Lists

Picture of a book: the best of me
Picture of a book: The Turn of the Screw
Picture of a book: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
Picture of a book: The Emperor's Children
Picture of a book: I Am Pilgrim
Picture of a book: Silence
Picture of a book: Tenth of December
Picture of a book: A Little Life
Picture of a book: The Dark Tower
Picture of a book: Stories of Your Life and Others
Picture of a book: Lying on the Couch
Picture of a book: The Danish Girl
Picture of a book: Private
Picture of a book: The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
Picture of a book: The Life We Bury
Picture of a book: Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music
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Picture of a book: Angela's Ashes
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Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt
Imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion. This is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic."When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the Pulitzer Prize winning memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy-- exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling-- does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors--yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness. Angela's Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt's astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.
Picture of a book: The Elegance of the Hedgehog
books

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Alison Anderson, Muriel Barbery
A moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence. Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter. Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.