books tagged “made into movie”

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  • The A.B.C. Murders
    by Agatha Christie
    ISBN 042513024X (0-425-13024-X)
    Softcover, Berkley Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Alice Ascher from Andover is the first victim. Next to her corpse is a spellbinding clue. It seems that a killer is knocking off his victims one-by-one, A through Z. Alphabetically speaking, Hercule Poirot fears that it's a matter of one down, twenty-five to go. [via]

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  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    by Mark Twain, Thomas Cooley
    ISBN 0393966402 (0-393-96640-2)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    In addition to the entire text of what some consider the quintessential American novel, this comprehensive volume features materials that help place the novel in perspective with its time and place. "Contexts" includes essays on the composition of the novel, the people and history of the Upper Mississippi Valley, slavery, and the critical reception of the novel upon its publication. "Readings" includes Henry Nash Smith's introduction to the 1958 Riverside Edition of the novel, as well as critical essays. [via]

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  • Bradley, Sculley: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    by Sculley Bradley, Mark Twain, E. Hudson Long, Thomas Cooley, Richmond Croom Beatty
    ISBN 0393044548 (0-393-04454-8)
    Softcover, Norton

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  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade)
    by Mark Twain, E.W. Kemble
    ISBN 0394605217 (0-394-60521-7)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    A seminal work of American Literature that still commands deep praise and still elicits controversy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a full understanding of the novel. The changes, deletions, and additions made in the first half of the manuscript indicate that Mark Twain frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational book than the one he finally published. [via]

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  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    by Mark Twain, Beverly Lyon Clark
    ISBN 0393926036 (0-393-92603-6)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Few books capture both the simplicity and complexities of American life quite like these enduring "boyhood" classics by Mark Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Take a lighthearted, nostalgic trip to a simpler time, seen through the eyes of a special boy named Tom Sawyer. It is a summertime world of hooky and adventure, pranks and punishment, villains and young love. [via]

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  • And Then There Were None
    by Agatha Christie
    ISBN 0425129586 (0-425-12958-6)
    Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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    Considered the best mystery novel ever written by many readers, And Then There Were None is the story of 10 strangers, each lured to Indian Island by a mysterious host. Once his guests have arrived, the host accuses each person of murder. Unable to leave the island, the guests begin to share their darkest secrets--until they begin to die. [via]

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  • The Andromeda Strain
    by Michael Crichton
    ISBN 0394415256 (0-394-41525-6)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Some biologists speculate that if we ever make contact with extraterrestrials, those life forms are likely to be--like most life on earth--one-celled or smaller creatures, more comparable to bacteria than little green men. And even though such organisms would not likely be able to harm humans, the possibility exists that first contact might be our last.

    That's the scientific supposition that Michael Crichton formulates and follows out to its conclusion in his excellent debut novel, The Andromeda Strain.

    A Nobel-Prize-winning bacteriologist, Jeremy Stone, urges the president to approve an extraterrestrial decontamination facility to sterilize returning astronauts, satellites, and spacecraft that might carry an "unknown biologic agent." The government agrees, almost too quickly, to build the top-secret Wildfire Lab in the desert of Nevada. Shortly thereafter, unbeknownst to Stone, the U.S. Army initiates the "Scoop" satellite program, an attempt to actively collect space pathogens for use in biological warfare. When Scoop VII crashes a couple years later in the isolated Arizona town of Piedmont, the Army ends up getting more than it asked for.

    The Andromeda Strain follows Stone and rest of the scientific team mobilized to react to the Scoop crash as they scramble to understand and contain a strange and deadly outbreak. Crichton's first book may well be his best; it has an earnestness that is missing from his later, more calculated thrillers. --Paul Hughes [via]

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  • Doubleday Staff: Anne Frank
    Anne Frank
    by Doubleday Staff
    ISBN 038542695X (0-385-42695-X)
    Softcover, Doubleday Canada, Limited

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  • The Annotated Huckleberry Finn
    by Mark Twain, Michael Patrick Hearn
    ISBN 0393020398 (0-393-02039-8)
    Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    A seminal work of American Literature that still commands deep praise and still elicits controversy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a full understanding of the novel. The changes, deletions, and additions made in the first half of the manuscript indicate that Mark Twain frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational book than the one he finally published. [via]

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  • McCullers, Carson: Ballad of the Sad Cafe
    Ballad of the Sad Cafe
    by Carson McCullers
    ISBN 0395079829 (0-395-07982-9)
    Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin

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  • The Best American Short Stories, 1999
    by Amy Tan, Katrina Kenison
    ISBN 039592684X (0-395-92684-X)
    Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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    Book summary:

    A great story gets its hooks into you right from the start; you know you're in the hands of a good writer when the very first sentence transports you wholly into another world. "Mother preferred Zulu servants." "It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring." "Who would have thought that a war of such proportions would bother to turn in its fury against the fools of Chelm?"

    The 21 fictions featured in The Best American Short Stories 1999 have very little in common--but whether they're about ranchers or commuters, romantic seekers or New Age pilgrims, what they do share is a sense of urgency. In each of them, there's a kind of voice that announces its need to be heard. "I'm not a bad guy," pleads the narrator of "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars," and even though he cheats on his girlfriend, by the end of Junot Díaz's story you might be tempted to agree anyway. (Especially considering the charming way he turns Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener into a verb--as in, "A lot of the time she Bartlebys me, says, 'No, I'd rather not.'") "Real Estate," by that master of bittersweet comedy Lorrie Moore, starts by repeating "Ha! Ha! Ha!" for two solid pages but becomes a rueful take on marriage, house-hunting, and even death: "The body, hauling sadnesses, pursued the soul, hobbled after. The body was like a sweet dim dog trotting lamely toward the gate as you tried slowly to drive off, out the long driveway. Take me, take me too, barked the dog."

    Other standouts in this collection include Alice Munro's "Save the Reaper," a kind of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" where no one is killed or saved; Rick Bass's haunting evocation of winter in the north country, "The Hermit's Story"; and Tim Gautreax's "The Piano Tuner," about a manic-depressive Creole princess playing cocktail piano in a motel lounge. (This is one tale that truly does end with a bang, not a whimper.) Taken together, they are ample evidence that the American short story is alive, well, and eminently able to--in the words of guest editor Amy Tan--"help us live interesting lives." --Chloe Byrne [via]

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  • The Big Sleep
    by Raymond Chandler
    ISBN 0394758285 (0-394-75828-5)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    "His thin, claw-like hands were folded loosely on the rug, purple-nailed. A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock." Published in 1939, when Raymond Chandler was 50, this is the first of the Philip Marlowe novels. Its bursts of sex, violence, and explosively direct prose changed detective fiction forever. "She was trouble. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full." [via]

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  • Congo
    by Michael Crichton
    ISBN 0394513924 (0-394-51392-4)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    If you saw the 1995 film adaptation of this Crichton thriller, somebody owes you an apology. While you're waiting for that to happen, try reading the vastly more intelligent novel on which the movie was based. The broad lines of the plot remain the same: A research team deep in the jungle disappears after a mysterious and grisly gorilla attack. A subsequent team, including a sign-language-speaking simian named Amy, follows the original team's tracks only to be subjected to more mysterious and grisly gorilla attacks. If you can look past the breathless treatment of '80s technology, like voice-recognition software and 256K RAM modules (the book was written in 1980), you'll find the same smart use of science and edge-of-your-seat suspense shared by Crichton's other work. --Paul Hughes [via]

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  • Count of Monte Cristo
    by Alexandre Dumas, Patricia C. Wrede
    ISBN 0439574293 (0-439-57429-3)
    Softcover, Scholastic Paperbacks

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    For nineteen-year-old Edmond Dantes, life is sweet. Soon to be captain of his own sip, he is also about to be married to his true love, Mercedes. But suddenly everything turns sour. On the joyous day of his wedding he is arrested and--without a fair trial--condemned to solitary confinement in the miserable Chateau d'If! The charges? Faked! Edmond has been framed by a handful of powerful enemies. But why?

    While locked away, Edmond learns from another prisoner of a secret treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo. Edmond concocts a daring and audacious plan: escape and find the treasure! But it is years later--long after Edmond has transformed himself into the Count of Monte Cristo--that his plan for revenge begins to unfold.

    Disguised as the wealthy count, Edmond returns to his native land to find his enemies--and make them pay!
    [via]

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  • Crash
    by J.G. Ballard
    ISBN 0394741099 (0-394-74109-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    J. G. Ballard's graphic, violent novel is controversial wherever it is read, even on Amazon.com's own Web page! The book's characters are obsessed with automobile accidents and are determined to narrate the horrors of the car crash as luridly as possible. In the words of the novel's protagonist, the wounds caused by automobile collisions are "the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology." Read this novel and learn why David Cronenberg, who had previously adapted Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch for the screen, fought to turn it into his latest film. [via]

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  • The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition
    by Anne Frank, Mirjam Pressler, Otto H. Frank
    ISBN 0385473788 (0-385-47378-8)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Anne Frank's diaries have always been among the most moving and eloquent documents of the Holocaust. This new edition restores diary entries omitted from the original edition, revealing a new depth to Anne's dreams, irritations, hardships, and passions. Anne emerges as more real, more human, and more vital than ever. If you've never read this remarkable autobiography, do so. If you have read it, you owe it to yourself to read it again. [via]

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  • Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Editon
    by Anne Frank, Mirjam Pressler, Otto H. Frank, Susan Massotty
    ISBN 0385480334 (0-385-48033-4)
    Softcover, Anchor Books

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    Book summary:

    The basis for and official tie-in edition to the PBS Masterpiece Classic movie titled The Diary of Anne Frank , directed by Jon Jones from a screenplay by Deborah Moggach. First airing April 11, 2010. More than fifty years after its first publication, Doubleday's definitive edition of Anne Frank's famous diary generated an extraordinary amount of excitement when it was published in early 1995. Enthusiastically received by critics and readers alike, it reigned for nine weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and will remain for all time the version that millions of readers will cherish.In a handsome package with flaps, rough front, and printed endpapers, this Anchor trade paperback will be the perfect gift for anyone who seeks insight into the indestructible nature of the human spirit. [via]

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  • The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition
    by Anne Frank, David Barnouw, Gerrold van der Stroom, H. J. J. Hardy, Gerrold Van Der Stroom, Barnouw. David, Arnold J. Pomerans, Susan Massotty, B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday
    ISBN 0385508476 (0-385-50847-6)
    Hardcover, Doubleday

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    Book summary:

    Looks unread with minute shelfwear only [via]

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  • Die Verwandlung
    by Franz Kafka, Marjorie L. Hoover
    ISBN 0393095339 (0-393-09533-9)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    Kafkas bekanntester Text in einer sorgfältig edierten Ausgabe

    Als Gregor Samsa eines morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem Ungeziefer verwandelt. Mit seiner Verwandlung in einen Käfer protestiert der Handlungsreisende Samsa gegen seinen Beruf, mit dem er die ganze Familie ernährt, er protestiert gegen Vater, Mutter und Schwester, die auf seine Kosten leben  er revoltiert gegen sein ganzes Leben. Aber sein Protest bleibt wirkungslos und führt schließlich zum Tod.

    Mit einem Nachwort, einer Zeittafel zu Kafka, einem Stellenkommentar und bibliographischen Hinweisen von Dr. Ewald Rösch.

    [via]

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  • Crichton, Michael: Eaters of the Dead
    Eaters of the Dead
    by Michael Crichton
    ISBN 0394494008 (0-394-49400-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • Perrotta, Tom: Election
    Election
    by Tom Perrotta
    ISBN 0425167283 (0-425-16728-3)
    Softcover, Berkley Signature

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  • The English Patient
    by Michael Ondaatje
    ISBN 039428013X (0-394-28013-X)
    Softcover, Random House of Canada Ltd

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    Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.

    A book that binds readers of great literature, The English Patient garnered the Booker Prize for author Ondaatje. The poet and novelist has also written In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family. [via]

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  • Evil Under the Sun
    by Agatha Christie
    ISBN 0425129608 (0-425-12960-8)
    Softcover, Berkley Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    A flirtatious young bride is strangled to death while vacationing, and only Poirot can unravel the woman's strange secrets. [via]

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  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,
    by Hunter S. Thompson
    ISBN 0394464354 (0-394-46435-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Heralded as the "best book on the dope decade" by the New York Times Book Review, Hunter S. Thompson's documented drug orgy through Las Vegas would no doubt leave Nancy Reagan blushing and D.A.R.E. founders rethinking their motto. Under the pseudonym of Raoul Duke, Thompson travels with his Samoan attorney, Dr. Gonzo, in a souped-up convertible dubbed the "Great Red Shark." In its trunk, they stow "two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers.... A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls," which they manage to consume during their short tour.

    On assignment from a sports magazine to cover "the fabulous Mint 400"--a free-for-all biker's race in the heart of the Nevada desert--the drug-a-delic duo stumbles through Vegas in hallucinatory hopes of finding the American dream (two truck-stop waitresses tell them it's nearby, but can't remember if it's on the right or the left). They of course never get the story, but they do commit the only sins in Vegas: "burning the locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help." For Thompson to remember and pen his experiences with such clarity and wit is nothing short of a miracle; an impressive feat no matter how one feels about the subject matter. A first-rate sensibility twinger, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a pop-culture classic, an icon of an era past, and a nugget of pure comedic genius. --Rebekah Warren [via]

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  • Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
    by Fannie Flagg
    ISBN 039456152X (0-394-56152-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    A folksy, funny and endearing story of life in a small town in Alabama in the Depression and in the 1980s. However, the novel's laughter and tears are interrupted by a strange murder and a still stranger trial. [via]

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  • Girls In Pants: The Third Summer Of The Sisterhood
    by Ann Brashares
    ISBN 0385909195 (0-385-90919-5)
    Hardcover, Delacorte Pr

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    Book summary:

    Ages 12 and up. Best buds Tibby, Carmen, Lena and Bridget are back with their magical pair of shared jeans in Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood. Each summer brings new and difficult challenges, as the perennially separated friends discover afresh this last season before college. Tibby struggles with the idea of close friend Brian becoming her boyfriend, and their fragile relationship is soon tested by a tragedy in her immediate family. Carmen doesnt know how to react when she finds out that her middle-aged mom is pregnant, and Bridget is unpleasantly surprised to be reunited with the boy who broke her heart two summers ago. Finally, Lena, still coming to terms with the loss of her first love, tries to convince her strict father that art school is a better career path than Greek restaurant management. But through every crisis, each girl is assured of the love and support of the created sisterhood when she pulls on the denim armor of the cherished, and by now, a bit fragrant ("Rule # 1. You must never wash the Pants.") Traveling Pants.

    Full of homey platitudes about life, love and the pursuit of perfect jeans, Girls in Pants occasionally reads like a lengthy Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul entry. But often thats precisely the kind of friendly reassurance female readers are looking for, and fans of the wildly popular series whove journeyed every summer with the "Septembers" will find much to laugh and cry about in this concluding volume. --Jennifer Hubert [via]

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  • The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings
    by J. R. R. Tolkien
    ISBN 0395489075 (0-395-48907-5)
    Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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    Book summary:

    Hobbits and wizards and Sauron--oh, my! Mild-mannered Oxford scholar John Ronald Reuel Tolkien had little inkling when he published The Hobbit; Or, There and Back Again in 1937 that, once hobbits were unleashed upon the world, there would be no turning back. Hobbits are, of course, small, furry creatures who love nothing better than a leisurely life quite free from adventure. But in that first novel and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo and their elfish friends get swept up into a mighty conflict with the dragon Smaug, the dark lord Sauron (who owes much to proud Satan in Paradise Lost), the monstrous Gollum, the Cracks of Doom, and the awful power of the magical Ring. The four books' characters--good and evil--are recognizably human, and the realism is deepened by the magnificent detail of the vast parallel world Tolkien devised, inspired partly by his influential Anglo-Saxon scholarship and his Christian beliefs. (He disapproved of the relative sparseness of detail in the comparable allegorical fantasy his friend C.S. Lewis dreamed up in The Chronicles of Narnia, though he knew Lewis had spun a page-turning yarn.) It has been estimated that one-tenth of all paperbacks sold can trace their ancestry to J.R.R. Tolkien. But even if we had never gotten Robert Jordan's The Path of Daggers and the whole fantasy genre Tolkien inadvertently created by bringing the hobbits so richly to life, Tolkien's epic about the Ring would have left our world enhanced by enchantment. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Crais, Robert: Hostage : A Novel
    Hostage : A Novel
    by Robert Crais
    ISBN 0385495854 (0-385-49585-4)
    Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing

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  • The House of Mirth
    by Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Ammons
    ISBN 0393959015 (0-393-95901-5)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth," warns Ecclesiastes 7:4, and so does the novel by Edith Wharton that takes its title from this call to heed. New York at the turn of the century was a time of opulence and frivolity for those who could afford it. But for those who couldn't and yet wanted desperately to keep up with the whirlwind, like Wharton's charming Lily Bart, it was something else altogether: a gilded cage rather than the Gilded Age.

    One of Wharton's earliest descriptions of her heroine, in the library of her bachelor friend and sometime suitor Lawrence Selden, indicates that she appears "as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing room." Indeed, herein lies Lily's problem. She has, we're told, "been brought up to be ornamental," and yet her spirit is larger than what this ancillary role requires. By today's standards she would be nothing more than a mild rebel, but in the era into which Wharton drops her unmercifully, this tiny spark of character, combined with numerous assaults by vicious society women and bad luck, ultimately renders Lily persona non grata. Her own ambivalence about her position serves to open the door to disaster: several times she is on the verge of "good" marriage and squanders it at the last moment, unwilling to play by the rules of a society that produces, as she calls them, "poor, miserable, marriageable girls.

    Lily's rather violent tumble down the social ladder provides a thumbnail sketch of the general injustices of the upper classes (which, incidentally, Wharton never quite manages to condemn entirely, clearly believing that such life is cruel but without alternative). From her start as a beautiful woman at the height of her powers to her sad finale as a recently fired milliner's assistant addicted to sleeping drugs, Lily Bart is heroic, not least for her final admission of her own role in her downfall. "Once--twice--you gave me the chance to escape from my life and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward," she tells Selden as the book draws to a close. All manner of hideous socialite beasts--some of whose treatment by Wharton, such as the token social-climbing Jew, Simon Rosedale, date the book unfortunately--wander through the novel while Lily plummets. As her tale winds down to nothing more than the remnants of social grace and cold hard cash, it's hard not to agree with Lily's own assessment of herself: "I have tried hard--but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else." Nevertheless, it's even harder not to believe that she deserved better, which is why The House of Mirth remains so timely and so vital in spite of its crushing end and its unflattering portrait of what life offers up. --Melanie Rehak [via]

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  • Huckleberry Finn / Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    by Mark Twain
    ISBN 0394847245 (0-394-84724-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A seminal work of American Literature that still commands deep praise and still elicits controversy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a full understanding of the novel. The changes, deletions, and additions made in the first half of the manuscript indicate that Mark Twain frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational book than the one he finally published. [via]

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  • Smith, Dodie: I Capture the Castle
    I Capture the Castle
    by Dodie Smith
    ISBN 0434713503 (0-434-71350-3)
    Hardcover, Heinemann

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  • James and the Giant Peach
    by Roald Dahl
    ISBN 0394812824 (0-394-81282-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books

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    Book summary:

    Roald Dahl's classic children's novel is now a motion picture from The Walt Disney Company, and this version of James and the Giant Peach grew out of the making of the movie. Lane Smith, conceptual artist for the film, has given James and company a new and arresting look, much in the style of his many highly regarded books, such as Math Curse and The Stinky Cheeseman. Karey Kirkpatrick, the film's screenwriter, created a text that is true to the spirit of Dahl's original, and deftly pulls young readers into the remarkable story. All in all, it's a peach of a book sure to be the pick of every child's bookshelf! [via]

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  • The Joy Luck Club
    by Amy Tan
    ISBN 0399134204 (0-399-13420-4)
    Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    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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  • Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13
    by Jim Lovell, Kluger Jeffrey
    ISBN 0395670292 (0-395-67029-2)
    Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin

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    Book summary:

    In April 1970, during the glory days of the Apollo space program, NASA sent Navy Captain Jim Lovell and two other astronauts on America's fifth mission to the moon. Only fifty-five hours into the flight of Apollo 13, disaster struck: a mysterious explosion rocked the ship, and soon its oxygen and power began draining away. Commander Lovell and his crew watched in alarm as the cockpit grew darker, the air grew thinner, and the instruments winked out one by one. The full story of the moon shot that almost ended in catastrophe has never been told, but now Lovell and coauthor Jeffrey Kluger bring it to vivd life. What begins as a smooth flight is transformed into a hair-raising voyage from the moment Lovell calls out, "Houston, we've got a problem." Minutes after the explosion, the astronauts are forced to abandon the main ship for the lunar module, a tiny craft designed to keep two men alive for just two days. But there are three men aboard, and they are four days from home. As the hours tick away, the narrative shifts from the crippled spacecraft to Mission Control, from engineers searching desperately for solutions to Lovell's wife and children praying for his safe return. The entire nation watches as one crisis after another is met and overcome. By the time the ship splashes down in the Pacific, we understand why the heroic effort to rescue Lovell and his crew is considered by many to be NASA's finest hour. This riveting book puts the reader right in the spacecraft during one of the worst disasters in the history of space exploration. Written with all the color and drama of the best fiction, Lost Moon is the true story of a thrilling adventure and an astonishing triumph over nearly impossible odds. It was a major Oscar(R)-nominated motion picture directed by Ron Howard and starred Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon. [via]

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  • Metamorphosis
    by Franz Kafka, Stanley Corngold
    ISBN 0393967972 (0-393-96797-2)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    Franz Kafka's 1915 masterpiece is presented in this Norton Critical Edition in the acclaimed translation by Stanley Corngold based on the definitive German edition.

    The novella is fully annotated and is accompanied by selected textual variants. Backgrounds and Contexts introduces readers to The Metamorphosis in the richest possible setting. The links between the author's life and his work are explored through an examination of his personal writings. Kafka's letters and diary entries illuminate the creative process behind his portrait of Gregor Samsa, his family, and their nightmarish ordeal. Criticism collects seven essays from the period 1970-95 representing the most important currents in literary theorysemiotics, feminism, identity philosophy, New Historicism, and post-Freudian cultural psychoanalysis. The essays offer a variety of perspectives on the novella by Iris Bruce, Nina Pelikan Straus, Kevin W. Sweeney, Mark Anderson, Hartmut Binder, Eric Santner, and Stanley Corngold. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included. [via]

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  • Mists of Avalon
    by Marion Zimmer Bradley
    ISBN 0394524063 (0-394-52406-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Even readers who don't normally enjoy Arthurian legends will love this version, a retelling from the point of view of the women behind the throne. Morgaine (more commonly known as Morgan Le Fay) and Gwenhwyfar (a Welsh spelling of Guinevere) struggle for power, using Arthur as a way to score points and promote their respective worldviews. The Mists of Avalon's Camelot politics and intrigue take place at a time when Christianity is taking over the island-nation of Britain; Christianity vs. Faery, and God vs. Goddess are dominant themes.

    Young and old alike will enjoy this magical Arthurian reinvention by science fiction and fantasy veteran Marion Zimmer Bradley. --Bonnie Bouman [via]

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  • Warner, Alan: Morvern Callar
    Morvern Callar
    by Alan Warner
    ISBN 038548741X (0-385-48741-X)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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  • Mrs. McGinty's Dead
    by Agatha Christie
    ISBN 0425175456 (0-425-17545-6)
    Softcover, Berkley Pub Group

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    When an old lady with no enemies is bludgeoned to death, suspicion falls on her lodger who has no alibi. With every piece of evidence working against him, he has only one hope: Hercule Poirot. [via]

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  • Burroughs, William S.: Naked Lunch
    Naked Lunch
    by William S. Burroughs
    ISBN 0394538838 (0-394-53883-8)
    Hardcover, Grove Pr

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    "He was," as Salon's Gary Kamiya notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."

    Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book--the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroine addict--so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.

    Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself. [via]

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  • The Night Watch
    by Sergei Lukyanenko
    ISBN 038566365X (0-385-66365-X)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    The phenomenal Russian bestseller. A vampire novel set in a richly realized post-Soviet Moscow, The Night Watch has sold across Europe and to 20th Century Fox for huge advances.

    In The Night Watch, the first of a quartet, and reminiscent of Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials in its ambitions and achievement, the setting is contemporary Moscow. A small number of Muscovites with supernatural powers  those who are Other, owing allegiance either to the Dark or the Light  co-exist in an uneasy truce, each side keeping a close eye on the others activities around the city.

    Anton, an Other on the side of the Light, is a night-watchman, patrolling the streets and Metro of the city as he protects ordinary people from the vampires of the Dark. On his rounds, Anton comes across a young woman, Svetlana, whom he realizes is under a curse that threatens the entire city, and a boy, Igor, a young Other, as yet unaware of his own enormous power. Partnered by Olga, an Other who is in the form of an owl, he struggles to remove the curse and thereby save the city, while at the same time prevent Igor from falling into the clutches of the Dark.

    The Night Watch explores the nature of good and evil and the tensions between the individual and the collective in a gripping narrative that owes as much to The Master and Margarita as it is does to the richly realized worlds of Philip Pullman and Tolkien. [via]

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  • Clavell, James: Noble House
    Noble House
    by James Clavell
    ISBN 0440064112 (0-440-06411-2)
    Hardcover, Delacorte Press

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  • Cather, Willa: O Pioneers!
    O Pioneers!
    by Willa Cather, Sharon O'Brien
    ISBN 0393924661 (0-393-92466-1)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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  • O Pioneers! and Other Tales of the Praire
    by Willa Cather
    ISBN 0385487207 (0-385-48720-7)
    Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing

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    Book summary:

    The transcontinental express swung along the windings of the Sand River Valley, and in the rear seat of the observation car a young man sat greatly at his ease, not in the least discomfited by the fierce sunlight which beat in upon his brown face and neck and strong back. There was a look of relaxation and of great passivity about his broad shoulders, which seemed almost too heavy until he stood up and squared them. He wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue silk necktie with loose ends. His trousers were wide and belted at the waist, and his short sack coat hung open. His heavy shoes had seen good service. His reddish-brown hair, like his clothes, had a foreign cut. He had deep-set, dark blue eyes under heavy reddish eyebrows. His face was kept clean only by close shaving, and even the sharpest razor left a glint of yellow in the smooth brown of his skin. His teeth and the palms of his hands were very white. His head, which looked hard and stubborn, lay indolently in the green cushion of the wicker chair, and as he looked out at the ripe summer country a teasing, not unkindly smile played over his lips. Once, as he basked thus comfortably, a quick light flashed in his eyes, curiously dilating the pupils, and his mouth became a hard, straight line, gradually relaxing into its former smile of rather kindly mockery. He told himself, apparently, that there was no point in getting excited; and he seemed a master hand at taking his ease when he could. Neither the sharp whistle of the locomotive nor the brakeman's call disturbed him. It was not until after the train had stopped that he rose, put on a Panama hat, took from the rack a small valise and a flute case, and stepped deliberately to the station platform. The baggage was already unloaded, and the stranger presented a check for a battered sole-leather steamer trunk.

    "Can you keep it here for a day or two?" he asked the agent. "I may send for it, and I may not. [via]

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  • Patriot Games
    by Tom Clancy
    ISBN 0425109720 (0-425-10972-0)
    Softcover, Berkley Pub Group

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    The bestselling author of Red Storm Rising and The Sum of All Fears brings Jack Ryan back in his to fight his deadliest battle yet.

    From England to Ireland to America, an explosive wave of violence sweeps a CIA analyst and his family into the deadliest game of our time: international terrorism. An ultra-left-wing faction fo the IRA has targeted the CIA man for his act of salvation in an assasination attempt. And now he must pay ... with his life. [via]

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  • Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    by Patrick Suskind
    ISBN 0394550846 (0-394-55084-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The year is 1738; the place, Paris. A baby is born under a fish-mongers bloody table in a marketplace, and abandoned. Orphaned, passed over to the monks as a charity case, already there is something in the aura of the tiny infant that is unsettling. No one will look after him; he is somehow too demanding, and, even more disturbing, something is missing: as his wet nurse tries to explain, he doesnt smell the way a baby should smell; indeed, he has no scent at all.

    Slowly, as we watch Jean-Baptiste Grenouille cling stubbornly to life, we begin to realize that a monster is growing before our eyes. With mounting unease, yet hypnotized, we see him explore his powers and their effect on the world around him. For this dark and sinister boy who has no smell himself possesses an absolute sense of smell, and with it he can read the world to discover the hidden truths that elude ordinary men. He can smell the very composition of objects, and their history, and where they have been, he has no need of the light, and darkness is not dark to him, because nothing can mask the odors of the universe.

    As he leaves childhood behind and comes to understand his terrible uniqueness, his obsession becomes the quest to identify, and then to isolate, the most perfect scent of all, the scent of life itself.

    At first, he hones his powers, learning the ancient arts of perfume-making until the exquisite fragrances he creates are the rage of Paris, and indeed Europe. Then, secure in his mastery of these means to an end, he withdraws into a strange and agonized solitude, waiting, dreaming, until the morning when he wakes, ready to embark on his monstrous quest: to find and extract from the most perfect living creaturesthe most beautiful young virgins in the land that ultimate perfume which alone can make him, too, fully human. As his trail leads him, at an ever-quickening pace, from his savage exile to the heart of the country and then back to Paris, we are caught up in a rising storm of terror and mortal sensual conquest until the frenzy of his final triumph explodes in all its horrifying consequences.

    Told with dazzling narrative brilliance and the haunting power of a grown-up fairy tale, Perfume is one of the most remarkable novels of the last fifty years. [via]

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  • Possession : A Romance
    by A. S. Byatt
    ISBN 0394586239 (0-394-58623-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, this novel describes the romance between two 19th-century poets and the parallel relationship of their two biographers and includes passages of "Victorian verse". [via]

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  • Practical Magic
    by Alice Hoffman
    ISBN 0425190374 (0-425-19037-4)
    Softcover, Berkley Pub Group

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    For most adults, fairy tales are among the childish things we've put away. Alice Hoffman, however, feels differently. Practical Magic starts out as a tale of Gillian and Sally Owens, two orphaned girls whose aunts are witches--of a mild sort. For the past two centuries, Owens women have been blamed for all that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town, ever since their ancestor arrived, rich, independent, and soon accused of theft: "And then one day, a farmer winged a crow in his cornfield, a creature who'd been stealing from him shamelessly for months. When Maria Owens appeared the very next morning with her arm in a sling and her white hand wound up in a white bandage, people felt certain they knew the reason why." The aunts are daily ostracized by the same upstanding citizens who sneak to their house at night for magical love cures. To the sisters they are for the most part benevolently absent, though their bell, book, and candle routine makes life a torment for Gillian, beautiful and blonde and lazy, and Sally, who's all too responsible. But when one of the aunts' cures works too well, ending as a curse, the dangers of real love become all too clear. In Hoffman's world being bewitched, bothered, and bewildered is no mere metaphor--and neither is desire. The elbows of one enamored man pucker a linoleum counter, another walks around with singed cuffs. It's difficult to catch the author's power in brief quotes. She needs space and increment to build her exquisite variations of vision and reality, her matter-of-fact announcements of the preternatural. Practical Magic again and again makes one recall the thrill of hearing at bedtime, "Now will I a tale unfold..." --Kerry Fried [via]

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  • The Prince of Tides
    by Pat Conroy
    ISBN 0395353009 (0-395-35300-9)
    Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin

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    In his most brilliant and powerful novel, Pat Conroy tells the story of Tom Wingo, his twin sister, Savannah, and the dark and violent past of the family into which they were born. Set in New York City and the lowcountry of South Carolina, the novel opens when Tom, a high school football coach whose marriage and career are crumbling, flies from South Carolina to New York after learning of his twin sister's suicide attempt. Savannah is one of the most gifted poets of her generation, and both the cadenced beauty of her art and the jumbled cries of her illness are clues to the too-long-hidden story of her wounded family. In the paneled offices and luxurious restaurants of New York City, Tom and Susan Lowenstein, Savannah's psychiatrist, unravel a history of violence, abandonment, commitment, and love. And Tom realizes that trying to save his sister is perhaps his last chance to save himself. With passion and a rare gift of language, the author moves from present to past, tracing the amazing history of the Wingos from World War II through the final days of the war in Vietnam and into the 1980s, drawing a rich range of characters: the lovable, crazy Mr. Fruit, who for decades has wordlessly directed traffic at the same intersection in the southern town of Colleton; Reese Newbury, the ruthless, patrician land speculator who threatens the Wingos' only secure worldly possession, Melrose Island; Herbert Woodruff, Susan Lowenstein's husband, a world-famous violinist; Tolitha Wingo, Savannah's mentor and eccentric grandmother, the first real feminist in the Wingo family. Pat Conroy reveals the lives of his characters with surpassing depth and power, capturing the vanishing beauty of the South Carolina lowcountry and a lost way of life. His lyric gifts, abundant good humor, and compelling storytelling are well known to readers of The Great Santini and The Lords of Discipline. The Prince of Tides continues that tradition yet displays a new, mature voice of Pat Conroy, signaling this work as his greatest accomplishment.
    [via]

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  • The Queen of the Damned
    by Anne Rice
    ISBN 0394558235 (0-394-55823-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Did you ever wonder where all those mischievous vampires roaming the globe in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles came from? In this, the third book in the series, we find out. That raucous rock-star vampire Lestat interrupts the 6,000-year slumber of the mama of all bloodsuckers, Akasha, Queen of the Damned.

    Akasha was once the queen of the Nile (she has a bit in common with the Egyptian goddess Isis), and it's unwise to rile her now that she's had 60 centuries of practice being undead. She is so peeved about male violence that she might just have to kill most of them. And she has her eye on handsome Lestat with other ideas as well.

    If you felt that the previous books in the series weren't gory and erotic enough, this one should quench your thirst (though it may cause you to omit organ meats from your diet). It also boasts God's plenty of absorbing lore that enriches the tale that went before, including the back-story of the boy in Interview with the Vampire and the ancient fellowship of the Talamasca, which snoops on paranormal phenomena. Mostly, the book spins the complex yarn of Akasha's eerie, brooding brood and her nemeses, the terrifying sisters Maharet and Mekare. In one sense, Queen of the Damned is the ultimate multigenerational saga. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • The Rainmaker
    by John Grisham
    ISBN 0385424736 (0-385-42473-6)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    The supple voice and deft narrative skills of Frank Muller are an excellent match for this tremendously popular courtroom thriller. With subtle vocal changes, accents, and thoughtful interpretation, Muller helps elevate the drama and suspense of this fascinating tale, which pits a small-time rookie lawyer against the power and influence of a corrupt insurance company. Muller's talent gives life to the entire cast: from apathetic law students to slippery corporate lawyers and heartbroken senior citizens. "It's simple... they're a bunch of crooks," exclaims the young lawyer's first clients, an elderly couple bitter over being swindled. "They think we're simple, ignorant trash with no money to fight 'em." Battling his instinct to agree, he sets out to defend their rightful claims and finds himself enmeshed in a suspenseful case of ruthless intimidation and deadly criminal behavior. (Running time: 17 hours, 12 cassettes) --George Laney [via]

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  • Rebecca (0435272616) by Milne, John
    Rebecca
    by John Milne
    ISBN 0435272616 (0-435-27261-6)
    Softcover, Delta Systems Co Inc

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  • Sense And Sensibility
    by Jane Austen, Claudia L. Johnson
    ISBN 039397751X (0-393-97751-X)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Though not the first novel she wrote, Sense and Sensibility was the first Jane Austen published. Though she initially called it Elinor and Marianne, Austen jettisoned both the title and the epistolary mode in which it was originally written, but kept the essential theme: the necessity of finding a workable middle ground between passion and reason. The story revolves around the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne. Whereas the former is a sensible, rational creature, her younger sister is wildly romantic--a characteristic that offers Austen plenty of scope for both satire and compassion. Commenting on Edward Ferrars, a potential suitor for Elinor's hand, Marianne admits that while she "loves him tenderly", she finds him disappointing as a possible lover for her sister:

    Oh! Mama, how spiritless, how tame was Edward's manner in reading to us last night! I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!
    Soon, however, Marianne meets a man who measures up to her ideal: Mr Willoughby, a new neighbour. So swept away by passion is Marianne that her behaviour begins to border on the scandalous. Then Willoughby abandons her; meanwhile, Elinor's growing affection for Edward suffers a check when he admits he is secretly engaged to a childhood sweetheart. misfortunes and the lessons they draw before coming finally to the requisite happy ending forms the heart of the novel. Though Marianne's disregard for social conventions and willingness to consider the world well-lost for love may appeal to modern readers, it is Elinor whom Austen herself most evidently admired; a truly happy marriage, she shows us, exists only where sense and sensibility meet and mix in proper measure. --Alix Wilber, Amazon.com [via]

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  • Kinsella, W.P.: Shoeless Joe
    Shoeless Joe
    by W.P. Kinsella, John Radziewicz
    ISBN 0395957737 (0-395-95773-7)
    Softcover, Mariner Books

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    W. P. Kinsella plays with both myth and fantasy in his lyrical novel, which was adapted into the enormously popular movie, Field of Dreams. It begins with the magic of a godlike voice in a cornfield, and ends with the magic of a son playing catch with the ghost of his father. In Kinsella's hands, it's all about as simple, and complex, as the object of baseball itself: coming home. Like Ring Lardner and Bernard Malamud before him, Kinsella spins baseball as backdrop and metaphor, and, like his predecessors, uses the game to tell us a little something more about who we are and what we need. [via]

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  • Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
    by Ann Brashares
    ISBN 0385730586 (0-385-73058-6)
    Softcover, Random House Childrens Books

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    Book summary:

    They were just a soft, ordinary pair of thrift-shop jeans until the four girls took turns trying them on--four girls, that is, who are close friends, about to be parted for the summer, with very different sizes and builds, not to mention backgrounds and personalities. Yet the pants settle on each girl's hips perfectly, making her look sexy and long-legged and feel confident as a teenager can feel. "These are magical Pants!" they realize, and so they make a pact to share them equally, to mail them back and forth over the summer from wherever they are. Beautiful, distant Lena is going to Greece to be with her grandparents; strong, athletic Bridget is off to soccer camp in Baja, California; hot-tempered Carmen plans to have her divorced father all to herself in South Carolina; and Tibby the rebel will be left at home to slave for minimum wage at Wallman's.

    Over the summer the Pants come to represent the support of the sisterhood, but they also lead each girl into bruising and ultimately healing confrontations with love and courage, dying and forgiveness. Lena finds her identity in Greece and the courage not to reject love; Bridget gets in over her head with an older camp coach; Carmen finds her father ensconced with a new fiancée and family; and Tibby unwillingly takes on a filmmaking apprentice who is dying of leukemia. Each girl's story is distinct and engrossing, told in a brightly contemporary style. Like the Pants, the reader bounces back and forth among the four unfolding adventures, and the melange is spiced with letters and witty quotes. Ann Brashares has here created four captivating characters and seamlessly interwoven their stories for a young adult novel that is fresh and absorbing. (Ages 12 and older) --Patty Campbell [via]

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  • The Sound and the Fury
    by William Faulkner, David Minter
    ISBN 0393964817 (0-393-96481-7)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    The ostensible subject of The Sound and the Fury is the dissolution of the Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families that fell on hard times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War. But in fact what William Faulkner is really after in his legendary novel is the kaleidoscope of consciousness--the overwrought mind caught in the act of thought. His rich, dark, scandal-ridden story of squandered fortune, incest (in thought if not in deed), madness, congenital brain damage, theft, illegitimacy, and stoic endurance is told in the interior voices of three Compson brothers: first Benjy, the "idiot" man-child who blurs together three decades of inchoate sensations as he stalks the fringes of the family's former pasture; next Quentin, torturing himself brilliantly, obsessively over Caddy's lost virginity and his own failure to recover the family's honor as he wanders around the seedy fringes of Boston; and finally Jason, heartless, shrewd, sneaking, nursing a perpetual sense of injury and outrage against his outrageous family.

    If Benjy's section is the most daringly experimental, Jason's is the most harrowing. "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say," he begins, lacing into Caddy's illegitimate daughter, and then proceeds to hurl mud at blacks, Jews, his sacred Compson ancestors, his glamorous, promiscuous sister, his doomed brother Quentin, his ailing mother, and the long-suffering black servant Dilsey who holds the family together by sheer force of character.

    Notoriously "difficult," The Sound and the Fury is actually one of Faulkner's more accessible works once you get past the abrupt, unannounced time shifts--and certainly the most powerful emotionally. Everything is here: the complex equilibrium of pre-civil rights race relations; the conflict between Yankee capitalism and Southern agrarian values; a meditation on time, consciousness, and Western philosophy. And all of it is rendered in prose so gorgeous it can take your breath away. Here, for instance, Quentin recalls an autumnal encounter back home with the old black possum hunter Uncle Louis:

    And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless October, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dogs and to the echo of Louis' voice dying away. He never raised it, yet on a still night we have heard it from our front porch. When he called the dogs in he sounded just like the horn he carried slung on his shoulder and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coiling out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo.
    What Faulkner has created is a modernist epic in which characters assume the stature of gods and the primal family events resonate like myths. It is The Sound and the Fury that secures his place in what Edmund Wilson called "the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust." --David Laskin [via]

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  • Sphere
    by Michael Crichton
    ISBN 0394561104 (0-394-56110-4)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton is possibly the best science teacher for the masses since H.G. Wells, and Sphere, his thriller about a mysterious spherical spaceship at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, is classic Crichton. A group of not-very-complex characters (portrayed in the film by Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Queen Latifah) assemble to solve a cleverly designed roller coaster of a mystery while attempting (with mixed success) to avoid sudden death and expounding (much more successfully) on the latest, coolest scientific ideas, including the existence of black holes. Somehow, Crichton manages to convey the complicated stuff in utterly simplistic prose, making him, as his old pal Steven Spielberg puts it, "the high priest of high concept." Yet there is more to Crichton than science and big-ticket show biz. He is also, as any reader of his startling memoir Travels knows, a bit of a mystic--he is entirely open to notions spouted by spoon-bending psychics that most science writers would scorn. Sphere is not only a gratifying sci-fi suspense tale; it also reflects Crichton's keen interest in the unexplained powers of the human mind. When something passes through a black hole in Crichton's fiction, a lesson is learned. The book also contains another profound lesson: when you're staring down a giant squid with an eyeball the size of a dinner plate, don't blink first. [via]

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  • Dickens, Charles: A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities
    by Charles Dickens
    ISBN 0396085350 (0-396-08535-0)
    Hardcover, Dodd Mead

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  • Christie, Agatha: Ten Little Indians
    Ten Little Indians
    by Agatha Christie
    ISBN 0396075150 (0-396-07515-0)
    Hardcover, Dodd Mead

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  • Grass, Gunter: Tin Drum
    Tin Drum
    by Gunter Grass
    ISBN 0394745604 (0-394-74560-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Treasure Island
    by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dan Danko
    ISBN 0439288886 (0-439-28888-6)
    Softcover, Scholastic Canada, Limited

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    Book summary:

    Pirates. Danger. Treasure. It's all here in Stevenson's classic, with a rousing introduction from best-selling author Mary Pope Osbourne.When Jim Hawkins finds an old pirate map showing a small island marked with a red cross, he knows that a fortune in gold lies waiting for him. What could be more exciting than buried treasure? Aboard a ship named the Hispaniola, Jim sails toward Treasure Island. The voyage goes well until Jim overhears a frightening conversation. He learns that the one-legged man who signed on as ship's cook is really the famous pirate Long John Silver. And worse - he discovers that the crew are teaming up with Silver to steal the treasure. Can Jim save the gold . . . and save his life? [via]

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  • Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Lifes Greatest Lesson
    by Mitch Albom
    ISBN 0385484518 (0-385-48451-8)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    This true story about the love between a spiritual mentor and his pupil has soared to the bestseller list for many reasons. For starters: it reminds us of the affection and gratitude that many of us still feel for the significant mentors of our past. It also plays out a fantasy many of us have entertained: what would it be like to look those people up again, tell them how much they meant to us, maybe even resume the mentorship? Plus, we meet Morrie Schwartz--a one of a kind professor, whom the author describes as looking like a cross between a biblical prophet and Christmas elf. And finally we are privy to intimate moments of Morrie's final days as he lies dying from a terminal illness. Even on his deathbed, this twinkling-eyed mensch manages to teach us all about living robustly and fully. Kudos to author and acclaimed sports columnist Mitch Albom for telling this universally touching story with such grace and humility. --Gail Hudson [via]

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  • Turn of the Screw
    by Henry James, Deborah Esch, Jonathan Warren
    ISBN 039395904X (0-393-95904-X)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    The story starts conventionally enough with friends sharing ghost stories 'round the fire on Christmas Eve. One of the guests tells about a governess at a country house plagued by supernatural visitors. But in the hands of Henry James, the master of nuance, this little tale of terror is an exquisite gem of sexual and psychological ambiguity. Only the young governess can see the ghosts; only she suspects that the previous governess and her lover are controlling the two orphaned children (a girl and a boy) for some evil purpose. The household staff don't know what she's talking about, the children are evasive when questioned, and the master of the house (the children's uncle) is absent. Why does the young girl claim not to see a perfectly visible woman standing on the far side of the lake? Are the children being deceptive, or is the governess being paranoid? By leaving the questions unanswered, The Turn of Screw generates spine-tingling anxiety in its mesmerized readers. [via]

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  • Vanity Fair
    by William Makepeace Thackery, Peter L. Shillingsburg
    ISBN 0393965953 (0-393-96595-3)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    The story of English society in the early nineteenth century. [via]

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