books tagged “living author”

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  • Clarke, Arthur C.: 2001
    2001
    by Arthur C. Clarke
    ISBN 1568494173 (1-56849-417-3)
    Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

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  • And the Ass Saw the Angel
    by Nick Cave
    ISBN 1880985721 (1-880985-72-1)
    Softcover, 2 13 61

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    Book summary:

    Born to a drunken mother and a hunter father, Euchrid Eucrow yearns to express the intense feelings he has for the world around him and is driven deeper and deeper into a mad angelic vision. Reprint. [via]

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  • Forsier, Olivia: Ardent Women: The History of the Federation of Saint Benedict
    Ardent Women: The History of the Federation of Saint Benedict
    by Olivia Forsier
    ISBN 096520443X (0-9652044-3-X)
    Softcover, Park Pr Quality Printing Inc

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  • The Beach
    by Alex Garland
    ISBN 1573226521 (1-57322-652-1)
    Softcover, Riverhead Books

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    Book summary:

    In our ever-shrinking world, where popular Western culture seems to have infected every nation on the planet, it is hard to find even a small niche of unspoiled land--forget searching for pristine islands or continents. This is the situation in Alex Garland's debut novel, The Beach. Human progress has reduced Eden to a secret little beach near Thailand. In the tradition of grand adventure novels, Richard, a rootless traveler rambling around Thailand on his way somewhere else, is given a hand-drawn map by a madman who calls himself Daffy Duck. He and two French travelers set out on a journey to find this paradise.

    What makes this a truly satisfying novel is the number of levels on which it operates. On the surface it's a fast-paced adventure novel; at another level it explores why we search for these utopias, be they mysterious lost continents or small island communes. Garland weaves a gripping and thought-provoking narrative that suggests we are, in fact, such products of our Western culture that we cannot help but pollute and ultimately destroy the very sanctuary we seek [via]

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  • Chronicle of a Death Foretold
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
    ISBN 140003471X (1-4000-3471-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister.
    Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, and as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion, an entire society--not just a pair of murderersis put on trial. [via]

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  • Cronica De Una Muerte Anunciada / Chronicle Of A Death Foretold
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
    ISBN 1400034957 (1-4000-3495-7)
    Softcover, Random House Espanol

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    Book summary:

    Un hombre regresa al pueblo donde ocurrió un asesinato desconcertante 27 años atrás, con la determinación de descubrir la verdad. Todos parecen estar de acuerdo en que Bayardo San Román, sólo unas horas después de su matrimonio con la bella Angela Vicario, la devuelve por deshonrada a la casa paterna. La atribulada familia fuerza a la novia a revelar el nombre de su primer amante; y los hermanos gemelos de ella anuncian su intención de matar a Santiago Nasar por haber deshonrado a su hermana.

    Sin embargo, si todos sabían que se iba a cometer un asesinato, ¿por qué nadie trató de impedirlo? Cuanto más se sabe de este asunto, menos se comprende, y cuando la historia al fin se precipita a su inesperada conclusión, una sociedad entera no sólo un par de asesinos está siendo enjuiciada. [via]

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  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
    by Mark Haddon
    ISBN 1400032717 (1-4000-3271-7)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years. [via]

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  • The Da Vinci Code
    by Dan Brown
    ISBN 1400079179 (1-4000-7917-9)
    Softcover, Bantam Books

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    Book summary:

    With The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown masterfully concocts an intelligent and lucid thriller that marries the gusto of an international murder mystery with a collection of fascinating esoteria culled from 2,000 years of Western history.

    A murder in the silent after-hour halls of the Louvre museum reveals a sinister plot to uncover a secret that has been protected by a clandestine society since the days of Christ. The victim is a high-ranking agent of this ancient society who, in the moments before his death, manages to leave gruesome clues at the scene that only his daughter, noted cryptographer Sophie Neveu, and Robert Langdon, a famed symbologist, can untangle. The duo become both suspects and detectives searching for not only Neveu's father's murderer but also the stunning secret of the ages he was charged to protect. Mere steps ahead of the authorities and the deadly competition, the mystery leads Neveu and Langdon on a breathless flight through France, England, and history itself.

    Brown (Angels and Demons) has created a page-turning thriller that also provides an amazing interpretation of Western history. Brown's hero and heroine embark on a lofty and intriguing exploration of some of Western culture's greatest mysteries--from the nature of the Mona Lisa's smile to the secret of the Holy Grail. Though some will quibble with the veracity of Brown's conjectures, therein lies the fun. The Da Vinci Code is an enthralling read that provides rich food for thought. --Jeremy Pugh [via]

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  • Dance, Dance, Dance
    by Haruki Murakami, Alfred Birnbaum
    ISBN 4770016832 (4-7700-1683-2)
    Hardcover, Kodansha Amer Inc

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    Book summary:

    He burst upon the international scene with the wildly acclaimed A Wild Sheep Chase. He quickly came to represent the quirky voice of a new generation of Japanese writers. Now Haruki Murakami gives us his wittiest, boldest, most daring work to date. Dance dance dance continues the extraordinary adventure of an ordinary man. At thirty something, Murakami's nameless hero lives in a hi-tech, high-rise world where old virtues die fast and success is all that matters. He has shared in the glittering city's spoils, and while he has not sold his soul, he knows that something is lacking in his life. Now, in dreams, a mysterious woman weeps softly - for him. Yet, even as he tries to understand why, the voice that beckons is not hers. And still he dreams. Bizarre dreams that propel him down byways of his life in search of ... ? His is a strange odyssey: en route, a thirteen-year-old girl, distressingly beautiful and clairvoyant, is his constant companion; a classmate, now oozing charm on TV soaps, grapples with murder; a lady of the night becomes his guardian angel; and an eccentric Sheep Man materializes to counsel and cajole. What's a fellow to do? Dance. You gotta dance as long as the music plays. And dance is what our hero does ... in the most unexpected ways! [via]

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  • Daughter of Fortune
    by Isabel Allende
    ISBN 1417755946 (1-4177-5594-6)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    Book summary:

    Oprah Book Club® Selection, February 2000: Until Isabel Allende burst onto the scene with her 1985 debut, The House of the Spirits, Latin American fiction was, for the most part, a boys' club comprising such heavy hitters as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mario Vargas Llosa. But the Chilean Allende shouldered her way in with her magical realist multi-generational tale of the Trueba family, followed it up with four more novels and a spate of nonfiction, and has remained in a place of honor ever since. Her sixth work of fiction, Daughter of Fortune, shares some characteristics with her earlier works: the canvas is wide, the characters are multi-generational and multi-ethnic, and the protagonist is an unconventional woman who overcomes enormous obstacles to make her way in the world. Yet one cannot accuse Allende of telling the same story twice; set in the mid-1800s, this novel follows the fortunes of Eliza Sommers, Chilean by birth but adopted by a British spinster, Rose Sommers, and her bachelor brother, Jeremy, after she is abandoned on their doorstep.

    "You have English blood, like us," Miss Rose assured Eliza when she was old enough to understand. "Only someone from the British colony would have thought to leave you in a basket on the doorstep of the British Import and Export Company, Limited. I am sure they knew how good-hearted my brother Jeremy is, and felt sure he would take you in. In those days I was longing to have a child, and you fell into my arms, sent by God to be brought up in the solid principles of the Protestant faith and the English language."
    The family servant, Mama Fresia, has a different point of view, however: "You, English? Don't get any ideas, child. You have Indian hair, like mine." And certainly Eliza's almost mystical ability to recall all the events of her life would seem to stem more from the Indian than the Protestant side.

    As Eliza grows up, she becomes less tractable, and when she falls in love with Joachin Andieta, a clerk in Jeremy's firm, her adoptive family is horrified. They are even more so when a now-pregnant Eliza follows her lover to California where he has gone to make his fortune in the 1849 gold rush. Along the way Eliza meets Tao Chi'en, a Chinese doctor who saves her life and becomes her closest friend. What starts out as a search for a lost love becomes, over time, the discovery of self; and by the time Eliza finally catches up with the elusive Joachin, she is no longer sure she still wants what she once wished for. Allende peoples her novel with a host of colorful secondary characters. She even takes the narrative as far afield as China, providing an intimate portrait of Tao Chi'en's past before returning to 19th-century San Francisco, where he and Eliza eventually fetch up. Readers with a taste for the epic, the picaresque, and romance that is satisfyingly complex will find them all in Daughter of Fortune. --Margaret Prior [via]

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  • Diary
    by Chuck Palahniuk
    ISBN 1400032814 (1-4000-3281-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Misty Wilmot has had it. Once a promising young artist, shes now stuck on an island ruined by tourism, drinking too much and working as a waitress in a hotel. Her husband, a contractor, is in a coma after a suicide attempt, but that doesnt stop his clients from threatening Misty with lawsuits over a series of vile messages theyve found on the walls of houses he remodeled.

    Suddenly, though, Misty finds her artistic talent returning as she begins a period of compulsive painting. Inspired but confused by this burst of creativity, she soon finds herself a pawn in a larger conspiracy that threatens to cost hundreds of lives. What unfolds is a dark, hilarious story from Americas most inventive nihilist, and Palahniuks most impressive work to date. [via]

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  • The Dice Man
    by Luke Rhinehart
    ISBN 0879518642 (0-87951-864-2)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    The cult classic that can still change your life! Let the dice decide! This is the philosophy that changes the life of bored psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart -- and in some ways changes the world as well. Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time. [via]

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  • Die Satanischen Verse
    by Salman Rushdie
    ISBN 3426606488 (3-426-60648-8)
    Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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  • Dufy
    by Pierre Camo
    ISBN 0828839824 (0-8288-3982-4)
    Softcover, French & European Pubns

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  • Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451
    Fahrenheit 451
    by Ray Bradbury
    ISBN 1417620285 (1-4176-2028-5)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    Book summary:

    In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't put out fires--they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury's vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal--a place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and ideas are bad. Fire Captain Beatty explains it this way, "Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs.... Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

    Guy Montag is a book-burning fireman undergoing a crisis of faith. His wife spends all day with her television "family," imploring Montag to work harder so that they can afford a fourth TV wall. Their dull, empty life sharply contrasts with that of his next-door neighbor Clarisse, a young girl thrilled by the ideas in books, and more interested in what she can see in the world around her than in the mindless chatter of the tube. When Clarisse disappears mysteriously, Montag is moved to make some changes, and starts hiding books in his home. Eventually, his wife turns him in, and he must answer the call to burn his secret cache of books. After fleeing to avoid arrest, Montag winds up joining an outlaw band of scholars who keep the contents of books in their heads, waiting for the time society will once again need the wisdom of literature.

    Bradbury--the author of more than 500 short stories, novels, plays, and poems, including The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man--is the winner of many awards, including the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. Readers ages 13 to 93 will be swept up in the harrowing suspense of Fahrenheit 451, and no doubt will join the hordes of Bradbury fans worldwide. --Neil Roseman [via]

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  • Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle That Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 358 Years
    by Simon Singh
    ISBN 1857026691 (1-85702-669-1)
    Hardcover, Fourth Estate

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    Book summary:

    In 1963, a schoolboy browsing in his local library stumbled across a great mathematical problem: Fermat's Last Theorem, a puzzle that every child can now understand, but which has baffled mathematicians for over 300 years. Aged just ten, Andrew Wiles dreamed he would crack it. Many people had tried before Wiles and failed, including an 18th-century philanderer who was killed in a duel. An 18th-century Frenchwoman made a major breakthrough in solving the riddle, but she had to attend maths lectures at the Ecole Polytechnique disguised as a man. This is the story of the puzzle that has confounded mathematicians since the 17th century. The solution of the Theorem is one of the most important mathematical developments of the 20th century. [via]

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  • Fever Pitch
    by Nick Hornby
    ISBN 1573226882 (1-57322-688-2)
    Softcover, Riverhead Books

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    Book summary:

    In the States, Nick Hornby is best know as the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, two wickedly funny novels about being thirtysomething and going nowhere fast. In Britain he is revered for his status as a fanatical football writer (sorry, fanatical soccer writer), owing to Fever Pitch--which is both an autobiography and a footballing Bible rolled into one. Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his formative year--the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. The author quickly moved "way beyond fandom" into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, loves, and relationships. His father had initially hoped that Saturday afternoon matches would draw the two closer together, but instead Hornby became completely besotted with the game at the expense of any conversation: "Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or what we chose to say was necessarily positive." Girlfriends also played second fiddle to one ball and 11 men. He fantasizes that even if a girlfriend "went into labor at an impossible moment" he would not be able to help out until after the final whistle.

    Fever Pitch is not a typical memoir--there are no chapters, just a series of match reports falling into three time frames (childhood, young adulthood, manhood). While watching the May 2, 1972, Reading v. Arsenal match, it became embarrassingly obvious to the then 15-year-old that his white, suburban, middle-class roots made him a wimp with no sense of identity: "Yorkshire men, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about." But a boy from Maidenhead could only dream of coming from a place with "its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems."

    Fever Pitch reveals the very special intricacies of British football, which readers new to the game will find astonishing, and which Hornby presents with remarkable humor and honesty--the "unique" chants sung at matches, the cold rain-soaked terraces, giant cans of warm beer, the trains known as football specials carrying fans to and from matches in prisonlike conditions, bottles smashing on the tracks, thousands of policemen waiting in anticipation for the cargo of hooligans. The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby's life--making him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles. --Naomi Gesinger [via]

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  • Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon
    by Chuck Palahniuk
    ISBN 1400047838 (1-4000-4783-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    It's rare to find a travel guide and a memoir joined neatly together in a single, highly readable 176-page volume. But Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Choke, Lullaby) is a writer of rare talent and his home of Portland, Oregon, is a city of rare wonders. In Strangers and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon, Palahniuk goes beyond the AAA handbooks to reveal the places, people, and legends of Portland that have long been known only to locals. The reader learns the location of the legendary Self Cleaning House, where to find the restless ghost of the founder of Powell's Books, and why feral cats are such an important part of Portland baseball. Portland, it seems, is also a highly sexual city and Palahniuk dutifully dissects the specialties of each strip joint as well as discussing Mochika, a zoo penguin with a real fetish for black boots. Along the way, he includes "postcards" from his life in the Rose City dating back to 1981 when, as a 19-year-old, he dropped acid and accidentally ate part of a woman's fur coat during a laser show of Pink Floyd's The Wall. As Palahniuk matures, the postcards reveal the author becoming increasingly a part of the city's scene, culminating with a wild and wooly Millennium Eve celebration at the Bagdad Theater that featured a screening of the film version of Fight Club. Fugitives and Refugees is a must for anyone who may, in their lives, go to Portland. But its appeal should reach beyond Oregonians. Palahniuk's love of the city is so great, and his stories so weirdly wonderful, it makes one want to get out of the house, get in the car, and drive to Portland right away. Just remember to pack the book. --John Moe [via]

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  • Pelevin, Viktor: Generation P
    Generation P
    by Viktor Pelevin
    ISBN 5702709497 (5-7027-0949-7)
    Hardcover, Vagrius

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  • Coupland, Douglas: Generation X
    Generation X
    by Douglas Coupland
    ISBN 1417706643 (1-4177-0664-3)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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  • The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
    by Haruki Murakami, Alfred T. Birnbaum
    ISBN 4770015445 (4-7700-1544-5)
    Hardcover, Kodansha International

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    Book summary:

    The narrator, like the narrator of A Wild Sheep Chase, is a mensch--an ordinary fellow aspiring to decency and self-respect, an individual laboring under the illusion of free will. Information is the key to this society in this unnerving tale of technological espionage, brain-wave tampering, and science-fictional fear and loathing. [via]

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  • Harper Lee's to Kill a Mockingbird
    by Christopher Sergel
    ISBN 0871290863 (0-87129-086-3)
    Softcover, Dramatic Pub Co

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  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    by J. K. Rowling, Mary Grandpre
    ISBN 1594130035 (1-59413-003-5)
    Softcover, Large Print Pr

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    Book summary:

    Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire CD Set tells the story of Harry's fourth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in 18 CDs. The audio book is also available in two volumes, Part 1 and Part 2, each containing 9 CDs.

    Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the long-awaited, heavily hyped fourth instalment of a phenomenally successful series that has captured the imagination of millions of readers, young and old, across the globe. For J K Rowling the pressure is certainly on to continue to come up with thrilling, pacey storylines that allow her hero to mature into a young man without detracting from the magical secret that has made Harry into a superstar. In this book, the teenage Harry has a certain gawky charm that fits well with his advancing adolescence. As the story moves on, Harry too moves on to a new level of maturity that leaves the reader wondering how he will learn from his experiences, and liking him all the more as a character.

    Once returned to Hogwarts after his summer holiday with the dreadful Dursleys and an extraordinary outing to the Quidditch World Cup, the 14-year-old Harry and his fellow pupils are enraptured by the promise of the Triwizard Tournament: an ancient, ritualistic tournament that brings Hogwarts together with two other schools of wizardry--Durmstrang and Beauxbatons--in heated competition. But when Harry's name is pulled from the Goblet of Fire, and he is chosen to champion Hogwarts in the tournament, the trouble really begins. Still reeling from the effects of a terrifying nightmare that has left him shaken, and with the lightning-shaped scar on his head throbbing with pain (a sure sign that the evil Voldemort, Harry's sworn enemy, is close), Harry becomes at once the most popular boy in school. Yet, despite his fame, he is totally unprepared for the furore that follows.

    This is a hefty volume: 636 pages, of which probably at least 200 could have been cut without detracting from the story. The weight and complexity of the book is perhaps a hint that Rowling now has her eye sharply focused on her adult audience, and the average child-reader (particularly one who is coming to Harry Potter for the first time) may well find its girth daunting. Rowling's ironic and pointed observations on tabloid journalism and the nature of media hype is just one of the references littered through the book that will tickle the grown-ups but may well fly over the heads of her young fans.

    However, after a slow start, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire really starts to sparkle halfway through with Rowling's familiar magic (and yes, there is a death--sudden and tragic--and yes, Harry does start to notice girls). The crux of this story, however, is Harry's gradual coming-of-age and his handling of the increasingly determined threats to his own life.

    This book is pivotal, not just for the author for whom the heat is well and truly on, but for Harry and his readers who, by the last chapter, are left in little doubt that there is much more to come. (Ages 10 to adult) --Susan Harrison [via]

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  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    by J. K. Rowling
    ISBN 1581306571 (1-58130-657-1)
    Softcover, Novel Units

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    Book summary:

    For most children, summer vacation is something to look forward to. But not for our 13-year-old hero, who's forced to spend his summers with an aunt, uncle, and cousin who detest him. The third book in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series catapults into action when the young wizard "accidentally" causes the Dursleys' dreadful visitor Aunt Marge to inflate like a monstrous balloon and drift up to the ceiling. Fearing punishment from Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon (and from officials at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry who strictly forbid students to cast spells in the nonmagic world of Muggles), Harry lunges out into the darkness with his heavy trunk and his owl Hedwig.

    As it turns out, Harry isn't punished at all for his errant wizardry. Instead he is mysteriously rescued from his Muggle neighborhood and whisked off in a triple-decker, violently purple bus to spend the remaining weeks of summer in a friendly inn called the Leaky Cauldron. What Harry has to face as he begins his third year at Hogwarts explains why the officials let him off easily. It seems that Sirius Black--an escaped convict from the prison of Azkaban--is on the loose. Not only that, but he's after Harry Potter. But why? And why do the Dementors, the guards hired to protect him, chill Harry's very heart when others are unaffected? Once again, Rowling has created a mystery that will have children and adults cheering, not to mention standing in line for her next book. Fortunately, there are four more in the works. (Ages 9 and older) --Karin Snelson [via]

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  • Birmingham, John: He Died With a Felafel in His Hand
    He Died With a Felafel in His Hand
    by John Birmingham
    ISBN 1875989218 (1-875989-21-8)
    Softcover, Duffy & Snellgrove

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  • A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
    by Dave Eggers
    ISBN 1568959095 (1-56895-909-5)
    Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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    Book summary:

    Dave Eggers is a terrifically talented writer; don't hold his cleverness against him. What to make of a book called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story? For starters, there's a good bit of staggering genius before you even get to the true story, including a preface, a list of "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book," and a 20-page acknowledgements section complete with special mail-in offer, flow chart of the book's themes, and a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of a stapler (helpfully labeled "Here is a drawing of a stapler:").

    But on to the true story. At the age of 22, Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labor, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his 8-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters, and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing manically fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.)

    The book is also, perhaps less successfully, about being young and hip and out to conquer the world (in an ironic, media-savvy, Gen-X way, naturally). In the early '90s, Eggers was one of the founders of the very funny Might Magazine, and he spends a fair amount of time here on Might, the hipster culture of San Francisco's South Park, and his own efforts to get on to MTV's Real World. This sort of thing doesn't age very well--but then, Eggers knows that. There's no criticism you can come up with that he hasn't put into A.H.W.O.S.G. already. "The book thereafter is kind of uneven," he tells us regarding the contents after page 109, and while that's true, it's still uneven in a way that is funny and heartfelt and interesting.

    All this self-consciousness could have become unbearably arch. It's a testament to Eggers's skill as a writer--and to the heartbreaking particulars of his story--that it doesn't. Currently the editor of the footnote-and-marginalia-intensive journal McSweeney's (the last issue featured an entire story by David Foster Wallace printed tinily on its spine), Eggers comes from the most media-saturated generation in history--so much so that he can't feel an emotion without the sense that it's already been felt for him. What may seem like postmodern noodling is really just Eggers writing about pain in the only honest way available to him. Oddly enough, the effect is one of complete sincerity, and--especially in its concluding pages--this memoir as metafiction is affecting beyond all rational explanation. --Mary Park [via]

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  • Pelevin, Victor: The Helmet of Horror
    The Helmet of Horror
    by Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield
    ISBN 184195912X (1-84195-912-X)
    Softcover, Canongate Books Ltd

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  • Helmet of Horror: The Myth Of Theseus And The Minotaur
    by Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield
    ISBN 1841957607 (1-84195-760-7)
    Hardcover, Canongate Books Ltd

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    Book summary:

    Victor Pelevin, the wildly interesting contemporary Russian novelist who The New Yorker named one of the Best European Writers Under 35, upends any conventional notions of what mythology must be with his unique take on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. By creating a mesmerizing world where the surreal and the hyperreal collide, The Helmet of Horror is a radical retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur set in an Internet chat room. They have never met, they have been assigned strange pseudonyms, they inhabit identical rooms that open out onto very different landscapes, and they have entered a dialogue they cannot escape  a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. Its wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown.

    The Helmet of Horror is structured according to the way we communicate in the twenty-first century  using the Internet  yet instilled with the figures and narratives of classical mythology. It is a labyrinthine examination of epistemological uncertainty that radically reinvents this myth for an age where information is abundant but knowledge ultimately unattainable.
    [via]

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  • Coupland, Douglas: Hey Nostradamus!
    Hey Nostradamus!
    by Douglas Coupland
    ISBN 1582344159 (1-58234-415-9)
    Softcover, Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA

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  • High Fidelity
    by Nick Hornby
    ISBN 1573228214 (1-57322-821-4)
    Softcover, Riverhead Books

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    Book summary:

    It has been said often enough that baby boomers are a television generation, but the very funny novel High Fidelity reminds that in a way they are the record-album generation as well. This funny novel is obsessed with music; Hornby's narrator is an early-thirtysomething English guy who runs a London record store. He sells albums recorded the old-fashioned way--on vinyl--and is having a tough time making other transitions as well, specifically adulthood. The book is in one sense a love story, both sweet and interesting; most entertaining, though, are the hilarious arguments over arcane matters of pop music. [via]

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  • The Hot Zone
    by Richard Preston
    ISBN 1568952058 (1-56895-205-8)
    Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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    Book summary:

    A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the
    appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • An Instance of the Fingerpost
    by Iain Pears
    ISBN 1573227951 (1-57322-795-1)
    Softcover, Riverhead Books

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    Book summary:

    An Instance of the Fingerpost is that rarest of all possible literary beasts--a mystery powered as much by ideas as by suspects, autopsies, and smoking guns. Hefty, intricately plotted, and intellectually ambitious, Fingerpost has drawn the inevitable comparisons to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and, for once, the comparison is apt.

    The year is 1663, and the setting is Oxford, England, during the height of Restoration political intrigue. When Dr. Robert Grove is found dead in his Oxford room, hands clenched and face frozen in a rictus of pain, all the signs point to poison. Rashomon-like, the narrative circles around Grove's murder as four different characters give their version of events: Marco da Cola, a visiting Italian physician--or so he would like the reader to believe; Jack Prestcott, the son of a traitor who fled the country to avoid execution; Dr. John Wallis, a mathematician and cryptographer with a predilection for conspiracy theories; and Anthony Wood, a mild-mannered Oxford antiquarian whose tale proves to be the book's "instance of the fingerpost." (The quote comes from the philosopher Bacon, who, while asserting that all evidence is ultimately fallible, allows for "one instance of a fingerpost that points in one direction only, and allows of no other possibility.")

    Like The Name of the Rose, this is one whodunit in which the principal mystery is the nature of truth itself. Along the way, Pears displays a keen eye for period details as diverse as the early days of medicine, the convoluted politics of the English Civil War, and the newfangled fashion for wigs. Yet Pears never loses sight of his characters, who manage to be both utterly authentic denizens of the 17th century and utterly authentic human beings. As a mystery, An Instance of the Fingerpost is entertainment of the most intelligent sort; as a novel of ideas, it proves equally satisfying. [via]

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  • The Joy Luck Club
    by Amy Tan
    ISBN 1587248832 (1-58724-883-2)
    Softcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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    Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.

    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. [via]

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  • Kafka On The Shore
    by Haruki Murakami, J. Philip Gabriel, Philip Gabriel
    ISBN 1400079276 (1-4000-7927-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.

    This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it 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 riddleyet 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.

    Extravagant in its accomplishment, Kafka on the Shore displays one of the worlds truly great storytellers at the height of his powers. [via]

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  • Les Particules Elementaires
    by Michel Houellebecq
    ISBN 2080674722 (2-08-067472-2)
    Hardcover, Flammarion

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    L'un est un scientifique de renom, l'autre est anonyme ; l'un a choisi une solitude absolue, l'autre ne l'a pas choisie mais la subit quand même ; l'un et l'autre sont frères et n'ont rien en commun, sinon cette propension au malheur. Ou plutôt au "non-bonheur" : bonheur dont les auraient privés les débordements libertaires des années soixante-dix. Chacun de leur côté, en se traînant de fiasco en désastre, et de retraite en désert, ils vont faire de leur vie la preuve de ce désenchantement du monde et révéler enfin la clef des rapports entre les hommes : l'illusion.

    Lors de sa sortie, ce livre a fait couler beaucoup d'encre, suscité de vives passions et de violents débats, alimentés par la personnalité de son auteur, volontiers provocateur et irrévérencieux. Cela ne fait qu'ajouter à la fascination que provoque la lecture de ce roman, qui remet en cause toutes nos certitudes et nous oblige à réagir. Que l'on aime ou pas le style Houellebecq, il est urgent de lire Les Particules élémentaires. --Karla Manuele [via]

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  • The Lovely Bones
    by Alice Sebold
    ISBN 159413023X (1-59413-023-X)
    Softcover, Thorndike Press

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    On her way home from school on a snowy December day, 14-year-old Susie Salmon is lured into a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case.

    As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams", where "there were no teachers... We never had to go inside except for art class... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue".

    The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years. Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother Buckley attempts to make sense of the new hole in his family and her younger sister Lindsey moves through the milestone events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie riding spiritual shotgun. Random acts and missed opportunities run throughout the book--Susie recalls her sole kiss with a boy on earth as "like an accident--a beautiful gasoline rainbow".

    Though sentimental at times, The Lovely Bones is a moving exploration of loss and mourning that ultimately puts its faith in the living and that is made even more powerful by a cast of convincing characters. Sebold orchestrates a big finish and though things tend to wrap up a little too well for everyone in the end, one can only imagine (or hope) that heaven is indeed a place filled with such happy endings. --Brad Thomas Parsons, Amazon.com [via]

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  • Goldman, William: Marathon Man
    Marathon Man
    by William Goldman
    ISBN 0884116530 (0-88411-653-0)
    Hardcover, Amereon Ltd

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  • Hoeg, Peter: Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
    Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
    by Peter Hoeg
    ISBN 1860461670 (1-86046-167-0)
    Softcover, Harvill Pr

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    A little boy falls off a roof and is killed. Smilla Jaspersen, his neighbour, suspects it is not an accident: she has seen his footsteps in the snow, and, having been brought up by her mother, a Greenlander, she has a feeling for snow. [via]

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  • Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow: The Making of a Film
    by Karin Trolle, Peter Heg, Bille August
    ISBN 1860463711 (1-86046-371-1)
    Hardcover, Harvill Press

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    Book summary:

    This volume gives an insight into the making of the film "Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow". It contains interviews with the director, Bille August, and the cast: Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Harris and Jim Broadbent, and also with the author himself, Peter Hoeg There are approximately 150 stills from the shooting of the film, as well as drawings by the set decorator, storyboard sketches, call sheets and Peter Hoeg's hand-written drafts of the novel, showing how the complex character of Miss Smilla came into being on the page and on the screen. [via]

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  • Noruwei No Mori
    by Haruki Murakami
    ISBN 4062035162 (4-06-203516-2)
    Hardcover, Kodansha

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    Noruwei no mori, Vol. 2 (Japanese Edition) by Murakami, Haruki [via]

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  • A Prayer for Owen Meany
    by John Irving, Diane Podnar
    ISBN 1560774142 (1-56077-414-2)
    Softcover, Center for Learning

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  • Princess Bride
    by William Goldman
    ISBN 0899668097 (0-89966-809-7)
    Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

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    Book summary:

    The Princess Bride is a true fantasy classic. William Goldman describes it as a "good parts version" of "S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure." Morgenstern's original was filled with details of Florinese history, court etiquette, and Mrs. Morgenstern's mostly complimentary views of the text. Much admired by academics, the "Classic Tale" nonetheless obscured what Mr. Goldman feels is a story that has everything: "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles."

    Goldman frames the fairy tale with an "autobiographical" story: his father, who came from Florin, abridged the book as he read it to his son. Now, Goldman is publishing an abridged version, interspersed with comments on the parts he cut out.

    Is The Princess Bride a critique of classics like Ivanhoe and The Three Musketeers, that smother a ripping yarn under elaborate prose? A wry look at the differences between fairy tales and real life? Simply a funny, frenetic adventure? No matter how you read it, you'll put it on your "keeper" shelf. --Nona Vero [via]

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  • The Satanic Verses
    by Salman Rushdie
    ISBN 0963270702 (0-9632707-0-2)
    Softcover, Consortium

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    Book summary:

    No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside, it is a marvelously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers, and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta ("for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies") and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. Rushdie's powers of invention are astonishing in this Whitbread Prize winner. [via]

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  • The Secret History
    by Donna Tartt
    ISBN 1400031702 (1-4000-3170-2)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Truly deserving of the accolade a modern classic, Donna Tartt's novel is a remarkable achievement-both compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful.Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill. [via]

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  • The Shadow of the Wind: A Novel
    by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Lucia Graves
    ISBN 1594200106 (1-59420-010-6)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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    Make this your next book club selection and everyone saves.
    Get 15% off when you order 5 or more of this title for your book club.
    Simply enter the coupon code ZAFONSHADOW at checkout.
    This offer does not apply to eBook purchases. This offer applies to only one downloadable audio per purchase.

    Barcelona, 1945just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mothers face. To console his only child, Daniels widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelonas guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniels father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Caraxs work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence. Before Daniel knows it his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelonas darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness and doomed love. And before long he realizes that if he doesnt find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.

    As with all astounding novels, The Shadow of the Wind sends the mind groping for comparisons The Crimson Petal and the White? The novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte? Of Victor Hugo? Love in the Time of Cholera?but in the end, as with all astounding novels, no comparison can suffice. As one leading Spanish reviewer wrote, The originality of Ruiz Zafóns voice is bombproof and displays a diabolical talent. The Shadow of the Wind announces a phenomenon in Spanish literature. An uncannily absorbing historical mystery, a heart-piercing romance, and a moving homage to the mystical power of books, The Shadow of the Wind is a triumph of the storytellers art.

    [via]

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  • Lewycka, Marina: A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian
    A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian
    by Marina Lewycka
    ISBN 1594200440 (1-59420-044-0)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • The Solitaire Mystery
    by Jostein Gaarder
    ISBN 185881636X (1-85881-636-X)
    Softcover, Trafalgar Square Books

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    Twelve-year-old Hans and his father have left home to search for Hans's mother. She went to Greece to 'find herself' when he was four. Hans's father loves to philosophise on life (and to drink) and Hans is always happy to listen. But this turns out to be a strange journey. A dwarf in Switzerland gives Hans a magnifying glass. Next day a baker gives him a bun with a tiny book in it. As Hans begins to read the book, he discovers an incredible cast of characters, from a shipwrecked sailor to a Joker who looks too deeply and too much. The more he reads, the more Hans begins to think that the book is trying to tell him something about his own life. But will it help him to find his mother? An incredibly imaginative book, that lingers in the mind long after the last page has been read. [via]

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  • Garland, Alex: The Tesseract
    The Tesseract
    by Alex Garland
    ISBN 1573227749 (1-57322-774-9)
    Softcover, Riverhead Books

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    Book summary:

    A single evening in Manila hints at shared consciousness and the circular nature of time and experience. More ambitious than his successful debut, The Beach, Alex Garland's second novel follows three seemingly disparate stories that converge just this side of possible. Opening pages are reminiscent of a Raymond Chandler detective story: the dirty hotel room that "didn't know it was a hotel, or had forgotten"; the flinty, deep thinking protagonist; a meeting with rough-cut thugs. But just when we expect the arrival of the stock sultry woman, the cast of characters begins to assume the more recognisable aspects of ordinary life--to eerie effect.

    Garland shows a talent for finely crafted phrases that emboss an image and encapsulate a moment. One minor character's brief sensory flashback provides more human insight than the pages of descriptive overload in the usual thriller. The Tesseract is an exciting tale that never stoops to the level of popcorn storytelling. --Samantha Starmer [via]

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  • To Kill a Mockingbird
    by Harper Lee
    ISBN 088103052X (0-88103-052-X)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.... When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out."

    Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up.

    Like the slow-moving occupants of her fictional town, Lee takes her time getting to the heart of her tale; we first meet the Finches the summer before Scout's first year at school. She, her brother, and Dill Harris, a boy who spends the summers with his aunt in Maycomb, while away the hours reenacting scenes from Dracula and plotting ways to get a peek at the town bogeyman, Boo Radley. At first the circumstances surrounding the alleged rape of Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a drunk and violent white farmer, barely penetrate the children's consciousness. Then Atticus is called on to defend the accused, Tom Robinson, and soon Scout and Jem find themselves caught up in events beyond their understanding. During the trial, the town exhibits its ugly side, but Lee offers plenty of counterbalance as well--in the struggle of an elderly woman to overcome her morphine habit before she dies; in the heroism of Atticus Finch, standing up for what he knows is right; and finally in Scout's hard-won understanding that most people are essentially kind "when you really see them." By turns funny, wise, and heartbreaking, To Kill a Mockingbird is one classic that continues to speak to new generations, and deserves to be reread often. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • To Kill a Mockingbird
    by Novel Units Inc. Staff
    ISBN 1561373079 (1-56137-307-9)
    Softcover, Novel Units

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  • Watership Down
    by Richard George Adams
    ISBN 0901720313 (0-901720-31-3)
    Hardcover, Rex Collings Ltd

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    Watership Down has been a staple of high-school English classes for years. Despite the fact that it's often a hard sell at first (what teenager wouldn't cringe at the thought of 400-plus pages of talking rabbits?), Richard Adams's bunny-centric epic rarely fails to win the love and respect of anyone who reads it, regardless of age. Like most great novels, Watership Down is a rich story that can be read (and reread) on many different levels. The book is often praised as an allegory, with its analogs between human and rabbit culture (a fact sometimes used to goad skeptical teens, who resent the challenge that they won't "get" it, into reading it), but it's equally praiseworthy as just a corking good adventure.

    The story follows a warren of Berkshire rabbits fleeing the destruction of their home by a land developer. As they search for a safe haven, skirting danger at every turn, we become acquainted with the band and its compelling culture and mythos. Adams has crafted a touching, involving world in the dirt and scrub of the English countryside, complete with its own folk history and language (the book comes with a "lapine" glossary, a guide to rabbitese). As much about freedom, ethics, and human nature as it is about a bunch of bunnies looking for a warm hidey-hole and some mates, Watership Down will continue to make the transition from classroom desk to bedside table for many generations to come. --Paul Hughes [via]

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  • Murakami, Haruki: A Wild Sheep Chase
    A Wild Sheep Chase
    by Haruki Murakami, Alfred T. Birnbaum
    ISBN 0870119052 (0-87011-905-2)
    Hardcover, Kodansha America, Incorporated

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  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
    by Haruki Murakami
    ISBN 1860464696 (1-86046-469-6)
    Softcover, Harvill Pr

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    Book summary:

    Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.

    Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

    If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake [via]

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  • Koch, Christopher J.: The Year of Living Dangerously
    The Year of Living Dangerously
    by Christopher J. Koch
    ISBN 094707225X (0-947072-25-X)
    Hardcover, Chivers North Amer

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French

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  • Fahrenheit 451
    by Ray Bradbury
    ISBN 3257208626 (3-257-20862-6)
    Softcover, Diogenes Verlag AG

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    All books are shipped from Austria! [via]

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  • Gottes Werk Und Teufels Beitrag
    by John Irving
    ISBN 3257218370 (3-257-21837-0)
    Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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    Book summary:

    Slight signs of wear! [via]

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  • Harry Potter: 4 und der Feuerkelch
    by Joanne K. Rowling
    ISBN 3551551936 (3-551-55193-6)
    Softcover

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    Book summary:

    Auch der vierte Harry Potter-Band wurde von den Fans sehnsüchtig erwartet, als er am 14. Oktober 2000 auf Deutsch erschien (am 08. Juli 2000 in der englischen Originalausgabe). 800 Seiten voller Abenteuer: u. a. werden die Fragen nach dem Gewinner des Quidditch-Worldcups beantwortet, außerdem in wen Harry sich verliebt und wer derjenige von den altvertrauten Figuren ist, der das Ende von Band 4 nicht überleben wird.

    Die Weltmeisterschaft im Quidditch ist nicht nur ein sportlicher Höhepunkt, sondern auch eine organisatorische Meisterleistung (wie geben Tausende von Zauberern und Zauberinnen sich den Anschein, eine ganz harmlose Versammlung von Muggels zu sein?). Und der im Titel erwähnte Feuerkelch spielt eine nicht unbedeutende Rolle dabei, dass die Zauberschule Hogwarts im Wettbewerb mit zwei anderen Schulen einen gewissen Vorteil erhält. Sie haben richtig gelesen: Zwar haben wir uns bisher kein einziges Mal gefragt, ob es noch andere Zauberschulen außer Hogwarts gibt -- mit seinem weiten Gelände, das sich zwischen den Gewächshäusern der Botanik-Lehrerin Prof. Sprout, dem See und Hagrids Hütte mit seinem Zoo an absonderlichen magischen Kreaturen erstreckt, schien es uns wie ein kleines perfektes Universum. Aber so wie Joanne K. Rowling die Schüler aus dem noblen Beauxbatons und dem abgelegenen Durmstrang beschreibt, die in Hogwarts zu Gast sind, muss man ihr einfach glauben, dass es die reine Wahrheit und irgendwie schon immer so gewesen ist, so wie wir ihr auch jede Menge Poltergeister, Hauselfen, Einhörner, Zentauren und sonstige magische Wesen glauben.

    Lord Voldemort, auch bekannt als Tom Riddle, auch bekannt als das Böse in Person (wenngleich seit einigen Jahren ohne einen eigenen Körper und quasi nur als eiskalter geistiger Hauch vorhanden) hat längst nicht aufgegeben, Harry nach dem Leben zu trachten -- und langsam, ganz langsam gelingt es ihm auch mithilfe des ihm ergebenen Wormtail, neue Kräfte zu sammeln. --Heike Reher

    Harry Potter und der Feuerkelch gibt es als Normalausgabe und als Ausgabe für Erwachsene. Die beiden Ausgaben unterscheiden sich in der Umschlaggestaltung, sind aber textlich identisch. [via]

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  • Harry Potter und der Gefangene von Azkaban
    by J. K. Rowling
    ISBN 3551551693 (3-551-55169-3)
    Softcover, Carlsen Verlag

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    Dass es für ein Buch einen Erstverkaufstag gibt, ist nichts Neues, doch dass sogar eine Erstverkaufsstunde festgelegt wird, das hat es noch nicht gegeben. Als in England der dritte Band der beliebten Harry-Potter-Reihe erschien, wurde, um ein kollektives Schwänzen der Schüler zu vermeiden, bestimmt, dieses Buch nicht vor 16.30 Uhr zu veräußern. Trotzdem war nach wenigen Stunden die erste Auflage restlos ausverkauft.

    Joanne Rowling knüpft auch in Deutschland mit ihrem neuen Band an ihren bisherigen Erfolg an. Harry ist mittlerweile im dritten Jahr auf der Zauberschule. Er ist so froh wie nie, als die Schule endlich wieder beginnt, denn wieder musste er seine Ferien bei den schrecklichen Dursleys verbringen. Und dann kommt auch noch die fürchterliche Tante Magda zu Besuch. Einfach grässlich. Aus Versehen lässt er sie mit einem kleinen Schwebezauber an die Decke abheben. Eigentlich bricht er damit eine Regel der Zauberer. Aber Harry droht kein Schulverweis, denn das Zauberministerium schützt ihn, da man vermutet, der gefürchtete Verbrecher Sirius Black -- aus dem gut bewachten Gefängnis Askaban entkommen -- ist hinter Harry her.

    Harry rätselt, was Black mit ihm zu schaffen hat. Bei einem nächtlichen Gespräch erfährt er, dass dieser am Tod seiner Eltern beteiligt war.

    Joanne Rowling lässt ihre Fantasie Purzelbäume schlagen und als erwachsener Leser kann man sich nur wünschen, immer so jung zu bleiben, dass einem dieses Buch Freude bereitet. --Manuela Haselberger

    Harry Potter und der Gefangene von Askaban gibt es als Normalausgabe und als Ausgabe für Erwachsene. Die beiden Ausgaben unterscheiden sich in der Umschlaggestaltung, sind aber textlich identisch. [via]

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  • Harryz Zauberbox
    by J. K. Rowling
    ISBN 3551553009 (3-551-55300-9)
    Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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    Die Box und die Bücher sind in einen guten gebrauchten Zustand. [via]

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  • Der Strand
    by Alex Garland
    ISBN 3442442354 (3-442-44235-4)
    Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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    Ein Traumstrand in Thailand, umgeben von tropischem Dschungel - der junge Engländer Richard glaubt, das Paradies entdeckt zu haben. Nur eine kleine Gruppe junger Rucksacktouristen aus aller Weit teilt die Idylle mit ihm. Doch innerhalb weniger Tage zeigt der Strand sein wahres Gesicht, und Richard stellt fest, daß er in die Hölle geraten ist. [via]

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Spanish

  • El Club de la Buena Estrella
    by Amy Tan
    ISBN 1400002370 (1-4000-0237-0)
    Softcover, Plaza & Janes Editories, S.A.

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    En 1949, cuatro mujeres chinas emigradas a San Francisco se reunen regularmente para comer dim sum,jugar al mah-jong y hablar. Unidas por sentimientos de perdida y esperanza, se hacen llamar El Club de laBuena Estrella. Amy Tan explora la conexion entre las protagonistas y sus hijas, ya nacidas en Estados Unidos, un mundo totalmente distinto al suyo. [via]

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  • Desde Mi Cielo
    by Alise Ceboll
    ISBN 1400059453 (1-4000-5945-3)
    Softcover, Random House Mondadori

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    From her vantage point in heaven, Susie Salmon describes how she was confronted by a murderer one December afternoon on her way home from school. Lured into an underground hiding place, she was raped and killed. But what the reader knows, her family does not. Anxiously,we keep vigil with Susie, aching for her grieving family, desperate for the killer to be found and punished. Sebold creates a heaven that's calm and comforting, a place whose residents can have whatever they enjoyed when they were alive  and then some.
    But Susie isn't ready to release her hold on life just yet, and she intensely watches her family and friends as they struggle to cope with a reality in which she is no longer a part. [via]

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  • Les Particules Elementaires
    by Michel Houellebecq
    ISBN 2290351717 (2-290-35171-7)
    Softcover, J Ai Lu Editions

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    L'un est un scientifique de renom, l'autre est anonyme ; l'un a choisi une solitude absolue, l'autre ne l'a pas choisie mais la subit quand même ; l'un et l'autre sont frères et n'ont rien en commun, sinon cette propension au malheur. Ou plutôt au "non-bonheur" : bonheur dont les auraient privés les débordements libertaires des années soixante-dix. Chacun de leur côté, en se traînant de fiasco en désastre, et de retraite en désert, ils vont faire de leur vie la preuve de ce désenchantement du monde et révéler enfin la clef des rapports entre les hommes : l'illusion.

    Lors de sa sortie, ce livre a fait couler beaucoup d'encre, suscité de vives passions et de violents débats, alimentés par la personnalité de son auteur, volontiers provocateur et irrévérencieux. Cela ne fait qu'ajouter à la fascination que provoque la lecture de ce roman, qui remet en cause toutes nos certitudes et nous oblige à réagir. Que l'on aime ou pas le style Houellebecq, il est urgent de lire Les Particules élémentaires. --Karla Manuele [via]

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  • La Sombra Del Viento/ the Shadow of the Wind
    by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
    ISBN 0974872407 (0-9748724-0-7)
    Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp

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    Book summary:

    Un amanecer de 1945, un muchacho es conducido por su padre a un misterioso lugar oculto en el corazón de la ciudad vieja: el Cementerio de los Libros Olvidados. Allí encuentra La Sombra del Viento, un libro maldito que cambiará el rumbo de su vida y le arrastrará a un laberinto de intrigas y secretos enterrados en el alma oscura de la ciudad. Ambientada en la enigmática Barcelona de principios del siglo XX, este misterio literario mezcla técnicas de relato de intriga, de novela histórica y de comedia de costumbres, pero es, sobre todo, una tragedia histórica de amor cuyo eco se proyecta a través del tiempo. Con gran fuerza narrativa, el autor entrelaza tramas y enigmas a modo de muñecas rusas en un inolvidable relato sobre los secretos del corazón y el embrujo de los libros, manteniendo la intriga hasta la última página. [via]

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