Want to read books
Top 10 Want to read books
: Don Quixote, The Handmaid's Tale, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Runaway, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders, The Terror, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Wicked Lovely, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, Preludes & Nocturnes
| Author | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra |
| ISBN | 0142437239 |
Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray—he tilts at windmills,...
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,...
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Librarian note: Alternate cover edition of 9780765356154.
Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred...
| Author | Wendelin Van Draanen |
| ISBN | 0375835229 |
"It's a cold, hard, cruel fact that my mother loved heroin more than she loved me."
Holly is in her fifth foster home in two years and she's had enough. She's run away before and always been caught quickly. But she's older and wiser now--she's twelve--and this time she gets away clean.
Through...
Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
| Author | Neil Gaiman |
| ISBN | 0060515228 |
This is a stunning collection of short stories by acclaimed fantasy writer Neil Gaiman. His distinctive genius has been championed by writers as diverse as Norman Mailer and Stephen King. With The Sandman Neil Gaiman created one of the most sophisticated, intelligent, and influential graphic novel...
| Author | Dan Simmons |
| ISBN | 0316017442 |
The men on board HMS Terror have every expectation of triumph. As part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage, they are as scientifically supported an enterprise as has ever set forth. As they enter a second summer in the Arctic...
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
| Author | Max Brooks |
| ISBN | 0307346609 |
The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that...
| Author | Melissa Marr |
| ISBN | 0061214655 |
Rule #3: Don't stare at invisible faeries.
Aislinn has always seen faeries. Powerful and dangerous, they walk hidden in the mortal world. Aislinn fears their cruelty - especially if they learn of her Sight - and wishes she were as blind to their presence as other teens.
Rule #2: Don't speak...
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
| Author | Christopher Moore |
| ISBN | 0380813815 |
The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years—except Biff, the Messiah's best bud, who has been resurrected to tell the story in the divinely...
| Author | Neil Gaiman |
| ISBN | 1563892278 |
New York Times best-selling author Neil Gaiman's transcendent series SANDMAN is often hailed as the definitive Vertigo title and one of the finest achievements in graphic storytelling. Gaiman created an unforgettable tale of the forces that exist beyond life and death by weaving ancient mythology,...
| Author | Thomas Pynchon |
| ISBN | 0143039946 |
Advice for a first time reader of Gravity's Rainbow:
Gravity's Rainbow is a book you either love or hate, and if you hate it it's probably because you couldn't finish the damn thing. Though by no means impenetrable, the novel is daunting enough to merit a list of tips for those wishing to tackle...
Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
| Author | Steve Martin |
| ISBN | 1416553649 |
In the midseventies, Steve Martin exploded onto the comedy scene. By 1978 he was the biggest concert draw in the history of stand-up. In 1981 he quit forever. This book is, in his own words, the story of "why I did stand-up and why I walked away."
Emmy and Grammy Award winner, author of the acclaimed...
| Author | Lemony Snicket |
| ISBN | 0439206472 |
Dear Reader,
I'm sorry to say that the book you are holding in your hands is extremely unpleasant. It tells an unhappy tale about three very unlucky children. Even though they are charming and clever, the Baudelaire siblings lead lives filled with misery and woe. From the very first page of this...
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
| Author | Rachel Cohn |
| ISBN | 0375835318 |
It all starts when Nick asks Norah to be his girlfriend for five minutes. He only needs five minutes to avoid his ex-girlfriend, who’s just walked in to his band’s show. With a new guy. And then, with one kiss, Nick and Norah are off on an adventure set against the backdrop of New York City—and...
Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes
Here's a lively, hilarious, not-so-reverent crash course through the great philosophical traditions, schools, concepts, and thinkers. Its Philosophy 101 for everyone who knows not to take all this heavy stuff too seriously. Some of the Big Ideas are Existentialism (what do Hegel and Bette Midler...
The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque
| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
| ISBN | 0452280249 |
In these twenty-five gothic horror tales from the master of the short story, Joyce Carol Oates explores the waking nightmares of life with eyes wide-open, facing what the bravest of us fear the most. From the Kafka-esque "Scars" to a ballad like tale of erotic obsession in "The Crossing, " to the mother-daughter...
| Author | Jean Craighead George |
| ISBN | 0064400581 |
Alone and lost—on the North Slope of Alaska
Miyax rebels against a home situation she finds intolerable. She runs away toward San Francisco, toward her pen pal, who calls her Julie. But soon Miyax is lost in the Alaskan wilderness, without food, without even a compass. Slowly she is accepted by...
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age novel and a richly plotted suspense tale told through the distinctive voice of its heroine, Blue van Meer. After a childhood moving from one academic outpost to another with her father (a man prone to aphorisms and meteoric affairs),...
| Author | E.L. Konigsburg |
| ISBN | 0689862210 |
How has Mrs. Olinski chosen her sixth-grade Academic Bowl team? She had a number of answers. But were any of them true? How had she really chosen Noah and Nadia and Ethan and Julian? And why did they make such a good team? It was a surprise to a lot of people when Mrs. Olinski's team won the sixth-grade Academic...
| Author | John Wyndham |
| ISBN | 0812967127 |
In 1951 John Wyndham published his novel The Day of the Triffids to moderate acclaim. Fifty-two years later, this horrifying story is a science fiction classic, touted by The Times (London) as having “all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare.”
Bill Masen, bandages over his wounded...
| Author | Gail Tsukiyama |
| ISBN | 0312144075 |
A 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and...
| Author | Clive Barker |
| ISBN | 0061002828 |
Clive Barker is widely acknowledged as the master of nerve-shattering horror. The Hellbound Heart is one of his best, one of the most dead-frightening stories you are likely to ever read, a story of the human heart and all the great terrors and ecstasies within. It was also the book behind the cult horror...
Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
| Author | Ruth Reichl |
| ISBN | 0143036610 |
Ruth Reichl, world-renowned food critic and editor in chief of Gourmet magazine, knows a thing or two about food. She also knows that as the most important food critic in the country, you need to be anonymous when reviewing some of the most high-profile establishments in the biggest restaurant town...
Boston medical examiner Dr. Maura Isles literally meets her match–and must face a savage serial killer and shattering personal revelations–in the brilliant new novel of suspense by the New York Times bestselling author of The Surgeon and The Sinner.
Dr. Maura Isles makes her living...
| Author | David Mitchell |
| ISBN | 0812974018 |
From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new.
Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying...
| Author | Kathleen Norris |
| ISBN | 1573227218 |
Struggling with her return to the Christian church after many years away, Kathleen Norris found it was the language of Christianity that most distanced her from faith. Words like "judgment," "faith," "dogma," "salvation," "sinner"—even "Christ"—formed what she called her "scary vocabulary,"...
Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ISBN13 9780380395866 here.
Set in England's Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of very special creatures on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction...
| Author | Henry James |
| ISBN | 0451528719 |
The plot of Washington Square has the simplicity of old-fashioned melodrama: a plain-looking, good-hearted young woman, the only child of a rich widower, is pursued by a charming but unscrupulous man who seeks the wealth she will presumably inherit. On this premise, Henry James constructed one of...
| Author | Peter Carey |
| ISBN | 0702229784 |
Peter Carey's Booker Prize winning novel imagines Australia's youth, before its dynamic passions became dangerous habits. It is also a startling and unusual love story.
Oscar is a young English clergyman who has broken with his past and developed a disturbing talent for gambling. A country...
The time is 1981, and Sibyl Danforth has been a dedicated midwife in the rural community of Reddington, Vermont, for fifteen years. But one treacherous winter night, in a house isolated by icy roads and failed telephone lines, Sibyl takes desperate measures to save a baby's life. She performs an emergency...
