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Fiction
Children's
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Description |
Google Books |
Good Reads |
Gutenberg |
Various
4.39 of 5 stars 4.39 avg rating 39,323 ratings published 2003 |
Dr. Seuss |
Geisel published 46 children's books, often characterized by imaginative characters, rhyme, and frequent use of anapestic meter. His most celebrated books include the bestselling Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, The Lorax, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Horton Hatches the Egg, Horton Hears a Who!, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. Numerous adaptations of his work have been created, including 11 television specials, four feature films, a Broadway musical and four television series. He won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958 for Horton Hatches the Egg and again in 1961 for And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street |
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The Monster at the End of This Book
4.46 of 5 stars 4.46 avg rating 83,610 ratings published 1971 |
Jon Stone and Michael Smollin |
Many adults name this book as their favorite Little Golden Book. Generations of kids have interacted with lovable, furry old Grover as he begs the reader not to turn the pagef or fear of a monster at the end of the book. Oh, I am so embarrassed, he says on the last page . . . for, of course, the monster is Grover himself! |
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The Little Prince
4.23 of 5 stars 4.23 avg rating 485,436 ratings published 1940 |
Antoine de Saint Exupery |
Moral allegory and spiritual autobiography, The Little Prince is the most translated book in the French language. With a timeless charm it tells the story of a little boy who leaves the safety of his own tiny planet to travel the universe, learning the vagaries of adult behaviour through a series of extraordinary encounters. His personal odyssey culminates in a voyage to Earth and further adventures. |
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Everybody Poops
4.17 of 5 stars 4.17 avg rating 3,615 ratings published 1993 |
Taro Gomi |
With a straightforward text and full-color illustrations showing beasts and bugs doing it, younger children are shown a natural part of life. Illustrations. |
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Comedy
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Author |
Description |
Google Books |
Good Reads |
Gutenberg |
A Confederacy of Dunces
3.87 of 5 stars 3.87 avg rating 142,597 ratings published 1980 |
John Kennedy Toole |
A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero is one Ignatius J. Reilly, "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures |
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Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
4.26 of 5 stars 4.26 avg rating 225,826 ratings published 1990 |
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett |
There is a distinct hint of Armageddon in the air. According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (recorded, thankfully, in 1655, before she blew up her entire village and all its inhabitants, who had gathered to watch her burn), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, the Four Bikers of the Apocalypse are revving up their mighty hogs and hitting the road, and the world's last two remaining witch-finders are getting ready to fight the good fight, armed with awkwardly antiquated instructions and stick pins. Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. . . . Right. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except that a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon -- each of whom has lived among Earth's mortals for many millennia and has grown rather fond of the lifestyle -- are not particularly looking forward to the coming Rapture. If Crowley and Aziraphale are going to stop it from happening, they've got to find and kill the Antichrist (which is a shame, as he's a really nice kid). There's just one glitch: someone seems to have misplaced him. . . . |
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Fantasy
Title |
Author |
Description |
Google Books |
Good Reads |
Gutenberg |
Harry Potter Series
4.73 of 5 stars 4.73 avg rating 154,495 ratings published 1998 |
J.K. Rowling |
A mysterious letter arrives by owl messenger: a letter with an invitation to a wonderful place he never dreamed existed. There he finds not only friends, aerial sports, and magic around every corner, but a great destiny that's been waiting for him... if Harry can survive the encounter. |
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The Lord of the Rings
4.44 of 5 stars 4.44 avg rating 319,078 ratings published 1954 |
J.R.R. Tolkien |
In a sleepy villiage in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as the ring is entrusted to his care. He must leave his home and make a perilious journey across the realms of Middle-Earth to the Crack of Doom, deep inside the territories of the Dark Lord. There he must destroy the Ring forever and foil the dark lord in his evil plan. |
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His Dark Materials Trilogy
3.89 of 5 stars 3.89 avg rating 741,974 ratings published 1995 |
Philip Pullman |
In an epic trilogy, Philip Pullman unlocks the door to a world parallel to our own, but with a mysterious slant all its own. Dæmons and winged creatures live side by side with humans, and a mysterious entity called Dust just might have the power to unite the universes--if it isn't destroyed first. Here, the three paperback titles in Pullman's heroic fantasy series are united in one dazzling boxed set. Join Lyra, Pantalaimon, Will, and the rest as they embark on the most breathtaking, heartbreaking adventures of their lives. The fate of the universe is in their hands. The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass pit good against evil in a way no reader will ever forget. |
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A Song of Ice and Fire Series
4.44 of 5 stars 4.44 avg rating 910,082 ratings published 1996 |
George R.R. Martin |
As Warden of the north, Lord Eddard Stark counts it a curse when King Robert bestows on him the office of the Hand. His honour weighs him down at court where a true man does what he will, not what he must
and a dead enemy is a thing of beauty. The old gods have no power in the south, Starks family is split and there is treachery at court. Worse, the vengeance-mad heir of the deposed Dragon King has grown to maturity in exile in the Free Cities. He claims the Iron Throne. |
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The Hobbit
4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 avg rating 1,678,362 ratings published 1937 |
J.R.R. Tolkien |
Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely travelling further than the pantry of his hobbit-hole in Bag End. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard, Gandalf, and a company of thirteen dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day to whisk him away on an unexpected journey there and back again. They have a plot to raid the treasure hoard of Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon
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American Gods 4.10 avg rating 328,509 ratings published 2001 |
Neil Gaiman |
Shadow gets out of prison early when his wife is killed in a car crash. At a loss, he takes up with a mysterious character called Wednesday, who is much more than he appears. In fact, Wednesday is an old god, once known as Odin the All-father, who is roaming America rounding up his forgotten fellows in preparation for an epic battle against the upstart deities of the Internet, credit cards, television, and all that is wired. Shadow agrees to help Wednesday, and they whirl through a psycho-spiritual storm that becomes all too real in its manifestations. For instance, Shadow's dead wife Laura keeps showing up, and not just as a ghost the difficulty of their continuing relationship is by turns grim and darkly funny, just like the rest of the book. |
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The Dark Tower Series 4.00 avg rating 244,997 ratings published 1982 |
Stephen King |
In The Gunslinger King introduces his most enigmatic hero, Roland Deschain of Gilead, the Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting, solitary figure at first, on a mysterious quest through a desolate world that eerily mirrors our own. Pursuing the man in black, an evil being who can bring the dead back to life, Roland is a good man who seems to leave nothing but death in his wake. |
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The Scar
4.14 of 5 stars 4.14 avg rating 17,521 ratings published 2000 |
China Mieville |
Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, a band of prisoners and slaves, their bodies remade into grotesque biological oddities, is being transported to the fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. But the journey is not theirs alone. They are joined by a handful of travelers, each with a reason for fleeing the city. Among them is Bellis Coldwine, a renowned linguist whose services as an interpreter grant her passageand escape from horrific punishment. For she is linked to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, the brilliant renegade scientist who has unwittingly unleashed a nightmare upon New Crobuzon. |
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The Prince of Nothing
3.74 of 5 stars 3.74 avg rating 10,449 ratings published 2003 |
R. Scott Bakker |
With the first book of his Prince of Nothing saga, R. Scott Bakker has begun the assemblage of an all-encompassing world scarred by an apocalyptic past. In a setting that evokes both the past and the distant future, two men and two women encounter a mysterious traveler who they accompany on a great crusade. |
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Perdido Street Station
3.94 of 5 stars 3.94 avg rating 34,155 ratings published 2000 |
China Mieville |
New Crobuzon is a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. Isaac, a brilliant scientist, is asked by a bird-man Garuda to restore his power of flight. But one lab specimen threatens the whole city. A vividly colored caterpillar eating a hallucinatory drug grows in order to consume all. |
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The Wheel of Time Series 4.15 avg rating 178,608 ratings published 1990 |
Robert Jordan |
The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth returns again. In the Third Age, an Age of Prophecy, the World and Time themselves hang in the balance. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow. |
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Historical
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Author |
Description |
Google Books |
Good Reads |
Gutenberg |
Gravity's Rainbow
4.03 of 5 stars 4.03 avg rating 21,752 ratings published 1973 |
Thomas Pynchon |
Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), "a screaming comes across the sky," heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. History has been a big trick: the plan is to switch from floods to obliterating fire from the sky. |
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Here Be Dragons
4.31 of 5 stars 4.31 avg rating 13,689 ratings published 1985 |
Sharon Kay Penman |
Thirteenth-century Wales is a divided country, ever at the mercy of England's ruthless, power-hungry King John. Then Llewelyn, Prince of North Wales, secures an uneasy truce with England by marrying the English king's beloved, illegitimate daughter, Joanna. Reluctant to wed her father's bitter enemy, Joanna slowly grows to love her charismatic and courageous husband who dreams of uniting Wales. But as John's attentions turn again and again to subduing Wales--and Llewelyn--Joanna must decide to which of these powerful men she owes her loyalty and love. |
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The Pillars of the Earth
4.26 of 5 stars 4.26 avg rating 360,923 ratings published 1989 |
Ken Follett |
The spellbinding epic set in twelfth-century England, The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of the lives entwined in the building of the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever knownand a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state, and brother against brother. |
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Horror
Title |
Author |
Description |
Google Books |
Good Reads |
Gutenberg |
House of Leaves
4.15 of 5 stars 4.15 avg rating 61,523 ratings published 2000 |
Mark Z. Danielwelski |
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. |
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John Dies at the End
3.93 of 5 stars 3.93 avg rating 31,503 ratings published 2007 |
David Wong |
Its street name is Soy Sauce - a drug that lets its users drift across time and dimensions. But sometimes, those who come back bring something with them. Suddenly, a silent otherworldly invasion is underway, and mankind needs a hero. What it gets instead is John and David, a pair of dropouts who can barely hold down jobs. Can these two stop the oncoming horror in time to save humanity? No. No, they can′t... |
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The Stand
4.32 of 5 stars 4.32 avg rating 341,536 ratings published 1978 |
Stephen King |
And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides -- or are chosen. A world in which good rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old Mother Abagail -- and the worst nightmares of evil are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers: Randall Flagg, the dark man. |
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Cthulhu Mysteries
4.25 of 5 stars 4.25 avg rating 20,057 ratings published 1972 |
H. P. Lovecraft |
Howard Phillips Lovecraft forever changed the face of horror, fantasy, and science fiction with a remarkable series of stories as influential as the works of Poe, Tolkien, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. His chilling mythology established a gateway between the known universe and an ancient dimension of otherworldly terror, whose unspeakable denizens and monstrous landscapes--dread Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, the Plateau of Leng, the Mountains of Madness--have earned him a permanent place in the history of the macabre. |
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Haunted
3.56 of 5 stars 3.56 avg rating 57,865 ratings published 2005 |
Chuck Palahniuk |
Haunted is a novel made up of twenty-three horrifying, hilarious, and stomach-churning stories. Theyre told by people who have answered an ad for a writers retreat and unwittingly joined a Survivor-like scenario where the host withholds heat, power, and food. As the storytellers grow more desperate, their tales become more extreme, and they ruthlessly plot to make themselves the hero of the reality show that will surely be made from their plight. This is one of the most disturbing and outrageous books youll ever read, one that could only come from the mind of Chuck Palahniuk. |
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The Long Walk
4.1 of 5 stars 4.10 avg rating 58,726 ratings published 1979 |
Stephen King as Richard Bachman |
On the first day of May, 100 teenage boys meet for a race known as "The Long Walk". If you break the rules, you get three warnings. If you exceed your limit, what happens is absolutely terrifying... |
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Literature
Title |
Author |
Description |
Google Books |
Good Reads |
Gutenberg |
The Catcher in the Rye
3.77 of 5 stars 3.77 avg rating 1,598,684 ratings published 1951 |
J.D. Salinger |
Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. |
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To Kill a Mockingbird
4.23 of 5 stars 4.23 avg rating 2,242,457 ratings published 1960 |
Harper Lee |
Tomboy Scout Finch comes of age in a small Alabama town during a crisis in 1935. She admires her father Atticus, how he deals with issues of racism, injustice, intolerance and bigotry, his courage and his love. |
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Siddhartha
3.95 of 5 stars 3.95 avg rating 294,222 ratings published 1922 |
Herman Hesse |
In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, unsatisfied, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life -- the beginning of suffering, rejection, peace, and, finally, wisdom. |
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Crime and Punishment
4.15 of 5 stars 4.15 avg rating 321,687 ratings published 1866 |
Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption. |
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Lolita
3.86 of 5 stars 3.86 avg rating 401,449 ratings published 1955 |
Vladamir Nabokov |
Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation. |
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The Count of Monte Cristo
4.16 of 5 stars 4.16 avg rating 469,108 ratings published 1844 |
Alexandre Dumas |
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 unearth the treasure and use it 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 serialised in the 1840s. |
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The Stranger
3.92 of 5 stars 3.92 avg rating 333,829 ratings published 1941 |
Albert Camus |
Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." |
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The Lord of the Flies
3.61 of 5 stars 3.61 avg rating 1,266,317 ratings published 1954 |
Willim Golding |
William Golding's compelling story about a group of very ordinary small boys marooned on a coral island has become a modern classic. At first it seems as though it is all going to be great fun; but the fun before long becomes furious and life on the island turns into a nightmare of panic and death. As ordinary standards of behaviour collapse, the whole world the boys know collapses with themthe world of cricket and homework and adventure storiesand another world is revealed beneath, primitive and terrible. |
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A Hundred Years of Solitude
4.0 of 5 stars 4.00 avg rating 447,177 ratings published 1967 |
Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. |
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Odyssey
3.69 of 5 stars 3.69 avg rating 585,691 ratings published -800 |
Homer |
The Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey through life. In the myths and legends that are retold here, renowned translator Robert Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery. This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the general reader, and to captivate a new generation of Homer's students. |
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Fahrenheit 451
3.95 of 5 stars 3.95 avg rating 847,257 ratings published 1953 |
Ray Bradbury |
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books. |
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The Great Gatsby
3.85 of 5 stars 3.85 avg rating 1,969,724 ratings published 1925 |
F. Scott Fitzgerald |
A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream. |
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The Brothers Karamazov
4.28 of 5 stars 4.28 avg rating 129,446 ratings published 1880 |
Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
When brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov is murdered, the lives of his sons are changed irrevocably: Mitya is placed under suspicion, Ivan's mental tortures drive him to breakdown, Alyosha tries to heal the family's rifts, and there is always the shadow of their bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov. |
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Heart of Darkness
3.39 of 5 stars 3.39 avg rating 219,846 ratings published 1899 |
Joseph Conrad |
Dark allegory describes the narrators journey up the Congo River and his meeting with, and fascination by, Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the unruly inhabitants of the region. Masterly blend of adventure, character development, psychological penetration. Considered by many Conrads finest, most enigmatic story. |
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
3.78 of 5 stars 3.78 avg rating 846,803 ratings published 1884 |
Mark Twain |
Of all the contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, none has a better claim than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Intended at first as a simple story of a boy's adventures in the Mississippi Valley - a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - the book grew and matured under Twain's hand into a work of immeasurable richness and complexity. More than a century after its publication, the critical debate over the symbolic significance of Huck's and Jim's voyage is still fresh, and it remains a major work that can be enjoyed at many levels: as an incomparable adventure story and as a classic of American humor. |
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Notes from Underground
4.14 of 5 stars 4.14 avg rating 65,660 ratings published 1864 |
Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
It is best to do nothing! The best thing is conscious inertia! So long live the underground! Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevskys groundbreaking Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter sarcasm, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the ant-hill of society and his gradual withdrawal to an existence underground. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who exactly resembles him his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly study of human consciousness. |
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A Clockwork Orange
3.95 of 5 stars 3.95 avg rating 349,708 ratings published 1962 |
Anthony Burgess |
In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. When the state undertakes to reform Alexto "redeem" himthe novel asks, "At what cost?" |
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Atlas Shrugged
3.66 of 5 stars 3.66 avg rating 228,028 ratings published 1957 |
Ayn Rand |
This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the worldand did. Was he a destroyer or the greatest of liberators? Why did he have to fight his battle, not against his enemies, but against those who needed him most, and his hardest battle against the woman he loved? What is the worlds motorand the motive power of every man? You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the characters in this story. |
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War and Peace
4.09 of 5 stars 4.09 avg rating 129,763 ratings published 1869 |
Leo Tolstoy |
Tolstoy's epic masterpiece intertwines the lives of private and public individuals during the time of the Napoleonic wars and the French invasion of Russia. The fortunes of the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, of Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei, are intimately connected with the national history that is played out in parallel with their lives. Balls and soirees alternate with councils of war and the machinations of statesmen and generals, scenes of violent battles with everyday human passions in a work whose extraordinary imaginative power has never been surpassed. |
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The Dharma Bums
3.93 of 5 stars 3.93 avg rating 54,427 ratings published 1958 |
Jack Kerouac |
One of the best and most popular of Kerouac's autobiographical novels, The Dharma Bums is based on experiences the writer had during the mid-1950s while living in California, after he'd become interested in Buddhism's spiritual mode of understanding. One of the book's main characters, Japhy Ryder, is based on the real poet Gary Snyder, who was a close friend and whose interest in Buddhism influenced Kerouac. |
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Moby Dick
3.41 of 5 stars 3.41 avg rating 322,983 ratings published 1851 |
Herman Melville |
Over a century and a half after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It 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 encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception. |
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The Old Man and the Sea
3.65 of 5 stars 3.65 avg rating 357,050 ratings published 1952 |
Ernest Hemingway |
Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. In a perfectly crafted story, which won for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements in which he lives. |
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Infinite Jest
4.33 of 5 stars 4.33 avg rating 37,434 ratings published 1995 |
David Foster Wallace |
Somewhere in the not-so-distant future, the screwed-up residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the Enfield Tennis Academy search for the master copy of a movie so dangerously entertaining that its viewers die in a state of catatonic bliss. Explores essential questions about what entertainment is, why we need it, and what it says about who we are. |
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The Turner Diaries
2.86 of 5 stars 2.86 avg rating 577 ratings published 1978 |
Andrew MacDonald |
At 9:02 am on Wednesday April 19, 1995, two tons of explosives ripped apart the federal office building in Oklahoma City and the psyche of America. The worst case of domestic terrorism in our history, this explosion killed 169 men, women, and children. The author of this book has written, If [this book] had been available to the general public . . . the Oklahoma bombing would not have come as such a surprise. It has been considered by the Justice Department and other government agencies as the bible of right-wing militia groups, and the FBI believes it provided the blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing. Barricade Books has published it so America can better understand the cause of racism and extremism. |
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Steppenwolf
4.08 of 5 stars 4.08 avg rating 67,962 ratings published 1927 |
Herman Hesse |
"Steppenwolf" is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hesse's searching philosophy and extraordinary sense of humanity as he tells of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope. Yet this novel can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of the intellectual hypocrisy of the period. As Hesse himself remarked, 'Of all my books "Steppenwolf" is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other'. |
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Naked Lunch
3.48 of 5 stars 3.48 avg rating 48,564 ratings published 1959 |
William Burroughs |
Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volumethat contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugsis a valuable and fresh experience of a novel that has lost none of its relevance or satirical bite |
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Of Mice and Men
3.8 of 5 stars 3.80 avg rating 1,143,107 ratings published 1937 |
John Steinbeck |
The tragic story of the complex bond between two migrant laborers in Central California. They are George Milton and Lennie Small, itinerant ranch hands who dream of one day owning a small farm. George acts as a father figure to Lennie, who is a very large, simple-minded man, calming him and helping to rein in his immense physical strength. |
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Watership Down
4.03 of 5 stars 4.03 avg rating 233,353 ratings published 1972 |
Richard Adams |
Set in England's Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of rabbits on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of brothers, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society. |
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Breakfast of Champions
4.09 of 5 stars 4.09 avg rating 147,357 ratings published 1973 |
Kurt Vonnegut |
In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonneguts most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth. |
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The Grapes of Wrath
3.88 of 5 stars 3.88 avg rating 403,354 ratings published 1939 |
John Steinbeck |
The novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of sharecroppers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in financial and agricultural industries. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they were trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California. Along with thousands of other "Okies", they sought jobs, land, dignity and a future. When preparing to write the novel, Steinbeck wrote: "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects]." The book won Steinbeck a large following among the working class, perhaps due to the book's sympathy to the workers' movement and its accessible prose style. |
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American Psycho 3.80 avg rating 129,593 ratings published 1991 |
Brett Easton Ellis |
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront. |
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On the Road
3.66 of 5 stars 3.66 avg rating 218,025 ratings published 1957 |
Jack Kerouac |
On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West." As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty," the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience. Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz combine to make On the Road an inspirational work of lasting importance. |
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The Kite Runner
4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 avg rating 1,369,193 ratings published 2002 |
Khaled Hosseini |
The Kite Runner of Khaled Hosseini's deeply moving fiction debut is an illiterate Afghan boy with an uncanny instinct for predicting exactly where a downed kite will land. Growing up in the city of Kabul in the early 1970s, Hassan was narrator Amir's closest friend even though the loyal 11-year-old with "a face like a Chinese doll" was the son of Amir's father's servant and a member of Afghanistan's despised Hazara minority. But in 1975, on the day of Kabul's annual kite-fighting tournament, something unspeakable happened between the two boys. |
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
4.17 of 5 stars 4.17 avg rating 399,914 ratings published 1962 |
Ken Kesey |
In this classic of the 1960s, Ken Kesey's hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over. A lusty, life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and women, and openly defies the rules at every turn. But this defiance, which starts as a sport, soon develops into a grim struggle, an all-out war between two relentless oppnonents: Nurse Ratched, back by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy provides the story's shocking climax. |
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Kafka on the Shore
4.12 of 5 stars 4.12 avg rating 123,938 ratings published 2002 |
Haruki Murakami |
Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle - yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own. |
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Ulysses
3.72 of 5 stars 3.72 avg rating 65,082 ratings published 1920 |
James Joyce |
William Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism. |
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Women
3.92 of 5 stars 3.92 avg rating 31,509 ratings published 1978 |
Charles Bukowski |
Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova. |
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Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West
4.2 of 5 stars 4.20 avg rating 55,413 ratings published 1985 |
Cormac McCarthy |
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. |
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A Suitable Boy 4.08 avg rating 27,889 ratings published 1993 |
Vikram Seth |
Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find -- through love or through exacting maternal appraisal -- a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multi ethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence. |
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The Voyage of Argo: The Argonautica
3.81 of 5 stars 3.81 avg rating 5,360 ratings published -250 |
Apollonius of Rhodes |
The Argonautica is the dramatic story of Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece and his relations with the dangerous princess Medea. The only surviving Greek epic to bridge the gap between Homer and late antiquity, this epic poem is the crowning literary achievement of the Ptolemaic court at Alexandria, written by Appolonius of Rhodes in the third century BC. Appollonius explores many of the fundamental aspects of life in a highly original way: love, deceit, heroism, human ignorance of the divine, and the limits of science, and offers a gripping and sometimes disturbing tale in the process. This major new prose translation combines readability with accuracy and an attention to detail that will appeal to general readers and classicists alike. |
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The Fountainhead
3.82 of 5 stars 3.82 avg rating 207,702 ratings published 1943 |
Ayn Rand |
When The Fountainhead was first published, Ayn Rand's daringly original literary vision and her groundbreaking philosophy, Objectivism, won immediate worldwide interest and acclaim. This instant classic is the story of an intransigent young architect, his violent battle against conventional standards, and his explosive love affair with a beautiful woman who struggles to defeat him. This edition contains a special afterword by Rands literary executor, Leonard Peikoff, which includes excerpts from Ayn Rands own notes on the making of The Fountainhead. As fresh today as it was then, here is a novel about a heroand about those who try to destroy him. |
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