50 Books in a Year
I have decided to challenge myself to read 50 books in one year. Ever since university began three years ago I haven't had the opportunity, time, or inclination to read as much, and I really miss doing so. Hopefully this challenge will encourage me to read for pleasure again!
If you’re also doing this challenge, I would love to hear from you! Do you have a book you absolutely loved and want to recommend to me? Feel free to do so :)
I will list each book I read in succession with the book jacket description and will also include a rating of each book, based on my enjoyment of it, and the possibility I will re-read it again in the future. The books will be listed behind the LJ cut:
Book 001
Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood
Book jacket Description: "In Moral Disorder, her breathtaking and deeply personal new book of fiction, Margaret Atwood has created a series of inter-related stories that trace the course of a life, and also the lives intertwined with it - Those of parents, siblings, children, friends, enemies, teachers, and even animals. As in a photograph album, time is measured in sharp, clearly observed moments - The birth of a baby, divorce and remarriage, old age and death. The settings are equally varied: Large cities, suburbs, farms, northern forests."
Status: Complete
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Book 002
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
Book jacket Description: "Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".
Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island's Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl's fight for freedom of expression and a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere."
Status: Complete
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Book 003
Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas
Book jacket Description: "The summer Koren Zailckas turns fourteen she is standing in the kitchen of her best friend Natalie's house, dripping wet after a swim in the lake. With a sly grin, Natalie emerges from a cupboard holding a bottle of Southern Comfort. With one stiff sip, Zailckas is initiated into the world of drinking. From then on, she will drink faithfully, fanatically. In high school, her experimentation will lead to a stomach pumping at age sixteen. In college, her excess will give way to a pattern of self-poisoning that will grow more destructive with each year. At age twenty-two, Zailckas will wake up in an unfamiliar apartment in New York City, elbow her friend who is passed out next to her, and ask "Where are we?" Smashed is a sober look at how she got there and, after years of blackouts and smashups, what it took for her to realize she had to stop drinking."
Status: Complete
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Book 004
The Tailor's Daughter by Janice Graham
Book jacket Description: "Growing up in Victorian England, where her father owns a tailoring shop on fashionable Savile Row, Veda Grenfell and her family have always assumed she would one day make a suitable match. But when a fever leaves her deaf at the age of sixteen, Veda resolves to prove her worth in a realm that is usually off limits to respectable women. Dressing in gentlemen's clothes, Veda reinvents herself as a tailor to London's smart young set. Her beauty and spirit attract unexpected suitors, including a young viscount - But when passion turns to betrayal, Veda embarks on a treacherous journey that will lead her into a world of deception and murder."
Status: Complete
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Book 005
The Russian Concubine by Kate Furnivall
Book jacket Description: "Junchow, China, 1928. Perhaps it's her red hair, or her hard life. Whatever the reason, Lydia Ivanova has a fierce spirit. Nothing can dim it, not even the four waters of the Peiho River. Into the river's grime bodies are tossed, those of thieves and Communists alike. So every time she steals some marketplace treasure, the sixteen-year-old takes her life in her hands. Her mother, Valentina, numbered among the Russian elite until Bolsheviks rounded them up. They took her husband, but Valentina managed to buy back her child and bring her to China.
Now, though mother and daughter live in the whites-only International Settlement, no walls can keep Lydia in. She escapes to meet Chang An Lo, a handsome youth with fire in his eyes. He returns her love, but other dangers threaten him. Chiang Kai-Shek's troops are headed toward Junchow to kill Reds like him - And in his possession are the priceless jewels of the dead Tsarina, meant as a gift for the despot's wife. Their all-consuming love can only bring shame and peril upon the pair, from both sides. Those in power will do anything to quell it. But Lydia and Chang are powerless to end it..."
Status: Complete
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Book 006
And Only To Deceive by Tasha Alexander
Book jacket Description: "Emily agreed to wed Phillip, the Viscount Ashton, primarily to escape her overbearing mother. Phillip's death while on safari soon after their wedding left Emily feeling little grief, for she barely knew the dashing stranger.
But her discovery of his journals nearly two years later reveals a far different man than she imagined - A gentleman scholar and antiquities collector who apparently loved his new wife deeply. Emily's desire to learn more of her late husband leads her through the quiet corners of the British Museum and into a dangerous mystery involving rare stolen artifacts. To complicate matters, she's juggling two very prominent and wealthy suitors, one of those intentions may go beyond matrimony into darker realms..."
Status: Complete
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Book 007 ♣
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Book jacket Description: "Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending, and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her dissapointment, and when real life continues to fail to live up to her romantic expectations, the consequences are devastating.
Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi""
Status: Complete
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Book 008 ♣
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Book jacket Description: "On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.
As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence."
Status: Complete
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Book 009 ♣
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
Book jacket Description: "In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Truman Capote created a woman whose name entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the literary landscape. Holly Golightly knows that nothing bad can happen to you at Tiffany's: Her poignancy, wit, and naïveté continue to charm."
Status: Complete
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Book 010
Some Like It Cool: The Charmed Life of Jack Lemmon by Michael Freedland
Book jacket Description: "Some Like It Cool is the story of Jack Lemmon, perhaps one of the best-loved stars in Hollywood's history. The first biography since his death in 2001, this book focuses not just on Lemmon's career, but also on his private life. It includes the story of his relationship with his mother, a broken first marriage, his drinking, his 'terrible' facelift and his fight with cancer. Much of the book is devoted to his relationship with Walter Matthau: Billy Wilder describes him as the "Perfect Actor": Gregory Peck remarks on his generosity an Fred Astaire, in an early interview with Michael Freedland, speaks of choosing him as a co-star in The Notorious Landlady.
This is no rags-to-riches tale. Lemmon's father was the wealthy businessman who sent his son to Harvard, where a talent scout for Columbia Pictures invited him to Hollywood. The speed of his rise to stardom was astonishing. Early films, such as The Apartment and Some Like It Hot have become comedy classics while his role as the fall guy in Mister Roberts won him his first Oscar.
The author, who interviewed Lemmon frequently, confesses to being a Lemmon devotee, yet his biography presents a frank and honest account - As well as a celebration - of one of Hollywood's greats."
Status: Complete
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Book 011
Bluebeard's Egg by Margaret Atwood
Book jacket Description: "In this acclaimed collection of twelve stories, Margaret Atwood probes the territory of childhood memories and the casual cruelty men and women inflict upon each other and themselves. She looks behind the familiar world of family summers at remote lakes, ordinary lives, and unexpected loves, and she unearths profound truths. A melancholy, teenage love is swept away by a Canadian hurricane, while a tired, middle-aged affection is rekindled by the spectacle of rare Jamaican birds; a potter tries to come to terms with the group of poets who so smother her that she is driven into the arms of her accountant; and, in the title story, the Bluebeard legend is retold as an ironic tale of marital deception. Stark and scathing at times, humorous and compassionate at others, Bluebeard's Egg confirms once again Atwood's reputation as the pre-eminent chronicler of our times."
Status: Complete
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Book 012
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
Book jacket Description: "In 1925 a new kind of heroine burst upon the Jazz Age world: Lorelei Lee, a not-so-dumb blonde whose taste for orchids, champagne, and diamonds was so single-minded as to make her seem almost innocent. Sent abroad "to be broadened" by her protector, a Chicago button manufacturer, Lorelei meets the Prince of Wales and mixes in English society. In France she stays at the Ritz, shops in the rue de la Paix, and is taken to the "Foley Bergere". In Vienna, she comments "Dr. Froyd said that all I needed was to cultivate a few inhibitions." Finally, back home, Lorelei marries a Main Line millionaire and becomes a movie star.
Outrageous, charming, and unforgettable, Lorelei has been portrayed on stage and screen by Carol Channing and Marilyn Monroe and has become the archetype of the blonde bombshell gold-digger."
Status: Complete
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Book 013
Remember Me? by Sophie Kinsella
Book jacket Description: "When twenty-eight-year-old Lexi Smart wakes up in a London hospital, she's in for a big surprise. Her teeth are perfect. Her body is toned. Her handbag is Vuitton. Having survived a car accident - in a Mercedes no less - Lexi has lost a big chunk of her memory, three years to be exact, and she's about to find out just how much things have changed.
Somehow Lexi went from a twenty-five-year-old working girl to a corporate big shot with a sleek new loft, a personal assistant, a carb-free diet, and a set of glamorous new friends. And who is this gorgeous husband - who also happens to be a multimillionaire? With her mind still stuck three years in reverse, Lexi greets this brave new world determined to be the person she...well, seems to be. That is, until an adorably dishevelled architect drops the biggest bombshell of all.
Suddenly Lexi is scrambling to catch her balance. Her new life, it turns out, comes complete with secrets, schemes, and intrigue. How on earth did all this happen? Will she ever remember? And what will happen when she does?"
Status: Complete
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Book 014
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
Book jacket Description: "Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920's, The Painted Veil is th story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of the cholera epidemic. Stripped of the British society of her youth and the small but effective society she fought so hard to attain in Hong Kong, she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how to love.
The Painted Veil is a beautifully written affirmation of the human capacity to grow, to change, and to forgive."
Status: Complete
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Book 015
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Book jacket Description: "When Henry meets Clare, he is twenty-eight and she is twenty. Henry has never met Clare before; Clare has known Henry since she was six. Impossible but true, because Henry finds himself periodically displaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. Henry and Clare's attempts to live normal lives are threatened by a force they can neither prevent nor control, making their passionate love story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.
The Time Traveler's Wife is a story of fate, hope, and belief, and more than that, it's about the power of love to endure beyond the bounds of time."
Status: Complete
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Book 016 ♣
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Book jacket Description: "On a summer day in 1935, young Briony Tallis witnesses a moment's flirtation between her old sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony's misunderstanding of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions Atonement follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the 20th century."
Status: Complete
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Book 017
Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire
Book jacket Description: "The year is 1502 and seven-year-old Bianca de Nevada lives perched high above the rolling hills and valleys of Tuscany and Umbria at Montefiore, the farm of her beloved father, Don Vicente. But one day a noble entourage makes its way up the winding slopes to the farm - and the world comes to Montefiore. In the presence of Cesare Borgia and his sister, the lovely and vain Lucrezia - decadent children of a wicked pope - no one can claim innocence for very long. When Borgia sends Don Vicente on a years-long quest, he leaves Bianca under the care - so to speak - of Lucrezia. She plots a dire fate for the young girl in the woods below the farm, but in the dark forest salvation can be found as well...
A lyrical work of stunning creative vision, Mirror Mirror gives fresh life to the classic story of Snow White - and has a truth and beauty all its own."
Status: Complete
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Book 018
Love The One You're With by Emily Giffin
Book jacket Description: "This is a story for anyone who has ever wondered: How can I truly love the one I'm with when I can't forget the one who got away?
Ellen and Andy's marriage doesn't just seem perfect, it is perfect. There is no question how deep their devotion is, and how naturally they bring out the best in each other. But one fateful afternoon, Ellen runs into Leo for the first time in eight years. Leo, the one who brought out the worst in her. Leo, the one who left her heartbroken with no explanation. Leo, the one she could never quite forget. When his reappearence ignites long-dormant emotions, Ellen begins to question whether the life she's living is the one she's meant to live."
Status: Complete
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Book 019
My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
Book jacket Description: "Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate - a life and a role that she has never challenged...until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, Anna is beginning to be defined in terms of her sister - and so Anna makes a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves."
Status: Complete
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Book 020 ♣
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Book jacket Description: "Young, impressionable Catherine believes that life should be a wonderful adventure right out of her favourite novels. Lost in her stories, she sees diabolical villains and swooning heroines everywhere she looks.
Only her new friends, Henry and Eleanor Tilney, are able to teach her about the realities of life. But when Catherine is invited to be a guest of General Tilney and his family at the mysterious Northanger Abbey, she still can't help wondering what horrifying secret her host is hiding in its dark rooms...
Will Catherine ever be able to tell the difference between truth and fantasy? And is she too busy looking for heroes and villains to see the chance of genuine romance when it comes her way?"
Status: Complete
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Book 021 ♣
Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
Book jacket Description: "Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: He pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be "saved" by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, go on to send checks to support him. When he's not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park."
Status: Complete
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Book 022
Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey
Book jacket Description: "Dozens of characters pass across the reader's sight lines - some never to be seen again - but James Frey lingers on a handful of LA's lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives: a bright, ambitious young Mexican-American woman who allows her future to be undone by a moment of searing humiliation; a supremely narissistic action-movie star whose passion for the unattainable object of his affection nearly destroys him; a couple, both nineteen years old, who flee their suffocating hometown and struggle to survive on the fringes of the great city; and an aging Venice Beach alcoholic whose life is turned upside down when a meth-addicted teenage girl shows up half-dead outside the restroom he calls home.
Throughout this strikingly powerful novel there is the relentless drumbeat of the millions of other stories that, taken as a whole, describe a city, a culture, and an age. A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles. "
Status: Complete
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Book 023
How To Be Good by Nick Hornby
Book jacket Description: "Nick Hornby's How To Be Good was published in 2001 and was his first novel for Penguin. It tells the story of London GP Katie Carr, who is driven half-mad by her husband's attempts to 'do good'. As he invites the homeless to stay, gives away his children's toys and even their Sunday lunch, Katie comes to ask herself: If charity begins at home, maybe it's time to move. This is Hornby at his finest."
Status: Complete
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Book 024
Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer
Book jacket Description: "To be irrevocably in love with a vampire is both fantasy and nightmare woven into a dangerously heightened reality for Bella Swan. Pulled in one direction by her intense passion for Edward Cullen, and in another by her profound connection to werewolf Jacob Black, she has endured a tumultuous year of temptation, loss, and strife to reach the ultimate turning point. Her imminent choice to either join the dark but seductive world of immortals or pursue a fully human life has become the thread from which the fate of two tribes hang.
Now that Bella has made her decision, a startling chain of unprecedented events is about to unfold with potentially devastating and unfathomable consequences. Just when the frayed strands of Bella’s life - First discovered in Twilight, then scattered and town in New Moon and Eclipse - seem ready to heal and knit together, could they be destroyed…forever?
The astonishing, breathlessly anticipated conclusion to the Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn illuminates the secrets and mysteries of this spellbinding romantic epic that has entranced millions."
Status: Complete
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Book 025
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams
Book jacket Description: "The sensuality and excitement of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof first heated up Broadway in 1955 with its gothic American story of two brothers (and their wives) vying for the inheritance of their dying father, Big Daddy, amid a whirlwind of sexuality untethered (in the person of Maggie the Cat) and the burden of love repressed (in the person of her husband, Brick Pollitt)."
Status: Complete
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Book 026
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
Book jacket Description: "Dolls: red or black; capsules or tablets; washed down with vodka or swallowed straight - for Anne, Neely and Jennifer, it doesn't matter, as long as the pill bottle is within easy reach. These three women become best friends when they are young and struggling in New York City and then climb to the top of the entertainment industry, only to find that there's no place left to go but down - into the Valley of the Dolls."
Status: Complete
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Book 027
Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
Book jacket Description: "Cassie Wright, porn priestess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. On camera. With six hundred men. Snuff unfolds from the perspective of Mr. 72, Mr. 137 and Mr. 600, who await their turn on camera in a very crowded green room. This wild, lethally funny, and thoroughly researched novel brings the huge yet under-acknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction at last. Who else but Chuck Palahniuk would dare do such a thing? Who else could do it so well, so unflinchingly, and with such an incendiary (you might say) climax?"
Status: Complete
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Book 028
The Torontonians by Phyllis Brett Young
Book jacket Description: "The arrival, one sunny morning, of pale green wall to wall carpeting for the living room is the crowning jewel in Karen Whitney's long-anticipated transformation of her house into a beautiful home, renovated to the exacting standards of her own impeccable taste. The banal finality of this event triggers an introspective voyage through the events of her life and how she became who she is: wife of buisness executive Rick, mother to two accomplished daughters in university, citizen of the suburb of Rowanwood. Before Betty Friedan coined the term "feminine mystique", The Torontonians" told a classic feminist story of suburban ennui and existential self-discovery, tracing a detailed portrait of women in the 1950's through the eyes of its perceptive and thoughtful heroine."
Status: Complete
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Book 029 ♣
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Book jacket Description: "Orphaned in the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead, subject to the cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre none the less emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. How she takes up the post of governess at Thornfield Hall, meets and loves Mr. Rochester and discovered the impediment to their lawful marriage are elements in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman's passionate search for a wider and richer life than that traditionally accorded to her sex in Victorian society."
Status: Complete
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Book 030
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
Book jacket Description: "Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Lily Sabbath. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel Motes founds The Church of God Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood", who leads him to a mummified holy child, and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Hazel's existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction."
Status: Complete
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Book 031 ♣
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Book jacket Description: "In Hard Times, Charles Dickens created the Victorian city of Coketown in Northern England to critique the industrialist economy he believed exploited the lives of the working class, destroying human creativity and joy in the process. He brilliantly caricatures the monotony of an increasingly practical world where facts are amassed for their own sake at the expense of a more humane and varied existance.
Some of Dicken's most colourful and memorable characters reside in Coketown, including the unwavering utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind, the callous factory owner Josiah Bounderby, and the redeemingly optimistic Sissy Jupe. A captivating storyteller and visionary, Dickens predicted with astounding clarity the ills that continue to plague the modern age."
Status: Complete
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Book 032 ♣
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Book jacket Description: "Margaret's safe existence is turned upside down when she has to move to the grim northern town of Milton. Not only does she have her eyes opened by the poverty and hardship she encounters there, but she is thrown into confusion by stern factory owner John Thornton - Whose treatment of his workers brings them into fierce opposition.
As men and women, workers and masters come into violent conflict, it seems opposites can never meet. But do John and Margaret's power struggles hide deeper feelings? And, when it seems Margaret has lost everything, can she find the one thing she never expected?"
Status: Complete
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Book 033
Lace by Shirley Conran
Book jacket Description: "Four elegant, successful, and sophisticated women in their forties are called to New York's Pierre Hotel to meet Lilli - A beautiful, young, and notoriously temperamental Hollywood movie star. None of the women knows exactly why she is there: each has a reason to hate Lilli and each of them is astonished to see the others. They are old friends who share a guilty secret and who have for years been doing their best to keep that secret quiet. Their lives are changed forever, however, when Lilli suddenly confronts them. When the women refuse to answer her, Lilli proceeds to travel around the world through the playgrounds of the rich and famous, seeking to answer the question that has obsessed and almost destroyed her.
From Paris to London, from the boardroom to the bedroom, Lace takes the reader into the rarified world of five unforgettable women who are as beautiful, as complex and as strong as...lace."
Status: Complete
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Book 034 ♣
The Mill on the Floss by George Elliot
Book jacket Description: "Rebellious and affectionate, Maggie Tulliver is always in trouble. Re-calling her own experiences as a girl, George Elliot describes Maggie's turbulent childhood with a sympathetic engagement that makes the early chapters of The Mill on the Floss among the most immediately attractive she ever wrote. As Maggie approaches adulthood, her spirited temperament brings her into conflict with her family, her community, and her much-loved brother Tom. Still more painfully, she finds her own nature divided between the claims of moral responsibility and her passionate hunger for self fulfillment. George Elliot's searching exploration of Maggie's complex dilemma has made this one of the most enduringly popular of her works."
Status: Complete
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Book 035
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
Book jacket Description: "Countless writers and artists have spoken for a generation, but no-one has done it quite like Chuck Klosterman. With an exhaustive knowledge of popular culture and an almost effortless ability to spin brilliant prose out of unlikely subject matter, Klosterman attacks the entire spectrum of postmodern America: Reality TV, Internet porn, Pamela Anderson, literary Jesus freaks, and the real difference between apples and oranges (Of which there is none) And don't even get him started on his love life and the whole Harry-Met-Sally situation.
Whether deconstructing Saved By The Bell episodes or the artistic legacy of Billy Joel, the symbolic importance of The Empire Strikes Back or the Celtics/Lakers rivalry, Chuck will make you think, he'll make you laugh, and he'll drive you insane - Usually all at once. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is ostensibly about art, entertainment, infotainment, sports, politics and kittens, but - really - it's about us. All of us. As Klosterman realizes late at night, in the moment before he falls asleep, "In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever 'in and of itself'" Read to believe."
Status: Complete
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Book 036
Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas by Chuck Klosterman
Book jacket Description: "Fans of Klosterman's Ritalin-paced pop culture criticism (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) will eagerly devour this collection of previously published essays. Whether investigating Latino fans of British pop icon Morrissey, interviewing female tribute bands like Lez Zeppelin and AC/DShe or eating nothing but Chicken McNuggets for a week, Klosterman is always entertaining and often insightful. But other than a sympathetic profile of Billy Joel, Klosterman rarely strays from his favorite topics: heavy metal music, television, sports and sex. Perhaps this career overview is his way of recycling old themes into some kind of new "defining endeavor," as he describes the title inspired by Led Zeppelin IV (As it is unofficially called). Overall it's a mixed bag of collected essays - Strong and not-so-strong performances- Its parts are greater than the whole. "
Status: Complete
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Book 037
Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story by Chuck Klosterman
Book jacket Description: "For 6,557 miles, Chuck Klosterman thought about dying. He drove a rental car from New York to Rhode Island to Georgia to Mississippi to Iowa to Minneapolis to Fargo to Seattle, and he chased death and rock 'n' roll all the way. Over the span of twenty-one days, Chuck had three relationships end - One by choice, one by chance, and one by exhaustion. He snorted cocaine in a graveyard. He walked a half-mile through a bean field. A man in Dickinson, North Dakota explained to him why we have fewer windmills than we used to. Chuck listened to the KISS solo albums and Rod Stewart box set. At one point, poisonous snakes became involved. The road is hard. From the Chelsea Hotel to the swampland where Lynyrd Skynrd's place went down to the sit where Kurt Cobain blew his head off, Chuck explored every brand of rock-star demise. He wanted to know why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing...And what this means for the rest of us."
Status: Complete
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Book 038
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Book jacket Description: "Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute-half Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them all imprisoned."
Status: Complete
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Book 039
Tess Of The D'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
Book jacket Description: "Tess is an innocent young girl until the day she goes to visit her rich 'relatives', the D'Urbervilles, in hope that they might help alleviate her family's poverty. Her encounter with her manipulative cousin, Alec, leads her onto a path that is beset with suffering and betrayal. When she falls in love with another man, Angel Clare, Tess sees a potential escape from her past, but only if she can tell him her shameful secret..."
Status: Complete
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Book 040
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
Book jacket Description: "Sedaris's caustic gift has not deserted him in his fourth book, which mines poignant comedy from his peculiar childhood in North Carolina, his bizarre career path, and his move with his lover to France. Though his anarchic inclination to digress is his glory, Sedaris does have a theme in these reminiscences: the inability of humans to communicate. The title is his rendition in transliterated English of how he and his fellow students of French in Paris mangle the Gallic language. In the essay "Jesus Shaves," he and his classmates from many nations try to convey the concept of Easter to a Moroccan Muslim. "It is a party for the little boy of God," says one. "Then he be die one day on two... morsels of... lumber," says another. Sedaris muses on the disputes between his Protestant mother and his father, a Greek Orthodox guy whose Easter fell on a different day. Other essays explicate his deep kinship with his eccentric mom and absurd alienation from his IBM-exec dad: "To me, the greatest mystery of science continues to be that a man could father six children who shared absolutely none of his interests."
Every glimpse we get of Sedaris's family and acquaintances delivers laughs and insights. He thwarts his North Carolina speech therapist ("for whom the word pen had two syllables") by cleverly avoiding all words with s sounds, which reveal the lisp she sought to correct. His midget guitar teacher, Mister Mancini, is unaware that Sedaris doesn't share his obsession with breasts, and sings "Light My Fire" all wrong--"as if he were a Webelo scout demanding a match." As a remarkably unqualified teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sedaris had his class watch soap operas and assign "guessays" on what would happen in the next day's episode."
Status: Complete
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Book 041
Helter Skelter: The True Story Of The Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi
Book jacket Description: "In the summer of 1969, in Los Angeles, a series of brutal, seemingly random murders captured the headlines across America. A famous actress (And her unborn child), an heiress to a coffee fortune, a supermarket owner and his wife were among the seven victims. A thin trail of circumstances eventually tied the Tate-LaBianca murders to Charles Manson, a would-be pop singer of small talent living in the desert with his "family" of devoted young women and men. What was his hold over them? And what was the motivation behind such savagery? In the public imagination, over time, the case assumed the proportions of myth. The murders marked the end of the sixties and became an immediate symbol of the dark underside of that era."
Status: Complete
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Book 042
One Fifth Avenue by Candance Bushnell
Book jacket Description: "One Fifth Avenue, the Art Deco beauty towering over one of Manhatten's oldest and most historically hip neighbourhoods, is a one-of-the-kind address, the sort of building you have to earn your way into - one way or another. For the women in Candance Bushnell's new novel, One Fifth Avenue, this edifice is essential to the lives they've established - or hope to establish. From the hedge fundd king's wife to the aging gossip columnist to the free-spirited actress (A recent refugee from L.A.) each person's game plan for a rich life is realized under the soaring roof of this landmark building."
Status: Complete
(Works marked with a ♣ are listed in the book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die)
Current Status: 42 / 50 Books