en-US Wed, 07 Aug 2024 19:43:36 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 54479 252 Jules Verne 014044906X David 4 3.95 1872
author: Jules Verne
name: David
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1872
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> 35699518 384 Michael Nye 168336760X David 4 When he meets Carson the first Rockcastle student to see him as a person and not just a scholarship recipient Owen becomes infatuated with everything that is Carson. Carson is a young man from the right background, but as the story progresses there is something not quite right with this golden boy. Carson is the star basketball player on the varsity team and with his coaching and guidance Owen joins Carson there where he is able to come closer to being a part of a world he thought would remain out of reach. The world of All The Castles Burned centers around two friends that become close through the game of basketball, and even if you aren’t interested in basketball Nye draws you in with his electric descriptions of the flow of the game. Despite its focus on these two young basketball players the real impetus for the novel lies in the “friendship�� between Owen and Carson.
It is all a façade which is meticulously dismantled for the reader. The reader’s realization of Carson and the Rockcastle world is disrupted alongside Owen’s understanding of the world around him. He knows and the reader knows that Owen doesn’t belong and maybe doesn’t want to belong to this world where “all Rockcastle scandals�� was hushed rumor that [was] never spoke of in public.�� The blue blood world was a place where the appearance was always more important than the reality.
Carson serves to punctuate this point with the development of his face that he shows to the world one which Owen’s mother perceives the first time she meets him. Carson’s charisma doesn’t fool her as she comments that “there’s nothing behind his friendliness, is there?�� In a world ruled by civility and façade Carson epitomizes this society. His friendliness is a sociopathic representation for the world which eventually mirrors another close relations Owen deals with in his life.
Owen’s friendship with Carson begins to take a dark turn as the reader begins to understand Carson better than Owen. Owen becomes obsessed and his relationship with Caitlin, Carson’s sister, punctuates this point. Even in an intimate moment with Caitlin Owen can only think about how this will serve to keep him close to Carson.
If there is one thing that could be said negatively about the book it is the development of Caitlin’s character. She becomes incredibly important to Owen as the story continues, and when tragedy strikes Owen’s life the first person he wants to get a hold of, after Carson, is Caitlin. Despite that the narrative does little to develop that relationship on anything then a merely superficial basis. Caitlin remains a character that exists in the background and only serves as a foil to the development of Carson’s character.
At the climax of the novel the reader can only hope that Owen sees what his mother had known from the beginning as he spirals into a situation that has the potential to destroy his future. The reader grips the pages with intensity waiting to see whether Owen can rescue himself from what we all recognize. ]]> 3.50 2018
author: Michael Nye
name: David
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/04/26
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review:
Michael Nye’s novel All The Castles Burned hooks you from the first chapter and holds on. The reader becomes enmeshed in a world where classes clash and the perfect castles on the hill are shown to contain the cracks that you can’t see from a distance. The novel works to show the divide between the lower and upper classes while suggesting that everything isn’t as perfect as it appears when you drive through the rich neighborhoods. Owen Webb lives in a world in between classes in which he doesn’t feel like he really belongs. The end of the first chapter paints a picture of a boy, an outcast, a person “wrapped in ribbons of loneliness, an angry solitude from which�� there is no escape.
When he meets Carson the first Rockcastle student to see him as a person and not just a scholarship recipient Owen becomes infatuated with everything that is Carson. Carson is a young man from the right background, but as the story progresses there is something not quite right with this golden boy. Carson is the star basketball player on the varsity team and with his coaching and guidance Owen joins Carson there where he is able to come closer to being a part of a world he thought would remain out of reach. The world of All The Castles Burned centers around two friends that become close through the game of basketball, and even if you aren’t interested in basketball Nye draws you in with his electric descriptions of the flow of the game. Despite its focus on these two young basketball players the real impetus for the novel lies in the “friendship�� between Owen and Carson.
It is all a façade which is meticulously dismantled for the reader. The reader’s realization of Carson and the Rockcastle world is disrupted alongside Owen’s understanding of the world around him. He knows and the reader knows that Owen doesn’t belong and maybe doesn’t want to belong to this world where “all Rockcastle scandals�� was hushed rumor that [was] never spoke of in public.�� The blue blood world was a place where the appearance was always more important than the reality.
Carson serves to punctuate this point with the development of his face that he shows to the world one which Owen’s mother perceives the first time she meets him. Carson’s charisma doesn’t fool her as she comments that “there’s nothing behind his friendliness, is there?�� In a world ruled by civility and façade Carson epitomizes this society. His friendliness is a sociopathic representation for the world which eventually mirrors another close relations Owen deals with in his life.
Owen’s friendship with Carson begins to take a dark turn as the reader begins to understand Carson better than Owen. Owen becomes obsessed and his relationship with Caitlin, Carson’s sister, punctuates this point. Even in an intimate moment with Caitlin Owen can only think about how this will serve to keep him close to Carson.
If there is one thing that could be said negatively about the book it is the development of Caitlin’s character. She becomes incredibly important to Owen as the story continues, and when tragedy strikes Owen’s life the first person he wants to get a hold of, after Carson, is Caitlin. Despite that the narrative does little to develop that relationship on anything then a merely superficial basis. Caitlin remains a character that exists in the background and only serves as a foil to the development of Carson’s character.
At the climax of the novel the reader can only hope that Owen sees what his mother had known from the beginning as he spirals into a situation that has the potential to destroy his future. The reader grips the pages with intensity waiting to see whether Owen can rescue himself from what we all recognize.
]]> 37570595
These stories explore urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and the ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In “The Finkelstein Five,�� Adjei-Brenyah reckons with the brutal prejudice of our justice system. In “Zimmer Land,�� we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And “Friday Black�� and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing�� show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all.

Entirely fresh in its style and perspective, and sure to appeal to fans of Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and George Saunders, Friday Black confronts readers with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope.]]> 194 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 1328911241 David 5 “The Finkelstein 5�� throws you into a world where the reader becomes utterly aware of their own skin. The antagonist pulls us into a reality that for some will feel like an alien world, and for others will feel like the everyday. The most disturbing part is that despite the fantastic nature of the story it feels like something you have read about in the papers. “The Finkelstein 5�� exaggerates the world we are a part of in a way that leaves the reader questioning whether this is a real story.
“Zimmer Land�� couldn’t be a more obvious allusion to the Treyvon Martin shooting, and despite that the story doesn’t feel polemical. The story examines the implicit racism that still lives underneath a “post-racial�� world that feels anything but. Despite “Zimmer Land�� being set in the near future nothing about this world feels unfamiliar or unbelievable. It will leave you feeling sad that we could live in this world where a story like “Zimmer Land�� could feel like a possible future. Adjei-Brenyah’s Saunderesque stories push the reader to examine the America we live in.
And, this is very much an American collection of short stories. There might not be anything more American than the consumerist playground that is the mall. His stories manage to capture the disenfranchisement, futility, and brutality that is created by our consumerist society in his stories “Friday Black��, “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing��, and “In Retail��. Each revolves around the mall as a symbol of the consumerist market we live in, and yet they all feel fresh. His short story “Friday Black�� is remarkable in its ability to maintain the zombie tropes while subverting them, and the ability to push the frenzy of black Friday and “Dawn of the Dead�� together so thoroughly and believably without feeling cliché. On the other hand, “How to Sell a Jacket��, and “In Retail�� both approach consumerism from a literary angle that highlights the difficulties of feeling like an object.
Of course despite the similarities they both also manipulate the angle in ways that force the reader to examine themselves differently. “How to sell a Jacket�� pushes the reader to examine the bias that still exists in America and brings the collection back to something that feels familiar to “Zimmer Land��, and “Finkelstein 5��. “In Retail�� flips this objectification to express the futility of feeling like a cog in a consumerist machine, and expresses the moments that we treasure when, for just a second, we are recognized as people.
All of his stories maintain a connection to reality accept maybe “Through the Flash�� in which the setting is anything but familiar. Despite this Adjei-Brenyah still manages to create a horrifyingly realistic depiction of human nature. The brutality and pain that is expressed through pain is explored in a way that is tragic, but by the end of the story leaves the reader hopeful. He ends the collection and this story with an understanding that maybe there is a redemptive quality to be found in family and community.

]]> 4.06 2018
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: David
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/04/26
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review:
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s work is a tidal pool of emotions that will grip your imagination. If you were hard pressed to express a running theme that ties the collection of short stories together, it would have to be an expose of social injustice. Adjei-Brenyah’s debut collection of short stories Friday Black examines race issues, consumerism, class, and family relations. There are moments in the stories in which you aren’t sure what reality you are in. The collection oscillates between reality and fantasy, moves from the familiar to the unfamiliar, and leaves you questioning where the fuck did I just go. Sometimes the movement from the familiar to the unfamiliar occurs in the same story and sometimes the fantasy doesn’t feel so far off from the reality we live in. The first story itself starts you off on a whirl wind of emotions with brutal force both literally and figuratively.
“The Finkelstein 5�� throws you into a world where the reader becomes utterly aware of their own skin. The antagonist pulls us into a reality that for some will feel like an alien world, and for others will feel like the everyday. The most disturbing part is that despite the fantastic nature of the story it feels like something you have read about in the papers. “The Finkelstein 5�� exaggerates the world we are a part of in a way that leaves the reader questioning whether this is a real story.
“Zimmer Land�� couldn’t be a more obvious allusion to the Treyvon Martin shooting, and despite that the story doesn’t feel polemical. The story examines the implicit racism that still lives underneath a “post-racial�� world that feels anything but. Despite “Zimmer Land�� being set in the near future nothing about this world feels unfamiliar or unbelievable. It will leave you feeling sad that we could live in this world where a story like “Zimmer Land�� could feel like a possible future. Adjei-Brenyah’s Saunderesque stories push the reader to examine the America we live in.
And, this is very much an American collection of short stories. There might not be anything more American than the consumerist playground that is the mall. His stories manage to capture the disenfranchisement, futility, and brutality that is created by our consumerist society in his stories “Friday Black��, “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing��, and “In Retail��. Each revolves around the mall as a symbol of the consumerist market we live in, and yet they all feel fresh. His short story “Friday Black�� is remarkable in its ability to maintain the zombie tropes while subverting them, and the ability to push the frenzy of black Friday and “Dawn of the Dead�� together so thoroughly and believably without feeling cliché. On the other hand, “How to Sell a Jacket��, and “In Retail�� both approach consumerism from a literary angle that highlights the difficulties of feeling like an object.
Of course despite the similarities they both also manipulate the angle in ways that force the reader to examine themselves differently. “How to sell a Jacket�� pushes the reader to examine the bias that still exists in America and brings the collection back to something that feels familiar to “Zimmer Land��, and “Finkelstein 5��. “In Retail�� flips this objectification to express the futility of feeling like a cog in a consumerist machine, and expresses the moments that we treasure when, for just a second, we are recognized as people.
All of his stories maintain a connection to reality accept maybe “Through the Flash�� in which the setting is anything but familiar. Despite this Adjei-Brenyah still manages to create a horrifyingly realistic depiction of human nature. The brutality and pain that is expressed through pain is explored in a way that is tragic, but by the end of the story leaves the reader hopeful. He ends the collection and this story with an understanding that maybe there is a redemptive quality to be found in family and community.


]]> 12505 667 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0679642420 David 5 4.22 1869
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: David
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1869
rating: 5
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date added: 2018/04/23
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]]> 11012 I regret to see that my book has turned out un fiasco solenne.' James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories. Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would 'retard the course of civilisation in Ireland'.

Joyce's aim was to tell the truth �� to create a work of art that would reflect life in Ireland at the turn of the last century and by rejecting euphemism, reveal to the Irish the unromantic reality the recognition of which would lead to the spiritual liberation of the country.

Each of the fifteen stories offers a glimpse of the lives of ordinary Dubliners �� a death, an encounter, an opportunity not taken, a memory rekindled �� and collectively they paint a portrait of a nation.]]> 352 James Joyce David 5 3.86 1914
author: James Joyce
name: David
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1914
rating: 5
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date added: 2018/04/23
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]]> 7588 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a novel of sexual awakening, religious rebellion and the essential search for voice and meaning that every nascent artist must face in order to blossom fully into themselves.]]> 329 James Joyce 0142437344 David 4 3.64 1916
author: James Joyce
name: David
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1916
rating: 4
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date added: 2018/04/23
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]]> 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 David 5 4.15 1985
author: Margaret Atwood
name: David
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1985
rating: 5
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date added: 2018/04/23
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]]> 10365343
Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern­ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One—but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety—the “malfunctioning�� stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.

Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams work­ing in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world.

And then things start to go wrong.

Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One bril­liantly subverts the genre’s conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century.]]> 259 Colson Whitehead 0385528078 David 5 3.23 2011
author: Colson Whitehead
name: David
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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date added: 2018/04/23
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]]> 18310206 ��
��
On one level, The Noble Hustle is a familiar species of participatory journalism--a longtime neighborhood poker player, Whitehead was given a $10,000 stake and an assignment from the online online magazine Grantland to see how far he��could get in the World Series of Poker.�� But since it stems from the astonishing mind of Colson Whitehead (MacArthur Award-endorsed!), the book is a brilliant, hilarious, weirdly profound, and ultimately moving portrayal of--yes, it sounds overblown and��ridiculous, but really!--the human condition.
��������
��
After weeks of preparation that included repeated bus trips to glamorous Atlantic City, and hiring a personal trainer to toughen him up for sitting at twelve hours a stretch, the author journeyed to the gaudy wonderland that is Las Vegas �� the world’s greatest “Leisure Industrial Complex�� -- to try his luck in the multi-million dollar tournament.���� Hobbled by his mediocre playing skills and a lifelong condition known as “anhedonia�� (the inability to experience pleasure) Whitehead did not �� spoiler alert! �� - win tens of millions of dollars.�� But he did chronicle his progress, both literal and existential, in this unbelievably funny, uncannily accurate social satire whose main target is the author himself.��
��
Whether you’ve been playing cards your whole life, or have never picked up a hand, you’re sure to agree that this book contains some of the best writing about beef jerky ever put to paper.]]> 234 Colson Whitehead 0385537050 David 5 3.36 2014
author: Colson Whitehead
name: David
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2014
rating: 5
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date added: 2018/04/23
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]]> 30555488
In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor--engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey--hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.]]> 320 Colson Whitehead 0385542364 David 5 4.04 2016
author: Colson Whitehead
name: David
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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date added: 2018/04/23
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]]> 12948
A very young woman's first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate... An estate haunted by a beckoning evil. Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls. But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.

Excerpt:
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days - found myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house.]]> 121 Henry James 0140620613 David 2 3.42 1898
author: Henry James
name: David
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1898
rating: 2
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date added: 2018/04/23
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]]> 84369 288 C.S. Lewis 0007202326 David 0 4.03 1956
author: C.S. Lewis
name: David
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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date added: 2018/04/23
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]]> 11529868
Considering himself "a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world," Jun Do becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress "so pure, she didn't know what starving people looked like."

Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master's Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. A towering literary achievement, The Orphan Master's Son ushers Adam Johnson into the small group of today's greatest writers.

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master's Son follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.]]> 443 Adam Johnson 0812992792 David 5 4.05 2012
author: Adam Johnson
name: David
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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date added: 2018/03/28
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]]> 34
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkeness 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 into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in The Hobbit.

In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.
--back cover]]> 398 J.R.R. Tolkien 0618346252 David 4 4.36 1954
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: David
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1954
rating: 4
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date added: 2018/03/28
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]]> 17157681
Whisked from his comfortable hobbit-hole by Gandalf the wizard and a band of dwarves, Bilbo Baggins finds himself caught up in a plot to raid the treasure hoard of Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon.]]> 230 J.R.R. Tolkien 0007926669 David 3 4.31 1937
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: David
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1937
rating: 3
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date added: 2018/03/28
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]]> 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 David 4 4.24 1950
author: C.S. Lewis
name: David
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1950
rating: 4
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date added: 2018/03/28
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]]> 139864 The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.��]]> 624 Frank O'Hara 0520201663 David 0 currently-reading 4.34 1971
author: Frank O'Hara
name: David
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1971
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/03/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 1039371 532 Brad Gooch 0394571185 David 0 currently-reading 4.12 1993
author: Brad Gooch
name: David
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/03/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 33223266 233 Tim O'Brien 0544309766 David 5 4.32 1990
author: Tim O'Brien
name: David
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2018/03/26
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]]> 971577 Vladimir Nabokov 0151495998 David 0 to-read 4.25 1981
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: David
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 865 197 Paulo Coelho 0061122416 David 4 3.85 1988
author: Paulo Coelho
name: David
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2018/03/26
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]]> 51496 139 Robert Louis Stevenson 0451528956 David 3 3.84 1886
author: Robert Louis Stevenson
name: David
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1886
rating: 3
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date added: 2018/03/26
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]]> 732562 "Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere") is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written circa 1797 and published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. Modern editions use a later revised version printed in 1817 and featuring a gloss. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it was a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature.

It relates the events experienced by a mariner who has returned from a long sea voyage. The Mariner stops a man on his way to a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story. The Wedding-Guest's reaction turns from bemusement to impatience, fear, and fascination as the Mariner's story progresses, as can be seen in the language style: for example, the use of narrative techniques such as personification and repetition to create a sense of danger, or the supernatural, or serenity, depending on the mood each different part of the poem.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772��1834) was an English poet, critic and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England, and one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1792) and 'Kubla Khan' (1816), as well as his major prose work 'Biographia Literaria' (1817).]]> 77 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 0486223051 David 3 3.95 1798
author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
name: David
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1798
rating: 3
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]]> 5936
"In his work a continent awakens to consciousness." So wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet." This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems. Scores of them are in new and sometimes multiple translations, and many accompanied by the Spanish original. In his introduction, Ilan Stavans situates Neruda in his native milieu as well as in a contemporary English-language one, and a group of new translations by leading poets testifies to Neruda's enduring, vibrant legacy among English-speaking writers and readers today.]]> 1040 Pablo Neruda 0374529604 David 5 4.44 1951
author: Pablo Neruda
name: David
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1951
rating: 5
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]]> 87635 Confessions is a remarkable account of the pleasures and pains of worshipping at the 'Church of Opium'. Thomas De Quincey consumed daily large quantities of laudanum (at the time a legal painkiller), and this autobiography of addiction hauntingly describes his surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings through London, along with the nightmares, despair and paranoia to which he became prey. The result is a work in which the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory and imagination are seamlessly interwoven, describing in intimate detail the mind-altering pleasures and pains unique to opium. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater forged a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, paving the way for later generations of literary addicts from Baudelaire to James Frey, and anticipating psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious.

This edition is based on the original serial version of 1821, and reproduces two 'sequels', 'Suspiria de Profundis' (1845) and 'The English Mail-Coach' (1849). It also includes a critical introduction discussing the romantic figure of the addict and the tradition of confessional literature, and an appendix on opium in the nineteenth century.

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) studied at Oxford, failing to take his degree but discovering opium. He later met Coleridge, Southey and the Wordsworths. From 1828 until his death he lived in Edinburgh and made his living from journalism.

If you enjoyed Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, you might like William S. Burroughs' Junky, available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'De Quincey was one of the first great autobiographers'
Jonathan Bate]]> 352 Thomas de Quincey David 0 to-read 3.30 1821
author: Thomas de Quincey
name: David
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1821
rating: 0
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]]> 1430 Eleven Minutes is the story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heartbroken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that “love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer. . . .�� A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune.

Maria’s despairing view of love is put to the test when she meets a handsome young painter. In this odyssey of self-discovery, Maria has to choose between pursuing a path of darkness—sexual pleasure for its own sake—or risking everything to find her own “inner light�� and the possibility of sacred sex, sex in the context of love.]]> 273 Paulo Coelho 0060589280 David 4 3.74 2003
author: Paulo Coelho
name: David
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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]]> 675551 Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results.

With One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey created a work without precedent in American literature, a novel at once comic and tragic that probes the nature of madness and sanity, authority and vitality. Greeted by unanimous acclaim when it was first published, the book has become and enduring favorite of readers.]]> 288 Ken Kesey 014028334X David 5 4.19 1962
author: Ken Kesey
name: David
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1962
rating: 5
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]]> 19806900 156 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch 1492242012 David 3 3.80 1870
author: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
name: David
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1870
rating: 3
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]]> 2767 Zinn portrays a side of American history that can largely be seen as the exploitation and manipulation of the majority by rigged systems that hugely favor a small aggregate of elite rulers from across the orthodox political parties.
A People's History has been assigned as reading in many high schools and colleges across the United States. It has also resulted in a change in the focus of historical work, which now includes stories that previously were ignored

Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s book “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those…whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.”]]> 729 Howard Zinn 0060838655 David 5 4.07 1980
author: Howard Zinn
name: David
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1980
rating: 5
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]]> 876302
Here is a novel as original as the breathtaking, unspoiled world for which it is named, a place where all appears to be in idyllic balance. Generations ago, humans fled to the cosmic anomaly known as Grass. Over time, they evolved a new and intricate society. But before humanity arrived, another species had already claimed Grass for its own. It, too, had developed a culture. . . .

Now, a deadly plague is spreading across the stars. No world save Grass has been left untouched. Marjorie Westriding Yrarier has been sent from Earth to discover the secret of the planet’s immunity. Amid the alien social structure and strange life-forms of Grass, Lady Westriding unravels the planet’s mysteries to find a truth so shattering it could mean the end of life itself.]]> 480 Sheri S. Tepper 055376246X David 5 4.10 1989
author: Sheri S. Tepper
name: David
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1989
rating: 5
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]]> 28749 Animal Farm for the 21st century, this is an incendiary political satire of unprecedented imagination, spiky humor, and cautionary appreciation for the hysteric in everyone.]]> 130 George Saunders 1594481520 David 2 3.72 2005
author: George Saunders
name: David
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2005
rating: 2
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]]> 46170 For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.]]> 471 Ernest Hemingway David 5 3.98 1940
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: David
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1940
rating: 5
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]]> 11617647 The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway’s most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal—a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Here Hemingway recasts, in strikingly contemporary style, the classic theme of courage in the face of defeat, of personal triumph won from loss. Written in 1952, this hugely successful novella confirmed his power and presence in the literary world and played a large part in his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.]]> 128 Ernest Hemingway David 4 3.86 1952
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: David
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1952
rating: 4
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]]> 28166229 A fascinating look at the history and grandeur of bullfighting, "Death in the Afternoon" is also a deeper contemplation of the nature of cowardice and bravery, sport and tragedy, and is enlivened throughout by Hemingway's sharp commentary on life and literature.

]]> 343 Ernest Hemingway 0099595621 David 1 3.09 1932
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: David
average rating: 3.09
book published: 1932
rating: 1
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]]> 13055237 288 Larissa Lai 0887623824 David 3 3.66 2002
author: Larissa Lai
name: David
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2002
rating: 3
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]]> 71409 here.

It's Carnival time, and the Carribean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance and pageantry. Masked "Midnight Robbers" waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. But to young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favourite costume to wear at the festival--until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgivable crime.

Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree. Here monstrous creatures from folklore are real, and the humans are violent outcasts in the wilds. Here Tan-Tan must reach into the heart of myth--and become the Robber Queen herself. For only the Robber Queen's legendary powers can save her life...and set her free.]]> 329 Nalo Hopkinson 0446675601 David 4 3.92 2000
author: Nalo Hopkinson
name: David
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2000
rating: 4
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]]> 788331 448 Marge Piercy 0449220605 David 3 3.98 1991
author: Marge Piercy
name: David
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1991
rating: 3
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]]> 23183 A best-selling volume of Pablo Neruda's poetry in an English-Spanish edition.

Pablo Neruda is one of the world's most popular and famous poets, and in The Book of Questions, Neruda refuses to be corralled by the rational mind. Composed of 316 unanswerable questions, these poems integrate the wonder of a child with the experiences of an adult. By turns Orphic, comic, surreal, and poignant, Neruda's questions lead the reader beyond reason into the realms of intuition and pure imagination.

This complete translation of Pablo Neruda's El libro de las preguntas (The Book of Questions) features Neruda's original Spanish-language poems alongside William O'Daly's English translations. In his introduction O'Daly, who has translated eight volumes of Pablo Neruda's poetry, writes, "These poems, more so than any of Neruda's other work, remind us that living in a state of visionary surrender to the elemental questions, free of the quiet desperation of clinging too tightly to answers, may be our greatest act of faith."


When Neruda died in 1973, The Book of Questions was one of eight unpublished poetry manuscripts that lay on his desk. In it, Neruda achieves a deeper vulnerability and vision than in his earlier work-and this unique book is a testament to everything that made Neruda an artist.

Pablo Neruda, born in southern Chile, led a life charged with poetic and political activity. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the International Peace Prize, and served as Chile's ambassador to several countries, including Burma, France, and Argentina. He died in 1973.

II.

Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?

Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?

Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?

Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?

XIV.

And what did the rubies say
standing before the juice of pomegranates?

Why doesn't Thursday talk itself
into coming after Friday?

Who shouted with glee
when the color blue was born?

Why does the earth grieve
when the violets appear?


]]> 96 Pablo Neruda 1556591608 David 5 4.21 1974
author: Pablo Neruda
name: David
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1974
rating: 5
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]]> 25852752
In 1849 Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison camp for his participation in a utopian socialist discussion group. The account he wrote after his release, based on notes he smuggled out, was the first book to reveal life inside the Russian penal system. The book not only brought him fame but also founded the tradition of Russian prison writing.

Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead) is filled with vivid details of brutal punishments, shocking conditions, feuds and betrayals, and the psychological effects of the loss of freedom, but it also describes moments of comedy and acts of kindness. There are grotesque bathhouse and hospital scenes that seem to have come straight from Dante’s Inferno, alongside daring escape attempts, doomed acts of defiance, and a theatrical Christmas celebration that draws the entire community together in a temporary suspension of their grim reality.

To get past government censors, Dostoevsky made his narrator a common-law criminal rather than a political prisoner, but the perspective is unmistakably his own. His incarceration was a transformative experience that nourished all his later works, particularly Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky’s narrator discovers that even among the most debased criminals there are strong and beautiful souls. His story reveals the prison as a tragedy both for the inmates and for Russia; it is, finally, a profound meditation on freedom: “The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner; but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being.”��




From the Hardcover edition.]]> 336 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0307949877 David 4 4.04 1861
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: David
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1861
rating: 4
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]]> 265056 The award-winning account of how America's educational system fails it students and what can be done about it

Remedial, illiterate, intellectually deficient--these are the stigmas that define America's educationally underprepared. Having grown up poor and been labeled this way, nationally acclaimed educator and author Mike Rose takes us into classrooms and communities to reveal what really lies behind the labels and test scores. With rich detail, Rose demonstrates innovative methods to initiate "problem" students into the world of language, literature, and written expression. This book challenges educators, policymakers, and parents to re-examine their assumptions about the capacities of a wide range of students.

Already a classic, Lives on the Boundary offers a truly democratic vision, one that should be heeded by anyone concerned with America's future.

A mirror to the many lacking perfect grammar and spelling who may see their dreams translated into reality after all. -Los Angeles Times Book Review

Vividly written . . . tears apart all of society's prejudices about the academic abilities of the underprivileged. -New York Times]]> 288 Mike Rose 0143035460 David 0 to-read 3.93 1989
author: Mike Rose
name: David
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2018/03/23
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]]> 11989
It tells the story from the point of view of a narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown until the start of the last chapter, chapter 5 of part 5. The novel presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author's distinctive absurdist point of view.

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

The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus' objection to the label. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their destinies. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka's, especially in The Trial, whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings; the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.]]> 308 Albert Camus David 4 4.05 1947
author: Albert Camus
name: David
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1947
rating: 4
read at: 2018/03/21
date added: 2018/03/21
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]]> 34230427
The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, where he grew up. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story...

Summary : The story concerns a young married woman, the former Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley), whose upper class husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, has been paralysed from the waist down due to a Great War injury. In addition to Clifford's physical limitations, his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple. Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, the novel's title character. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class. The novel is about Constance's realization that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically. This realization stems from a heightened sexual experience Constance has only felt with Mellors, suggesting that love can only happen with the element of the body, not the mind...

Extrait : This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home, Wragby Hall, the family ‘seat��. His father had died, Clifford was now a baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley. They came to start housekeeping and married life in the rather forlorn home of the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a sister, but she had departed. Otherwise there were no near relatives. The elder brother was dead in the war. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never have any children, Clifford came home to the smoky Midlands to keep the Chatterley name alive while he could.

He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor attachment, so he could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the line melancholy park, of which he was really so proud, though he pretended to be flippant about it.

Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him. He remained strange and bright and cheerful, almost, one might say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, arid his pale-blue, challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were broad and strong, his hands were very strong...

Biography : David Herbert Richards "D. H." Lawrence (11 September 1885 �� 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. Some of the issues Lawrence explores are emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his "savage pilgrimage"...]]> 0 D.H. Lawrence David 0 to-read 3.38 1928
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: David
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1928
rating: 0
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]]> 49552 The Stranger has long been considered a classic of twentieth-century literature. Le Monde ranks it as number one on its "100 Books of the Century" list. Through this story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."]]> 123 Albert Camus David 4 4.04 1942
author: Albert Camus
name: David
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1942
rating: 4
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date added: 2016/12/19
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]]> 11438 Alternate-cover edition can be found here

In his second collection, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated and beloved short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.]]> 159 Raymond Carver 0679723056 David 4 4.11 1981
author: Raymond Carver
name: David
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1981
rating: 4
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]]> 1 652 J.K. Rowling David 3 4.57 2005
author: J.K. Rowling
name: David
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2005
rating: 3
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date added: 2014/04/30
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]]> 781025 Jimmy A. Lerner 0552149659 David 4 3.90 2002
author: Jimmy A. Lerner
name: David
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2012/03/11
date added: 2014/03/04
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i'd like to start by saying i really liked this book. The first two thirds of the book managed to be funny in the way that he talked about his experience in prison. his sarcastic "talking out his neck" humor was well appreciated. Kansas was an awesome character and the irony that he was a Nazi who was close friends with a Jew was not lost on me. I read some things talking about the "monster" of the book that made me feel that his narrative towards the end was mostly false. Considering that Jimmy exaggerates his physical attributes to make himself look tougher leads me to believe that he might have "tweaked" the truth to look better. I wouldn't have considered that man(hasselmann) to be my friend after all the crazy shit hasselman did. My theory is that they were so close because Jimmy bought coke off the guy, and leading up to the hotel incident were a result of that relationship.
]]> 780639 The Prince and the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius [Livy], along with a historical and critical Introduction by Max Lerner.

"Nothing could be more timely than the publication at this moment of history of the two works which made Machiavelli both famous and infamous as a model for contemporary statesmen. The Prince and The Discourses have become required reading for an understanding of our daily newspaper headlines.

"These books have never before been printed in a single volume. The texts are complete and unabridged. An illuminating introduction is provided by Max Lerner who traces the career and thought of the first analyst of power and the uses to which political domination can be put for aggression and the expanding control of the state."
-- from the jacket of the 1950 edition]]> 540 Niccolò Machiavelli 0075535777 David 4 4.12 1531
author: Niccolò Machiavelli
name: David
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1531
rating: 4
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]]> 314114 The Tao of Physics and The Turning Point, Fritjof Capra juxtaposed physics and mysticism to define a new vision of reality. Now, in The Web of Life, he takes yet another giant step forward, offering a brilliant synthesis of such recent scientific breakthroughs as the theory of complexity, Gaia theory, and chaos theory. 25 line drawings.]]> 347 Fritjof Capra 0385476760 David 3 to-read 4.19 1996
author: Fritjof Capra
name: David
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1996
rating: 3
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date added: 2012/05/17
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]]> 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 David 0 to-read 3.67 1957
author: Ayn Rand
name: David
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1957
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/05/07
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]]> 7624 182 William Golding 0140283331 David 4 3.70 1954
author: William Golding
name: David
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1954
rating: 4
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date added: 2012/05/07
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]]> 9802336
In Cold Spring Harbour, New York, the newly formed Eugenics Records Office is sending its agents to catalogue the infirm, the insane, and the criminal—with an eye to a cull, for the betterment of all.

Near Cracked Wheel, Montana, a terrible illness leaves Jason Thistledown an orphan, stranded in his dead mother’s cabin until the spring thaw shows him the true meaning of devastation—and the barest thread of hope.

At the edge of the utopian mill town of Eliada, Idaho, Doctor Andrew Waggoner faces a Klansman’s noose and glimpses wonder in the twisting face of the patient known only as Mister Juke.

And deep in a mountain lake overlooking that town, something stirs, and thinks, in its way: Things are looking up.

Eutopia follows Jason and Andrew as together and alone, they delve into the secrets of Eliada—industrialist Garrison Harper's attempt to incubate a perfect community on the edge of the dark woods and mountains of northern Idaho. What they find reveals the true, terrible cost of perfection—the cruelty of the surgeon's knife—the folly of the cull—and a monstrous pact with beings that use perfection as a weapon, and faith as a trap.]]> 320 David Nickle 1926851110 David 0 to-read 3.36 2011
author: David Nickle
name: David
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> 41681
When it was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following year. That expurgated commercial edition edited out much of the ethnic flavor of the original, as well as some of the goriest descriptions of the meat-packing industry and much of Sinclair's most pointed social and political commentary.

The text of this new edition is as it appeared in the original uncensored edition of 1905.
It contains the full 36 chapters as originally published, rather than the 31 of the expurgated edition.

A new foreword describes the discovery in the 1980s of the original edition and its subsequent suppression, and a new introduction places the novel in historical context by explaining the pattern of censorship in the shorter commercial edition.]]> 335 Upton Sinclair 1884365302 David 5 favorites 3.77 1906
author: Upton Sinclair
name: David
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1906
rating: 5
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date added: 2012/04/29
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]]> 41231 210 Barry Glassner 0465014909 David 0 to-read 3.69 1999
author: Barry Glassner
name: David
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/04/05
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]]> 2251777
Anatole France's 1914 satire of war, government, and religion offers an ever-resonant protest against violence and tyranny.]]> 282 Anatole France 1399719238 David 0 to-read 4.06 1914
author: Anatole France
name: David
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1914
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/04/02
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]]> 17245 You can find an alternative cover edition for this ISBN here and here.

When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the 'Master' and his imminent arrival.

In Dracula, Bram Stoker created one of the great masterpieces of the horror genre, brilliantly evoking a nightmare world of vampires and vampire hunters and also illuminating the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.

This Norton Critical Edition includes a rich selection of background and source materials in three areas: Contexts includes probable inspirations for Dracula in the earlier works of James Malcolm Rymer and Emily Gerard. Also included are a discussion of Stoker's working notes for the novel and "Dracula's Guest," the original opening chapter to Dracula. Reviews and Reactions reprints five early reviews of the novel. "Dramatic and Film Variations" focuses on theater and film adaptations of Dracula, two indications of the novel's unwavering appeal. David J. Skal, Gregory A. Waller, and Nina Auerbach offer their varied perspectives. Checklists of both dramatic and film adaptations are included.

Criticism collects seven theoretical interpretations of Dracula by Phyllis A. Roth, Carol A. Senf, Franco Moretti, Christopher Craft, Bram Dijkstra, Stephen D. Arata, and Talia Schaffer.

A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.]]> 488 Bram Stoker 0393970124 David 5 4.02 1897
author: Bram Stoker
name: David
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1897
rating: 5
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]]> 18490 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780141439471

'Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart ...'

Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.

Based on the third edition of 1831, this volume contains all the revisions Mary Shelley made to her story, as well as her 1831 introduction and Percy Bysshe Shelley's preface to the first edition. This revised edition includes as appendices a select collation of the texts of 1818 and 1831 together with 'A Fragment' by Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori's 'The Vampyre: A Tale'.]]> 288 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley David 4 3.77 1818
author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
name: David
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1818
rating: 4
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]]> 17876 Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead (150th Anniversary Edition)

The compelling works presented in this volume were written at distinct periods in Dostoyevsky's life, at decisive moments in his groping for a political philosophy and a religious answer. From the primitive peasant who kills without understanding that he is destroying life to the anxious antihero of Notes from Underground—who both craves and despises affection—the writer's often-tormented characters showcase his evolving outlook on our fate.

Thomas Mann described Dostoyevsky as "an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul" and Notes from Underground as "an awe- and terror- inspiring example of this sympathy."]]> 233 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0451529553 David 5 4.19 1864
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: David
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1864
rating: 5
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date added: 2012/04/02
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]]> 2805260 Fyodor Dostoevsky David 5 4.30 1880
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: David
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1880
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2012/04/02
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]]> 7144 671 Fyodor Dostoevsky David 5 4.26 1866
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: David
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1866
rating: 5
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]]> 246 244 Henry Miller 0811201090 David 5 4.00 1941
author: Henry Miller
name: David
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1941
rating: 5
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]]> 617148 640 Henry Miller 0802151795 David 3 4.12 1952
author: Henry Miller
name: David
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1952
rating: 3
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]]> 252
Henry Miller called the end of his life in America and the start of a new, bohemian existence in 1930s Paris his 'rosy crucifixion'. His searing fictionalized autobiography of this time of liberation was banned for nearly twenty years. Sexus, the first volume in The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, looks back to his early sexual escapades in Brooklyn, and his growing infatuation with the playful, teasing dance hall hostess who will become the great obsession of his life.]]> 506 Henry Miller 0802151809 David 3 4.03 1949
author: Henry Miller
name: David
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1949
rating: 3
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]]> 32829
The expedition descends into an extinct volcano toward a sunless sea, where they encounter a subterranean world of luminous rocks, antediluvian forests, and fantastic marine life �� a living past that holds the secrets to the origins of human existence.]]> 240 Jules Verne 0553213970 David 4 3.87 1864
author: Jules Verne
name: David
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1864
rating: 4
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]]> 33507 269 Jules Verne 076072850X David 5 3.92 1869
author: Jules Verne
name: David
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1869
rating: 5
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]]> 295 Treasure Island has never been surpassed. From the moment young Jim Hawkins first encounters the sinister Blind Pew at the Admiral Benbow Inn until the climactic battle for treasure on a tropic isle, the novel creates scenes and characters that have fired the imaginations of generations of readers. Written by a superb prose stylist, a master of both action and atmosphere, the story centers upon the conflict between good and evil - but in this case a particularly engaging form of evil. It is the villainy of that most ambiguous rogue Long John Silver that sets the tempo of this tale of treachery, greed, and daring. Designed to forever kindle a dream of high romance and distant horizons, Treasure Island is, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, 'the realization of an ideal, that which is promised in its provocative and beckoning map; a vision not only of white skeletons but also green palm trees and sapphire seas.' G. S. Fraser terms it 'an utterly original book' and goes on to write: 'There will always be a place for stories like Treasure Island that can keep boys and old men happy.']]> 352 Robert Louis Stevenson 0753453800 David 4 3.84 1882
author: Robert Louis Stevenson
name: David
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1882
rating: 4
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]]> 1112870 Jerry Rubin 067120601X David 5 3.67 1970
author: Jerry Rubin
name: David
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1970
rating: 5
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date added: 2012/03/27
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]]> 8075281
A girl with drug-induced ESP and an eerie connection to Patty Reed (a young member of the Donner Party who credited her survival to her relationship with a hidden wooden doll), searches for her disappeared foster sister along "The Highway That Eats People," stalked by a conflation of Twin Peaks' "Bob" and the Green River Killer, known as Dactyl.

With a scathing voice and penetrating delivery, Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps is one of the most ferocious debut novels in memory.]]> 172 Grace Krilanovich 0982015186 David 4 3.03 2010
author: Grace Krilanovich
name: David
average rating: 3.03
book published: 2010
rating: 4
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]]> 12522 Book of Dreams I just continue the same story but in the dreams I had of the real-life characters I always write about."

Excerpt:

WALKING THROUGH SLUM SUBURBS of Mexico City I'm stopped by smiling threesome of cats who've disengaged themselves from the general fairly crowded evening street of brown lights, coke stands, tortillas—Unmistakably going to steal my bag—I struggled a little, gave up—Begin communicating with them my distress and in fact do so well they end up just stealing parts of my stuff��. We walk off leaving the bag with someone—arm in arm like a gang to the downtown lights of Letran, across a field��

Jack Kerouac (1922��1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include On the Roa, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Scattered Poems, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes, and Scripture of the Golden Eternity.]]> 360 Jack Kerouac 0872863808 David 2 3.46 1960
author: Jack Kerouac
name: David
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1960
rating: 2
read at: 2012/03/26
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]]> 13890
Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time.]]> 880 Robert Jordan 0812550285 David 4 4.05 1996
author: Robert Jordan
name: David
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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]]> 35231
On the slopes of Shayol Ghul, the Myrddraal swords are forged, and the sky is not the sky of this world ...

In Salidar the White Tower in exile prepares an embassy to Caemlyn, where Rand Al'Thor, the Dragon Reborn, holds the throne -- and where an unexpected visitor may change the world ...

In Emond's Field, Perrin Goldeneyes, Lord of the Two Rivers, feels the pull of ta'veren to ta'veren and prepares to march ...

Morgase of Caemlyn finds a most unexpected, and quite unwelcome, ally ...

And south lies Illian, where Sammael holds sway ...]]> 1011 Robert Jordan 0812513754 David 5 4.17 1994
author: Robert Jordan
name: David
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1994
rating: 5
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]]> 9539
In Tar Valon, Min sees portents of hideous doom. Will the White Tower itself be broken?

In the Two Rivers, the Whitecloaks ride in pursuit of a man with golden eyes, and in pursuit of the Dragon Reborn.

In Cantorin, among the Sea Folk, High Lady Suroth plans the return of the Seanchan armies to the mainland.

In the Stone of Tear, the Lord Dragon considers his next move. It will be something no one expects, not the Black Ajah, not Tairen nobles, not Aes Sedai, not Egwene or Elayne or Nynaeve.

Against the Shadow rising stands the Dragon Reborn.....]]> 1007 Robert Jordan 0812513738 David 5 4.27 1992
author: Robert Jordan
name: David
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1992
rating: 5
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]]> 34897 The Dragon Reborn—the leader long prophesied who will save the world, but in the saving destroy it; the savior who will run mad and kill all those dearest to him—is on the run from his destiny.

Able to touch the One Power, but unable to control it, and with no one to teach him how—for no man has done it in three thousand years—Rand al'Thor knows only that he must face the Dark One. But how?

Winter has stopped the war—almost—yet men are dying, calling out for the Dragon. But where is he?

Perrin Aybara is in pursuit with Moiraine Sedai, her Warder Lan, and Loial the Ogier. Bedeviled by dreams, Perrin is grappling with another deadly problem—how is he to escape the loss of his own humanity?

Egwene, Elayne and Nynaeve are approaching Tar Valon, where Mat will be healed—if he lives until they arrive. But who will tell the Amyrlin their news—that the Black Ajah, long thought only a hideous rumor, is all too real? They cannot know that in Tar Valon far worse awaits...

Ahead, for all of them, in the Heart of the Stone, lies the next great test of the Dragon reborn....
]]> 624 Robert Jordan 0765305119 David 4 4.27 1991
author: Robert Jordan
name: David
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1991
rating: 4
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]]> 233649
Rand cannot run for ever. With every passing day the Dark One grows in strength and strives to shatter his ancient prison, to break the Wheel, to bring an end to Time and sunder the weave of the Pattern.

And the Pattern demands the Dragon.]]> 705 Robert Jordan 0812517725 David 4 4.25 1990
author: Robert Jordan
name: David
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1990
rating: 4
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]]> 228665
Moiraine Damodred arrives in Emond’s Field on a quest to find the one prophesized to stand against The Dark One, a malicious entity sowing the seeds of chaos and destruction. When a vicious band of half-men, half beasts invade the village seeking their master’s enemy, Moiraine persuades Rand al’Thor and his friends to leave their home and enter a larger unimaginable world filled with dangers waiting in the shadows and in the light.]]> 800 Robert Jordan 0812511816 David 4 4.19 1990
author: Robert Jordan
name: David
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1990
rating: 4
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]]> 3717 233 Chuck Palahniuk 0385722222 David 5 3.57 2004
author: Chuck Palahniuk
name: David
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2004
rating: 5
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]]> 10517543 58 Ryūnosuke Akutagawa 014119572X David 0 to-read 4.20 1918
author: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
name: David
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1918
rating: 0
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]]> 386411 Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here

Cat's Cradle, one of Vonnegut's most entertaining novels, is filled with scientists and G-men and even ordinary folks caught up in the game. These assorted characters chase each other around in search of the world's most important and dangerous substance, a new form of ice that freezes at room temperature. At one time, this novel could probably be found on the bookshelf of every college kid in America; it's still a fabulous read and a great place to start if you're young enough to have missed the first Vonnegut craze.]]> 287 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 038533348X David 3 4.11 1963
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: David
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1963
rating: 3
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]]> 460727
Meet Martin, JJ, Jess, and Maureen. Four people who come together on New Year's Eve: a former TV talk show host, a musician, a teenage girl, and a mother. Three are British, one is American. They encounter one another on the roof of Topper's House, a London destination famous as the last stop for those ready to end their lives.

In four distinct and riveting first-person voices, Nick Hornby tells a story of four individuals confronting the limits of choice, circumstance, and their own mortality. This is a tale of connections made and missed, punishing regrets, and the grace of second chances.

Intense, hilarious, provocative, and moving, "A Long Way Down" is a novel about suicide that is, surprisingly, full of life.

What's your jumping-off point?

Maureen
Why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you're told that you'll be going to this marvelous place when you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops you getting there at all. Oh, I can see that it's a kind of queue-jumping. But if someone jumps the queue at the post office, people tut. Or sometimes they say "Excuse me, I was here first." They don't say "You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity." That would be a bit strong.

Martin
I'd spent the previous couple of months looking up suicides on the Internet, just out of curiosity. And nearly every single time, the coroner says the same thing: "He took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed." And then you read the story about the poor bastard: His wife was sleeping with his best friend, he'd lost his job, his daughter had been killed in a road accident some months before . . . Hello, Mr. Coroner? I'm sorry, but there's no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I'd say he got it just right.

Jess
I was at a party downstairs. It was a shit party, full of all these ancient crusties sitting on the floor drinking cider and smoking huge spliffs and listening to weirdo space-out reggae. At midnight, one of them clapped sarcastically, and a couple of others laughed, and that was it-Happy New Year to you, too. You could have turned up to that party as the happiest person in London, and you'd still have wanted to jump off the roof by five past twelve. And I wasn't the happiest person in London anyway. Obviously.

JJ
New Year's Eve was a night for sentimental losers. It was my own stupid fault. Of course there'd be a low-rent crowd up there. I should have picked a classier date-like March 28, when Virginia Woolf took her walk into the river, or November 25 (Nick Drake). If anybody had been on the roof on either of those nights, the chances are they would have been like-minded souls, rather than hopeless f*ck-ups who had somehow persuaded themselves that the end of a calendar year is in any way significant.]]> 333 Nick Hornby 1573223026 David 5 favorites 3.37 2005
author: Nick Hornby
name: David
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2005
rating: 5
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]]> 2112240 250 Richard Kalich 1933382058 David 4 2.79 2005
author: Richard Kalich
name: David
average rating: 2.79
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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]]> 22916
Truly the most comprehensive translation to date, this critically acclaimed edition recaptures the fairy tales as the Brothers Grimm intended them to be: rich, stark, spiced with humor and violence, resonant with folklore and song.

One of the world’s experts on children’s literature, Jack Zipes is a professor of German at the University of Minnesota and is the author of numerous books on folklore and fairy tales.]]> 762 Jacob Grimm 0553382160 David 4 4.26 1812
author: Jacob Grimm
name: David
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1812
rating: 4
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]]> 763156 184 Jack Kerouac 0872860272 David 2 3.11 1960
author: Jack Kerouac
name: David
average rating: 3.11
book published: 1960
rating: 2
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]]> 52036 152 Hermann Hesse David 5 favorites 4.07 1922
author: Hermann Hesse
name: David
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1922
rating: 5
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I was travelling through my favorite little bookstore in Dayton when i found this treasure. Following Whitman's advice i read the book sitting on a rock out in the woods next to a beautiful little creek. Siddhartha was a great novel about a man following Buddha's(Siddhartha) teachings trying to find peace in his soul. He follows many different doctrines always falling short of true "happiness". He even goes as far as leading a secular life filled with money where he comes close to what he might call love. It isn't it though he still feels unfufilled and thus after years of it travels on still in search. late in his life he comes across a rive where he is able to find peace living his days by a river in serenity. When his bastard child comes to the river one day too he tries to teach him what he learned about living a happy life. He finds that he can't teach his son. The wisdom he learns, is the fact that the way to true "happiness" like any other wisdom can only be learned through experience.
]]> 30659 Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. While the Meditations were composed to provide personal consolation and encouragement, Marcus Aurelius also created one of the greatest of all works of philosophy: a timeless collection that has been consulted and admired by statesmen, thinkers and readers throughout the centuries.]]> 254 Marcus Aurelius 0140449337 David 4 4.29 180
author: Marcus Aurelius
name: David
average rating: 4.29
book published: 180
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]]> 142529
The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic.����While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. ��Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.����In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the government attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime.]]> 192 Vladimir Nabokov 0141185767 David 4 3.82 1947
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: David
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1947
rating: 4
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]]> 2479827 1952 Christopher Paolini 0375846158 David 4 4.25 2008
author: Christopher Paolini
name: David
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2008
rating: 4
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]]> 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 David 3 4.52 1954
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: David
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1954
rating: 3
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]]> 790171 Kon-Tiki is the record of an astonishing adventure - a journey of 4,300 nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean by raft. Intrigued by Polynesian folklore, biologist Thor Heyerdahl suspected that the South Sea Islands had been settled by an ancient race from thousands of miles to the east, led by a mythical hero, Kon-Tiki. He decided to prove his theory by duplicating the legendary voyage.

On April 28, 1947, Heyerdahl and five other adventurers sailed from Peru on a balsa log raft. After three months on the open sea, encountering raging storms, whales, and sharks, they sighted land - the Polynesian island of Puka Puka.

Translated into over sixty languages, Kon-Tiki is a classic, inspiring tale of daring and courage - a magnificent saga of men against the sea.]]> 240 Thor Heyerdahl 0671726528 David 5 4.15 1948
author: Thor Heyerdahl
name: David
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1948
rating: 5
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]]> 72085 96 Kamo no Chōmei 1880656221 David 0 to-read 4.12 1212
author: Kamo no Chōmei
name: David
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1212
rating: 0
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]]> 4268 305 Nick Hornby 3426615355 David 3 3.24 2001
author: Nick Hornby
name: David
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2001
rating: 3
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]]> 4271
Will is thirty-six but acts like a teenager. Single, child-free and still feeling cool, he reads the right magazines, goes to the right clubs and knows which trainers to wear. He's also discovered a great way to score with women at single parents' groups, full of available (and grateful) mothers, all waiting for Mr Nice Guy. That's where he meets Marcus, the oldest twelve-year-old in the world. Marcus is a bit strange: he listens to Joni Mitchell and Mozart, he looks after his Mum and he's never even owned a pair of trainers. Perhaps if Will can teach Marcus how to be a kid, Marcus can help Will grow up and they can both start to act their age.]]> 307 Nick Hornby 0140285679 David 5 3.80 1998
author: Nick Hornby
name: David
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1998
rating: 5
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]]> 285092
Rob does. He keeps a list, in fact. But Laura isn't on it—even though she's just become his latest ex. He's got his life back, you see. He can just do what he wants when he wants: like listen to whatever music he likes, look up the girls that are on his list, and generally behaves as if Laura never mattered. But Rob finds he can't move on. He's stuck in a really deep groove—and it's called Laura. Soon, Rob's asking himself some big questions: about love, about life—and about why we choose to share ours with the people we do.]]> 323 Nick Hornby 1573225517 David 4 favorites 3.92 1995
author: Nick Hornby
name: David
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1995
rating: 4
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]]> 357173
Soon to be a major motion picture starring and directed by Denzel Washington, Finding Fish is the memoir of Antwone Fisher's miraculous journey from abandonment and abuse to liberation, manhood, and extraordinary success--a modern-day Oliver Twist.

Baby Boy Fisher--as he was documented in his child welfare caseworkers' reports--was raised in institutions from the moment of his birth in prison to a single mother. After beginning his life in an orphanage, Antwone was placed in a temporary foster home until, around age two, he was transferred to a second foster home. It was there, over the next thirteen years, that he endured emotional abandonment and physical abuse. Removed from this foster home not long before his sixteenth birthday, Antwone found fleeting refuge in a boys' reform school but was soon thrust into the nightmare of homelessness.

Though convinced he was unwanted and unworthy, Fish, as he came to be known, refused to allow his spirit to be broken. Instead, he became determined to raise himself, to listen to social workers and teachers who intervened on his behalf, and to nurture a romantic heart along with a scathing sense of humor and a wondrous imagination--all of which sustained him with big dreams of a better day. Fatefully, just as Antwone's life on the streets hit rock bottom, he enlisted in the United States Navy, where he remained for the next eleven years. During that time, Fish became a man of the world, raised by the Navy family he created for himself.

Finding Fish shows how, out of this unlikely mix of deprivation and hope, an artist was born--first as the child who painted the feelings his words dared not speak, then as a poet and storyteller who would eventually become one of Hollywood's most well-paid, sought-after screenwriters. But before he ascends those lofty steps, Antwone's story takes us from the Navy to his jobs as a federal correctional officer and then a security guard at Sony Pictures in Hollywood. In its climactic conclusion, the mystery of his identity is finally unraveled as Antwone returns to Cleveland to locate his mother's and father's surviving family members.

A tumultuous and ultimately gratifying tale of self-discovery written in Fisher's gritty yet melodic literary voice, Finding Fish is an unforgettable reading experience.]]> 352 Antwone Quenton Fisher 0060007788 David 5 4.12 2001
author: Antwone Quenton Fisher
name: David
average rating: 4.12
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rating: 5
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]]> 18864 The Rum Diary is a tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. The narrator, freelance journalist Paul Kemp, irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman, is soon thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule and anything (including murder) is permissible.]]> 224 Hunter S. Thompson 0684856476 David 4 3.86 1998
author: Hunter S. Thompson
name: David
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1998
rating: 4
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]]> 890 “I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.��

They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. But George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own.

While the powerlessness of the laboring class is a recurring theme in Steinbeck's work of the late 1930s, he narrowed his focus when composing Of Mice and Men, creating an intimate portrait of two men facing a world marked by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. But though the scope is narrow, the theme is universal: a friendship and a shared dream that makes an individual's existence meaningful.

A unique perspective on life's hardships, this story has achieved the status of timeless classic due to its remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films.]]> 107 John Steinbeck 0142000671 David 5 3.88 1937
author: John Steinbeck
name: David
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1937
rating: 5
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]]> 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 David 4 3.90 1945
author: George Orwell
name: David
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1945
rating: 4
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]]> 5470 328 George Orwell David 5 favorites 4.15 1949
author: George Orwell
name: David
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1949
rating: 5
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]]> 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 David 3 3.93 1925
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: David
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 3
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]]> 9912994
The author described the novel as "if The Shawshank Redemption had a baby by The Lovely Bones and it was raised by Judy Blume." And "it's kind of like The Breakfast Club set in Hell."]]> 256 Chuck Palahniuk 0385671105 David 4 3.41 2011
author: Chuck Palahniuk
name: David
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2011
rating: 4
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]]> 15645
A groundbreaking bilingual edition of Dante's masterpiece that includes a substantive Introduction, extensive notes, and appendixes that reproduce Dante's key sources and influences. Of the great poets, Dante is one of the most elusive and therefore one of the most difficult to adequately render into English verse. With this major new translation, Anthony Esolen has succeeded brilliantly in marrying sense with sound, poetry with meaning, capturing both the poem's line-by-line vigor and its allegorically and philosophically exacting structure, yielding an Inferno that will be as popular with general readers as with scholars, teachers, and students. For, as Dante insists, without a trace of sentimentality or intellectual compromise, even Hell is a work of divine art.

Esolen's edition also provides a critical ntroduction and endnotes, with appendices containing Dante's most important sources—from Virgil to Saint Thomas Aquinas and beyond —that deftly illuminate the religious universe the poet inhabited.

Verse Translation by Anthony Esolen
Illustrations by Gustave Doré]]> 490 Dante Alighieri 0812970063 David 4 4.02 1320
author: Dante Alighieri
name: David
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1320
rating: 4
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date added: 2012/03/07
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]]> 11149 The Screwtape Letters is the most engaging and humorous account of temptation—and triumph over it—ever written.^]]> 209 C.S. Lewis 0060652896 David 5 4.17 1942
author: C.S. Lewis
name: David
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1942
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2012/03/07
shelves:
review:

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