en-US Sun, 05 Jan 2020 09:58:32 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 9758772
Keek and her boyfriend just had their Worst Fight Ever; her best friend heinously betrayed her; her parents are divorcing; and her mom’s across the country caring for her newborn cousin, who may or may not make it home from the hospital. To top it all off, Keek’s got the plague. (Well, the chicken pox.) Now she’s holed up at her grandmother’s technologically barren house until further notice. Not quite the summer vacation Keek had in mind.

With only an old typewriter and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar for solace and guidance, Keek’s alone with her swirling thoughts. But one thing’s clear through her feverish haze—she’s got to figure out why things went wrong so she can make them right.]]> 254 Arlaina Tibensky 1442413239 Alexandra 2 3.51 2011
author: Arlaina Tibensky
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2011
rating: 2
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]]> 2902062 Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind provides the fullest view possible of the development of Kissinger's approach to foreign policy. It is essential reading for courses that deal with American foreign relations in the twentieth century.]]> 288 Stephen R. Graubard 039309278X Alexandra 0 to-read 4.00 1973
author: Stephen R. Graubard
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2017/04/30
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]]> 103638 288 Frank Conroy 0140044469 Alexandra 0 to-read 3.94 1967
author: Frank Conroy
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/03/07
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]]> 15981664 A family is torn apart by fierce belief and private longing in this unprecedented journey deep inside the most insular Hasidic sect, the Satmar.
��
��
�������� Sweeping from the Central European countryside just before World War II to Paris to contemporary Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I Am Forbidden brings to life four generations of one Satmar family.
�������� Opening in 1939 Transylvania, five-year-old Josef witnesses the murder of his family by the Romanian Iron Guard and is rescued by a Gentile maid to be raised as her own son. Five years later, Josef rescues a young girl, Mila, after her parents are killed while running to meet the Rebbe they hoped would save them. Josef helps Mila reach Zalman Stern, a leader in the Satmar community, in whose home Mila is raised as a sister to Zalman’s daughter, Atara. As the two girls mature, Mila’s faith intensifies, while her beloved sister Atara discovers a world of books and learning that she cannot ignore. With the rise of communism in central Europe, the family moves to Paris, to the Marais, where Zalman tries to raise his children apart from the city in which they live.
�������� When the two�� girls come of age, Mila marries within the faith, while Atara continues to question fundamentalist doctrine. The different choices the two sisters makes force them apart until a dangerous secret threatens to banish them from the only community they’ve ever known.
�������� A beautifully crafted, emotionally gripping story of what happens when unwavering love, unyielding law, and centuries of tradition collide, I Am Forbidden announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new voice and opens a startling window on a world long closed to most of us, until now.]]> 337 Anouk Markovits 0307984745 Alexandra 0 to-read 3.73 2012
author: Anouk Markovits
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> 11466 304 Tobias Wolff 0802136680 Alexandra 5 3.97 1989
author: Tobias Wolff
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1989
rating: 5
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]]> 29209 291 James McBride 1573225789 Alexandra 4 4.13 1995
author: James McBride
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1995
rating: 4
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]]> 534255 I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.

At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect.]]> 236 Lucy Grealy 0060569662 Alexandra 3 3.97 1994
author: Lucy Grealy
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1994
rating: 3
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]]> 14241 The Liars�� Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as “funny, lively, and un-put-downable�� (USA Today) today as it ever was.]]> 352 Mary Karr 0143035746 Alexandra 4 3.94 1995
author: Mary Karr
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1995
rating: 4
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]]> 32370 293 Augusten Burroughs 0312423799 Alexandra 5 4.02 2003
author: Augusten Burroughs
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2003
rating: 5
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]]> 1241 Before considering reading this book, please see the BookBrowse note on the book jacket/review page.

BookBrowse Note: January 9th 2006: An article in the Smoking Gun claimed that James Frey (author of A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard) fabricated key parts of his books. They cited police records, court documents and interviews with law enforcement agents which belie a number of Frey's claims regarding criminal charges against him, jail terms and his fugitive status.

In an interview with the Smoking Gun, Frey admitted that he had 'embellished central details' in A Million Little Pieces and backtracked on claims he made in the book.

January 26th 2006. Frey's publisher stated that while it initially stood by him, after further questioning of the author, the house has "sadly come to the realization that a number of facts have been altered and incidents embellished." It will be adding a a publisher's note and author's note to all future editions of A Million Little Pieces.]]> 515 James Frey 0307276902 Alexandra 3 3.69 2003
author: James Frey
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2003
rating: 3
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]]> 7603 Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

]]> 356 Azar Nafisi 081297106X Alexandra 3 3.64 2003
author: Azar Nafisi
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2003
rating: 3
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]]> 252577
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

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

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

Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.]]> 452 Frank McCourt 0007205236 Alexandra 4 4.15 1996
author: Frank McCourt
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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]]> 242006 336 Augusten Burroughs 031242227X Alexandra 5 3.77 2002
author: Augusten Burroughs
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2002
rating: 5
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]]> 9777
Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family—their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).

When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen." With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.

The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.

The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes—Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic.]]> 321 Arundhati Roy 0679457313 Alexandra 5 3.97 1997
author: Arundhati Roy
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1997
rating: 5
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]]> 5203
Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Stranded in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally orbits into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before she really goes under.]]> 465 Wally Lamb 0671021001 Alexandra 5 3.91 1992
author: Wally Lamb
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1992
rating: 5
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]]> 4473 637 John Irving 0552135399 Alexandra 5 4.24 1989
author: John Irving
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1989
rating: 5
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]]> 4900
A reflection on corruptive European colonialism and a journey into the nightmare psyche of one of the corrupted, Heart of Darkness is considered one of the most influential works ever written.]]> 188 Joseph Conrad 1892295490 Alexandra 4 3.43 1899
author: Joseph Conrad
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1899
rating: 4
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]]> 7763 Alternate cover editions of ISBN 9780143038092 can be found here.

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

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.]]> 288 Amy Tan Alexandra 4 3.96 1989
author: Amy Tan
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1989
rating: 4
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]]> 3636 208 Lois Lowry 0385732554 Alexandra 4 4.12 1993
author: Lois Lowry
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1993
rating: 4
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]]> 227711
One of the most acclaimed novels of our time, Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True is a story of alienation and connection, devastation and renewal, at once joyous, heartbreaking, poignant, mystical, and powerfully, profoundly human.]]> 897 Wally Lamb 0060987561 Alexandra 4 4.21 1998
author: Wally Lamb
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1998
rating: 4
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]]> 12232938
So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her -- her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable tragedy and loss, The Lovely Bones succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even joy.]]> 372 Alice Sebold 0316166685 Alexandra 4 3.87 2002
author: Alice Sebold
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2002
rating: 4
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]]> 4214 460 Yann Martel 0770430074 Alexandra 5 3.94 2001
author: Yann Martel
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
rating: 5
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]]> 77203 371 Khaled Hosseini 159463193X Alexandra 5 4.34 2003
author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2003
rating: 5
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]]> 2429135
An international publishing sensation, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.]]> 480 Stieg Larsson 0670069019 Alexandra 4 4.17 2005
author: Stieg Larsson
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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]]> 9773
"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead."—From the CD

Arundhati Roy is an outspoken critic of globalization and American influence. She has authored four books, -including The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize. This summer, she will accept the Lannan Award for Cultural Freedom.]]> 80 Arundhati Roy 1902593804 Alexandra 0 to-read 4.37 2004
author: Arundhati Roy
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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]]> 13547180 New York Times bestseller that goes far beyond its riveting medical mystery, Brain on Fire is the powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity.

When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened?

In a swift and breathtaking narrative, Cahalan tells the astonishing true story of her descent into madness, her family’s inspiring faith in her, and the lifesaving diagnosis that nearly didn’t happen.]]> 250 Susannah Cahalan 145162137X Alexandra 0 to-read 4.06 2012
author: Susannah Cahalan
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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]]> 15793231 There are some things you can’t leave behind��

A broken-down camper hidden deep in a national forest is the only home fifteen year-old Carey can remember. The trees keep guard over her threadbare existence, with the one bright spot being Carey’s younger sister, Jenessa, who depends on Carey for her very survival. All they have is each other, as their mentally ill mother comes and goes with greater frequency. Until that one fateful day their mother disappears for good, and two strangers arrive.��Suddenly, the girls are taken from the woods and thrust into a bright and perplexing new world of high school, clothes and boys.

Now, Carey must face the truth of why her mother abducted her ten years ago, while haunted by a past that won’t let her go�� a dark past that hides many a secret, including the reason Jenessa hasn’t spoken a word in over a year. Carey knows she must keep her sister close, and her secrets even closer, or risk watching her new life come crashing down.]]> 256 Emily Murdoch 1250021529 Alexandra 0 to-read 4.08 2013
author: Emily Murdoch
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> 15811545
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.��

Full of Ozeki's signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.]]> 432 Ruth Ozeki 0670026638 Alexandra 0 to-read 4.06 2013
author: Ruth Ozeki
name: Alexandra
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2013
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]]> 15801967 New York Times bestseller and named Best Marketing Book of 2014 by the American Marketing Association

What makes things popular? Why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?

If you said advertising, think again. People don't listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral?

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He's studied why New York Times articles make the paper's own Most E-mailed List, why products get word of mouth, and how social influence shapes everything from the cars we buy to the clothes we wear to the names we give our children. In this book, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos.

Contagious combines groundbreaking research with powerful stories. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheese-steak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the seemingly most boring products there is: a blender. If you've wondered why certain stories get shared, e-mails get forwarded, or videos go viral, Contagious explains why, and shows how to leverage these concepts to craft contagious content. This book provides a set of specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread - for designing messages, advertisements, and information that people will share. Whether you're a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, Contagious will show you how to make your product or idea catch on.]]> 210 Jonah Berger 1451686579 Alexandra 0 to-read 3.97 2013
author: Jonah Berger
name: Alexandra
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]>