Brian's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 10 Jul 2013 22:36:18 -0700 60 Brian's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Happy Talk 13239423 316 Richard Melo 1935869175 Brian 4 currently-reading 4.00 2013 Happy Talk
author: Richard Melo
name: Brian
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 4
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]]> Oh Pure And Radiant Heart 22254
In Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, the three dead geniuses who invented the atomic bomb-Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi-mysteriously appear in Sante Fe, New Mexico, in 2003, nearly sixty years after they watched history's first mushroom cloud rise over the New Mexico desert in 1945. One by one, they are discovered by a shy librarian, who takes them in and devotes herself to them.

Faced with the evidence of their nuclear legacy, the scientists embark on a global disarmament campaign that takes them from Hiroshima to Nevada to the United Nations. Along the way, they acquire a billionaire pothead benefactor and a growing convoy of RVs carrying groupies, drifters, activists, former Deadheads, New Age freeloaders, and religious fanatics.

In this heroically mischievous, sweeping tour de force, Lydia Millet brings us an apocalyptic fable that marries the personal to the political, confronts the longing for immortality with the desire for redemption, and evokes both the beauty and the tragedy of the nuclear sublime.]]> 532 Lydia Millet 0156031035 Brian 0 to-read 3.68 2005 Oh Pure And Radiant Heart
author: Lydia Millet
name: Brian
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden]]> 1216737 213 Leon Forrest 0226257215 Brian 0 to-read 4.19 1973 There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden
author: Leon Forrest
name: Brian
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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]]> The Waves 46114 The Waves introduces six characters—three men and three women—who are grappling with the death of a beloved friend, Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Virginia Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing them through their thoughts and interior soliloquies. As their understanding of nature’s trials grows, the chorus of narrative voices blends together in miraculous harmony, remarking not only on the inevitable death of individuals but on the eternal connection of everyone. The novel that most epitomizes Virginia Woolf’s theories of fiction in the working form, The Waves is an amazing book very much ahead of its time. It is a poetic dreamscape, visual, experimental, and thrilling.]]> 297 Virginia Woolf 0156949601 Brian 0 to-read 4.17 1931 The Waves
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Brian
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1931
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]]> Mumbo Jumbo 761156 The Classic Freewheeling Look at Race Relations Through the Ages

Mumbo Jumbo is Ishmael Reed's brilliantly satiric deconstruction of Western civilization, a racy and uproarious commentary on our society. In it, Reed, one of our preeminent African-American authors, mixes portraits of historical figures and fictional characters with sound bites on subjects ranging from ragtime to Greek philosophy. Cited by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon, Mumbo Jumbo is a trenchant and often biting look at black-white relations throughout history, from a keen observer of our culture.]]> 224 Ishmael Reed 0684824779 Brian 0 3.86 1972 Mumbo Jumbo
author: Ishmael Reed
name: Brian
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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]]> Nog 1237451 Originally published by Random House in 1969, Nog became a universally revered cult novel and a symbol of the countercultural movement.

In Rudolph Wurlitzer's signature hypnotic and haunting voice, Nog tells the tale of a man adrift in the American West, armed with nothing more than his own three pencil-thin memories and an octopus in a bathysphere.

This edition of Nog features a new introduction from noted critic and writer Erik Davis (TechGnosis).

Yesterday afternoon a girl walked by the window and stopped for sea shells. I was wrenched out of two months of calm. Nothing more than that, certainly, nothing ecstatic or even interesting, but very silent and even, as those periods have become for me.

]]> 176 Rudolph Wurlitzer 1852424230 Brian 0 3.67 1968 Nog
author: Rudolph Wurlitzer
name: Brian
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1968
rating: 0
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]]> Irritant 17730993 624 Darby Larson Brian 0 4.50 2013 Irritant
author: Darby Larson
name: Brian
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> The Letters of William Gaddis 14433725
Here we see him forging his first novel The Recognitions (1955) while living in Mexico, fighting in a revolution in Costa Rica, and working in Spain, France, and North Africa. Over the next twenty years he struggles to find time to write the National Book Award-winning J R (1975) amid the complications of work and family; deals with divorce and disillusionment before reviving his career with Carpenter 's Gothic (1985); then teaches himself enough about the law to indite A Frolic of His Own (1994), which earned him another NBA. Returning to a topic he first wrote about in the 1940s, he finishes his last novel Agape Agape as he lay dying.]]> 545 William Gaddis 1564788040 Brian 0 to-read 4.23 2013 The Letters of William Gaddis
author: William Gaddis
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average rating: 4.23
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]]> J R 28434 The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterpiece. And J R is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor--a rushing, raucous look at money and its influence, at love and its absence, at success and its failures, in the magnificently orchestrated circus of all its larger- and smaller-than-life characters; a frantic, forlorn comedy about who uses -- and misuses -- whom.

At the center: J R, ambitious sixth-grader in torn sneakers, bred on the challenge of "free enterprise" and fired by heady mail-order promises of "success." His teachers would rather be elsewhere, his principal doubles as a bank president, his Long Island classroom mirrors the world he sees around him -- a world of public relations and private betrayals where everything (and everyone) wears a price tag, a world of "deals" where honesty is no substitute for experience, and the letter of the law flouts its spirit at every turn. Operating from the remote anonymity of phone booths and the local post office, with beachheads in a seedy New York cafeteria and a catastrophic, carton-crammed tenement on East 96th Street, J R parlays a deal for thousands of surplus Navy picnic forks through penny stock flyers and a distant textile-mill bankruptcy into a nationwide, hydra-headed "family of companies."

The J R Corp and its Boss engulf brokers, lawyers, Congressmen, disaffected school teachers and disenfranchised Indians, drunks, divorcées, second-hand generals, and a fledgling composer hopelessly entangled in a nightmare marriage of business and the arts. Their bullish ventures -- shaky mineral claims and gas leases, cost-plus defense contracts, a string of nursing homes cum funeral parlors, a formula for frozen music -- burgeon into a paper empire ranging from timber to textiles, from matchbooks to (legalized) marijuana, from prostheses to publishing, inadvertently crushing hopes, careers, an entire town, on a collision course with the bigger world . . . the pragmatic Real World where the business of America is business, where the stock market exists as a convenience, and the tax laws make some people more equal than others . . . the world that makes the rules because it plays to win, and plays for keeps.

Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering its own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity trading when the drop in pork belly futures masks the crumbling of our own, J R captures the reader in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths -- voices that dominate the book, talking to each other, at each other, into phones, on intercoms, from TV screens and radios -- a vast mosaic of sound that sweeps the reader into the relentless "real time" of spoken words in a way unprecedented in modern fiction. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, stumble through our words -- through our lives -- while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes J R the extraordinary novel that it is.

--From the first-edition dustjacket]]> 752 William Gaddis 0140187073 Brian 0 to-read 4.28 1975 J R
author: William Gaddis
name: Brian
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1975
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]]> The Recognitions 395058 Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both”�The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the increasingly thin line between the counterfeit and the fake. Gaddis anticipates by almost half a century the crisis of reality that we currently face, where the real and the virtual are combining in alarming ways, and the sources of legitimacy and power are often obscure to us.]]> 976 William Gaddis 0140187081 Brian 0 to-read 4.17 1955 The Recognitions
author: William Gaddis
name: Brian
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1955
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]]> <![CDATA[In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods]]> 16041846 Ěý
This novel, from one of our most exciting young writers, is a powerful exploration of the limits of parenthood and marriage—and of what happens when a marriage’s success is measured solely by the children it produces, or else the sorrow that marks their absence.]]> 312 Matt Bell 1616952539 Brian 0 to-read 3.30 2013 In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods
author: Matt Bell
name: Brian
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> Jokerman 8 409692 Written in a polyphonous prose where every tendency is contrapuntal to another--rollicking yet meditative, whirlwind yet lax, lush yet stark, ghostly yet grounded, complex yet accessible--the novel can best be summed up by its final (and shortest) "Live happy."]]> 280 Richard Melo 1932360344 Brian 0 to-read 4.00 2004 Jokerman 8
author: Richard Melo
name: Brian
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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]]> The Poetics of Trespass 8463832 101 Erik Anderson 0979617774 Brian 0 to-read 3.88 2010 The Poetics of Trespass
author: Erik Anderson
name: Brian
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2010
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]]> M.C. Escher: The Graphic Work 276287 Presenting the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature M.C. Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden (Netherlands). He received his first drawing lessons during secondary school from F.W. van der Haagen, who also taught him the block printing, thus fostering Escher's innate graphic talents.

From 1912 to 1922 he studied at the School of Architecture and Ornamental Design in Haarlem, where he was instructed in graphic techniques by S. Jessurun de Mesquita, who greatly influenced Escher's further artistic development. Between 1922 and 1934 the artist lived and worked in Italy. Afterwards Escher spent two years in Switzerland and five in Brussels before finally moving back to Barn in Holland, where he died in 1972.

M.C. Escher is not a surrealist drawing us into his dream world, but an architect of perfectly impossible worlds who presents the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature. The resulting dimensional and perspectival illusions bring us into confrontation with the limitations of our sensory perception. About the Series:
Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:
a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions]]> 92 M.C. Escher 3822858641 Brian 3 3.93 1954 M.C. Escher: The Graphic Work
author: M.C. Escher
name: Brian
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1954
rating: 3
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]]> Someday This Will Be Funny 10107874 Some Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators � by turn infamous and nameless � shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention � stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short fiction.]]> 160 Lynne Tillman 1935869000 Brian 0 3.15 2011 Someday This Will Be Funny
author: Lynne Tillman
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average rating: 3.15
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]]> Damn Sure Right 10146232 184 Meg Pokrass 1935708171 Brian 0 4.63 2011 Damn Sure Right
author: Meg Pokrass
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average rating: 4.63
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]]> I, Tania: a novel 2260299 128 Brian Joseph Davis 1550227823 Brian 0 3.65 2007 I, Tania: a novel
author: Brian Joseph Davis
name: Brian
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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]]> Library: An Unquiet History 108712
He explores how libraries are built and how they are destroyed, from the decay of the great Alexandrian library to scroll burnings in ancient China to the destruction of Aztec books by the Spanish—and in our own time, the burning of libraries in Europe and Bosnia.

Encyclopedic in its breadth and novelistic in its telling, this volume will occupy a treasured place on the bookshelf next to Baker's Double Fold, Basbanes's A Gentle Madness, Manguel's A History of Reading, and Winchester's The Professor and the Madman.]]> 256 Matthew Battles 0393325644 Brian 0 3.43 2003 Library: An Unquiet History
author: Matthew Battles
name: Brian
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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]]> Haunted Houses 525916 208 Lynne Tillman 1852424001 Brian 0 3.39 1987 Haunted Houses
author: Lynne Tillman
name: Brian
average rating: 3.39
book published: 1987
rating: 0
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]]> Zazen 5762055
Reactions to the attacks are polarized. Police activity intensifies. Della’s revolutionary parents welcome the upheaval but are trapped within their own insular beliefs. Her activist restaurant co-workers, who would rather change their identities than the world around them, resume a shallow rebellion of hair-dye, sex parties, and self-absorption. As those bombs keep inching closer, thudding deep and real between the sounds of katydids fluttering in the still of the city night, and the destruction begins to excite her. What begins as terror threats called in to greasy bro-bars across the block boils over into a desperate plot, intoxicating and captivating Della and leaving her little chance for escape.

Zazen unfolds as a search for clarity soured by irresolution and catastrophe, yet made vital by the thin, wild veins of imagination run through each escalating moment, tensing and relaxing, unfurling and ensnaring. Vanessa Veselka renders Della and her world with beautiful, freighting, and phantasmagorically intelligent accuracy, crafting from their shattered constitutions a perversely perfect mirror for our own selves and state.]]> 264 Vanessa Veselka 1935869051 Brian 0 3.55 2011 Zazen
author: Vanessa Veselka
name: Brian
average rating: 3.55
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]]> Follow Me Down 10368500 160 Kio Stark 193586906X Brian 4 3.89 2011 Follow Me Down
author: Kio Stark
name: Brian
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2011
rating: 4
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]]> The Curfew 9888365 195 Jesse Ball 0307739856 Brian 4 Wow. 3.74 2011 The Curfew
author: Jesse Ball
name: Brian
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2011
rating: 4
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Wow.
]]> Moby-Dick or, The Whale 153747 "It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it."

So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby-Dick is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

This edition of Moby-Dick, which reproduces the definitive text of the novel, includes invaluable explanatory notes, along with maps, illustrations, and a glossary of nautical terms.]]> 720 Herman Melville 0142437247 Brian 4 3.53 1851 Moby-Dick or, The Whale
author: Herman Melville
name: Brian
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1851
rating: 4
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]]> The Count of Monte Cristo 7126 The epic tale of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge, in its definitive translation

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to use the treasure to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas� epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.

Translated with an Introduction by Robin Buss

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here]]> 1276 Alexandre Dumas 0140449264 Brian 3 4.29 1846 The Count of Monte Cristo
author: Alexandre Dumas
name: Brian
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1846
rating: 3
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]]> A Tale of Two Cities 1953 A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens’s great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author’s novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores many of his enduring themes—imprisonment, injustice, social anarchy, resurrection, and the renunciation that fosters renewal.]]> 489 Charles Dickens 0141439602 Brian 3 3.86 1859 A Tale of Two Cities
author: Charles Dickens
name: Brian
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1859
rating: 3
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]]> Frankenstein 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 Brian 3 3.77 1818 Frankenstein
author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
name: Brian
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1818
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[Little Women (Little Women, #1)]]> 1934 This is an alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780451529305.

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

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

]]> 449 Louisa May Alcott Brian 3 4.16 1868 Little Women (Little Women, #1)
author: Louisa May Alcott
name: Brian
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1868
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]> 2956 327 Mark Twain 0142437174 Brian 4 3.82 1884 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
author: Mark Twain
name: Brian
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1884
rating: 4
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]]> Lord of the Flies 7624 182 William Golding 0140283331 Brian 3 3.70 1954 Lord of the Flies
author: William Golding
name: Brian
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1954
rating: 3
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]]> Romeo and Juliet 18135 Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a violent world, in which two young people fall in love. It is not simply that their families disapprove; the Montagues and the Capulets are engaged in a blood feud.

In this death-filled setting, the movement from love at first sight to the lovers� final union in death seems almost inevitable. And yet, this play set in an extraordinary world has become the quintessential story of young love. In part because of its exquisite language, it is easy to respond as if it were about all young lovers.]]> 281 William Shakespeare 0743477111 Brian 3 3.74 1597 Romeo and Juliet
author: William Shakespeare
name: Brian
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1597
rating: 3
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]]> One Hundred Years of Solitude 320 417 Gabriel García Márquez Brian 5 4.10 1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Brian
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 5
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]]> Me Talk Pretty One Day 4137 272 David Sedaris 0349113912 Brian 2 4.01 2000 Me Talk Pretty One Day
author: David Sedaris
name: Brian
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2000
rating: 2
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]]> Slaughterhouse-Five 4981 Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.�

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it.

Fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut's portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.]]> 275 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Brian 5 4.10 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Brian
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1969
rating: 5
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]]> The Alchemist 865 197 Paulo Coelho 0061122416 Brian 0 to-read 3.85 1988 The Alchemist
author: Paulo Coelho
name: Brian
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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]]> Of Mice and Men 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 Brian 3 3.88 1937 Of Mice and Men
author: John Steinbeck
name: Brian
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1937
rating: 3
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]]> Animal Farm 7613
The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, however, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon.

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

Two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, prove themselves important figures and planners of this dangerous enterprise. When Jones forgets to feed the animals, the revolution occurs, and Jones and his men are chased off the farm. Manor Farm is renamed Animal Farm, and the Seven Commandments of Animalism are painted on the barn wall...]]> 129 George Orwell Brian 3 3.90 1945 Animal Farm
author: George Orwell
name: Brian
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1945
rating: 3
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]]> Where the Sidewalk Ends 30119 Come in... for where the sidewalk ends, Shel Silverstein's world begins.

Shel Silverstein, theĚýNew York Times bestselling author of The Giving Tree, A Light in the Attic, Falling Up, and Every Thing On It, has created a poetry collection that is outrageously funny and deeply profound.

You'll meet a boy who turns into a TV set, and a girl who eats a whale. The Unicorn and the Bloath live there, and so does Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout who will not take the garbage out. It is a place where you wash your shadow and plant diamond gardens, a place where shoes fly, sisters are auctioned off, and crocodiles go to the dentist.

Shel Silverstein's masterful collection of poems and drawings stretches the bounds of imagination and will be cherished by readers of all ages.]]> 176 Shel Silverstein 0060513039 Brian 3 4.34 1974 Where the Sidewalk Ends
author: Shel Silverstein
name: Brian
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1974
rating: 3
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]]> The Great Gatsby 4671 The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald’s family and from his lifelong publisher.

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

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.]]> 180 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0743273567 Brian 4 3.93 1925 The Great Gatsby
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Brian
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 4
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]]> The Catcher in the Rye 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

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

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

J.D. Salinger's (1919�2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Brian 4 3.81 1951 The Catcher in the Rye
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Brian
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 4
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]]> To Kill a Mockingbird 2657 "Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

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

"To Kill A Mockingbird" became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film.]]> 323 Harper Lee 0060935464 Brian 3 4.25 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird
author: Harper Lee
name: Brian
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1960
rating: 3
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