374525064 Margaret 3 3.78 1996 The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996
author: Robert Pinsky
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1996
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung]]> 64667 420 Lester Bangs 1852427485 Margaret 3 4.06 1987 Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung
author: Lester Bangs
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1987
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[Naked Lunch: The Restored Text]]> 7437 Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, a book that redefined not just literature but American culture. An unnerving tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, its formal innovation, taboo subject matter, and tour de force execution have exerted a significant influence on authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson; on the relationship of art and obscenity; and on the shape of music, film, and media generally. Naked Lunch: The Restored Text includes many editorial corrections to errors present in previous editions, and incorporates Burroughs’s notes on the text, several essays he wrote over the years about the book, and an appendix of 20 percent new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript, which predates the first published version. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a valuable and fresh experience of this classic of our culture.]]> 289 William S. Burroughs 0802140181 Margaret 5 3.48 1959 Naked Lunch: The Restored Text
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1959
rating: 5
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]]> The Simple Truth 29936 in a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private), family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.]]> 69 Philip Levine 0679765840 Margaret 4 4.20 1994 The Simple Truth
author: Philip Levine
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1994
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Three Plays: Juno and the Paycock / The Shadow of a Gunman / The Plow and the Stars]]> 570736 218 Seán O'Casey 0312802900 Margaret 5 plays 3.97 1969 Three Plays: Juno and the Paycock / The Shadow of a Gunman / The Plow and the Stars
author: Seán O'Casey
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1969
rating: 5
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]]> Birthday Letters 313277
The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work--animal, vegetable, mythological--as well as on Plath's famous verse.

Countless books have discussed the subject of this intense relationship from a necessary distance, but this volume--at last--offers us Hughes's own account. Moreover, it's a truly remarkable collection of poems in its own right.]]> 198 Ted Hughes 0374525811 Margaret 2 3.91 1998 Birthday Letters
author: Ted Hughes
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1998
rating: 2
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]]> <![CDATA[Plays 1: Owners / Traps / Vinegar Tom / Light Shining in Buckinghamshire / Cloud Nine]]> 243419 The plays in this volume represent the best of Churchill's writing up to and including her emergence onto the international theatre scene with Cloud Nine. The volume also contains a new introduction by the author as well as short prefaces to each play.

]]> 320 Caryl Churchill 0415901960 Margaret 4 plays 3.80 1985 Plays 1: Owners / Traps / Vinegar Tom / Light Shining in Buckinghamshire / Cloud Nine
author: Caryl Churchill
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1985
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[They Cage the Animals at Night: The True Story of an Abandoned Child's Struggle for Emotional Survival]]> 19412 304 Jennings Michael Burch 0451159411 Margaret 2 4.34 1984 They Cage the Animals at Night: The True Story of an Abandoned Child's Struggle for Emotional Survival
author: Jennings Michael Burch
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1984
rating: 2
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]]> Night 1617 Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's testimony to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this horror must simply never be allowed to happen again.]]> 120 Elie Wiesel 0374500010 Margaret 4 4.38 1956 Night
author: Elie Wiesel
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1956
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson]]> 112204 THE ONLY ONE-VOLUME EDITION CONTAINING ALL 1,775 OF EMILY DICKINSON’S POEMS

Only eleven of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published prior to her death in 1886; the startling originality of her work doomed it to obscurity in her lifetime. Early posthumously published collections-some of them featuring liberally “edited� versions of the poems-did not fully and accurately represent Dickinson’s bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations. Not until the 1955 publication of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, a three-volume critical edition compiled by Thomas H. Johnson, were readers able for the first time to assess, understand, and appreciate the whole of Dickinson’s extraordinary poetic genius.

This book, a distillation of the three-volume Complete Poems, brings together the original texts of all 1,775 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote.]]> 716 Emily Dickinson Margaret 5 4.28 1890 The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
author: Emily Dickinson
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1890
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Amphigorey Again (Amphigorey, #4)]]> 51243 Amphigorey Again contains previously uncollected work and two unpublished stories�"The Izzard Book," a quirky riff on the letter Z , and "La Malle Saignante," a bilingual homage to early French silent serial movies. Rough sketches and unfin- ished panels show an ironic and singular mind at work.

contains The Galoshes of Remorse, Signs of Spring, Seasonal Confusion, Random Walk, Category, The Other Statue, 10 Impossible Objects (abridged), The Universal Solvent (abridged), Scenes de Ballet, Verse Advice, The Deadly Blotter, Creativity, The Retrieved Locket, The Water Flowers, The Haunted Tea-Cosy, Christmas Wrap-Up, The Headless Bust, The Just Dessert, The Admonitory Hippopotamus, Neglected Murderesses, Tragedies Topiares, The Raging Tide, The Unknown Vegetable, Another Random Walk, Serious Life: A Cruise, Figbash Acrobate, La Malle Saignante, and The Izzard Book]]> 260 Edward Gorey 0151011079 Margaret 4 4.39 2006 Amphigorey Again (Amphigorey, #4)
author: Edward Gorey
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2006
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[Amphigorey Too (Amphigorey, #2)]]> 51244
Contains The Beastly Baby, The Nursery Frieze, The Pious Infant, The Evil Garden, The Inanimate Tragedy, The Gilded Bat, The Iron Tonic, The Osbick Bird, The Chinese Obelisks (bis), The Deranged Cousins, The Eleventh Episode, [The Untitled Book], The Lavender Leotard, The Disrespectful Summons, The Abandoned Sock, The Lost Lions, Story for Sara [by Alphonse Allais], The Salt Herring [by Charles Cros], Leaves from a Mislaid Album, and A Limerick.]]> 256 Edward Gorey 0399504206 Margaret 5 4.46 1975 Amphigorey Too (Amphigorey, #2)
author: Edward Gorey
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1975
rating: 5
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]]> Amphigorey (Amphigorey, #1) 47559 amphigory, meaning a nonsense verse or composition. As always, Gorey's painstakingly cross-hatched pen and ink drawings are perfectly suited to his oddball verse and prose. The first book of 15, "The Unstrung Harp," describes the writing process of novelist Mr. Clavius Frederick Earbrass: "He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel." In "The Listing Attic," you'll find a set of quirky limericks such as "A certain young man, it was noted, / Went about in the heat thickly coated; / He said, 'You may scoff, / But I shan't take it off; / Underneath I am horribly bloated.' "

Many of Gorey's tales involve untimely deaths and dreadful mishaps, but much like tragic Irish ballads with their perky rhythms and melodies, they come off as strangely lighthearted. "The Gashlycrumb Tinies," for example, begins like this: "A is for AMY who fell down the stairs, B is for BASIL assaulted by bears," and so on. An eccentric, funny book for either the uninitiated or diehard Gorey fans.

Contains: The Unstrung Harp, The Listing Attic, The Doubtful Guest, The Object Lesson, The Bug Book, The Fatal Lozenge, The Hapless Child, The Curious Sofa, The Willowdale Handcar, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Insect God, The West Wing, The Wuggly Ump, The Sinking Spell, and The Remembered Visit.]]> 220 Edward Gorey 0399504338 Margaret 5 4.05 1972 Amphigorey (Amphigorey, #1)
author: Edward Gorey
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1972
rating: 5
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]]> The Spirit Level 181946 80 Seamus Heaney 0571178227 Margaret 4 4.19 1996 The Spirit Level
author: Seamus Heaney
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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]]> Meadowlands 76544 84 Louise Glück 0880015063 Margaret 4 4.10 1996 Meadowlands
author: Louise Glück
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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]]> Selected Poems and Four Plays 53021 Scholars, students, and all who delight in Yeats's varied music and sheer quality will rejoice in this expanded edition. As the introduction observes, "Early and late he has the simple, indispensable gift of enchanting the ear....He was also the poet who, while very much of his own day in Ireland, spoke best to the people of all countries. And though he plunged deep into arcane studies, his themes are most clearly the general ones of life and death, love and hate, man's condition, and history's meanings. He began as a sometimes effete post-Romantic, heir to the pre-Raphaelites, and then, quite naturally, became a leading British Symbolist; but he grew at last into the boldest, most vigorous voice of this century." Selected Poems and Four Plays represents the essential achievement of the greatest twentieth-century poet to write in English.]]> 270 W.B. Yeats 0684826461 Margaret 5 4.35 1996 Selected Poems and Four Plays
author: W.B. Yeats
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1996
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990]]> 256032 152 Eavan Boland 0393308227 Margaret 5 4.16 1990 Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980-1990
author: Eavan Boland
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1990
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Selected Poems (William Carlos Williams)]]> 65336

It isn't what he [the poet] says that counts as a work of art," Williams maintained, "it's what he makes, with such intensity of purpose that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.]]> 302 William Carlos Williams 081120958X Margaret 4 4.18 1963 Selected Poems (William Carlos Williams)
author: William Carlos Williams
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1963
rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt]]> 732178
The Collected Poemsoffers us a chance to consider freshly the breadth of Amy Clampitt's vision and poetic achievement. It is a volume that her many admirers will treasure and that will provide a magnificent introduction for a new generation of readers.

When Amy Clampitt's first book of poems, The Kingfisher , was published in January 1983, the response was jubilant. The poet was sixty-three years old, and there had been no debut like hers in recent memory. "A dance of language," said May Swenson. "A genius for places," wrote J. D. McClatchy, and the New York Times Book Review said, "With the publication of her brilliant first book, Clampitt immediately merits consideration as one of the most distinguished contemporary poets."

She went on to publish four more collections in the next eleven years, the last one, A Silence Opens, appearing in the year she died.

Amy Clampitt's themes are the very American ones of place and displacement. She, like her pioneer ancestors, moved frequently, but she wrote with lasting and deep feeling about all sorts of landscapes--the prairies of her Iowa childhood, the fog-wrapped coast of Maine, and places she visited in Europe, from the western isles of Scotland to Italy's lush countryside. She lived most of her adult life in New York City, and many of her best-known poems, such as "Times Square Water Music" and "Manhattan Elegy," are set there.

She did not hesitate to take on the larger upheavals of the twentieth century--war, Holocaust, exile--and poems like "The Burning Child" and "Sed de Correr" remind us of the dark nightmare lurking in the interstices of our daily existence.

It is impossible to speak of Amy Clampitt's poetry without mentioning her immense, lifelong love of birds and wildflowers, a love that produced some of her most profound images--like the kingfisher's "burnished plunge, the color / of felicity afire," which came "glancing like an arrow / through landscapes of untended memory" to remind her of the uninhabitable sorrow of an affair gone wrong; or the sun underfoot among the sundews, "so dazzling / . . . that, looking, / you start to fall upward."]]> 510 Amy Clampitt 0375700641 Margaret 5 4.06 1997 The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt
author: Amy Clampitt
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1997
rating: 5
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]]> A Coney Island of the Mind 99713 "Into the Night Life" and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's—as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind—a kind of circus of the soul.]]> 93 Lawrence Ferlinghetti 0811200418 Margaret 3 4.16 1958 A Coney Island of the Mind
author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1958
rating: 3
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]]> Chicago Poems 596810 88 Carl Sandburg Margaret 4 4.00 1916 Chicago Poems
author: Carl Sandburg
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1916
rating: 4
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]]> The Castle of Otranto 12923 The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the Second Edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." Crammed with invention, entertainment, terror, and pathos, the novel was an immediate success and Walpole's own favorite among his numerous works. The novel is reprinted here from a text of 1798, the last that Walpole himself prepared for the press.]]> 125 Horace Walpole 0192834401 Margaret 2 3.20 1764 The Castle of Otranto
author: Horace Walpole
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.20
book published: 1764
rating: 2
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]]> Absolute Watchmen 23539 464 Alan Moore 1401207138 Margaret 4 4.57 1987 Absolute Watchmen
author: Alan Moore
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1987
rating: 4
read at: 2007/08/13
date added: 2007/04/28
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]]> The Major Works 112136 Lyrical Ballads, written with Coleridge, is a landmark in the history of English romantic poetry. His celebration of nature and of the beauty and poetry in the commonplace embody a unified and coherent vision that was profoundly innovative.

This volume presents the poems in their order of composition and in their earliest completed state, enabling the reader to trace Wordsworth's poetic development and to share the experience of his contemporaries. It includes a large sample of the finest lyrics, and also longer narratives such as The Ruined Cottage, Home at Grasmere, Peter Bell, and the autobiographical masterpiece, The Prelude (1805). All the major examples of Wordsworth's prose on the subject of poetry are also included.]]> 784 William Wordsworth 0192840444 Margaret 5 4.04 1805 The Major Works
author: William Wordsworth
name: Margaret
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1805
rating: 5
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]]> The Odyssey 1384
E. V. Rieu’s translation of The Odyssey was the very first Penguin Classic to be published, and has itself achieved classic status. For this edition, Rieu’s text has been sensitively revised and a new introduction added to complement his original introduction.]]> 348 Homer 0140449116 Margaret 5 3.96 -700 The Odyssey
author: Homer
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.96
book published: -700
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady]]> 529243 1534 Samuel Richardson 0140432159 Margaret 2 3.39 1748 Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady
author: Samuel Richardson
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.39
book published: 1748
rating: 2
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]]> Big Sur 50140
"Big Sur's humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac, a superior novelist who had strength to complete his poetic narrative, a task few scribes so afflicted have accomplished—others crack up. Here we meet San Francisco's poets & recognize hero Dean Moriarty ten years after On the Road. Jack Kerouac was a 'writer,' as his great peer W.S. Burroughs says, and here at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with 'Sea,' a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur."—Allen Ginsberg 10/10/91 N.Y.C.]]> 256 Jack Kerouac 0140168125 Margaret 4 3.85 1962 Big Sur
author: Jack Kerouac
name: Margaret
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1962
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/04/27
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]]>