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Here are your suggestions; click on a title to place a hold:
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Nineteen eighty-four : a novel
by
George Orwell
Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life—the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language—and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by
Mark Twain
A nineteenth-century boy from a Mississippi River town recounts his adventures as he travels down the river with a runaway slave, encountering a family involved in a feud, two scoundrels pretending to be royalty, and Tom Sawyer's aunt who mistakes him for Tom.
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The alchemist : A Fable About Following Your Dream
by
Paulo Coelho
A fable about undauntingly following one's dreams, listening to one's heart, and reading life's omens features dialogue between a boy and an unnamed being. 50,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo.
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The autobiography of Malcolm X
by
Malcolm X
The black leader discusses his political philosophy and reveals details of his life, shedding light on the ideas that enabled him to gain the allegiance of a still growing percentage of the black population.
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The Awakening
by
Kate Chopin
When first published in 1899, The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were taken aback by Chopin's daring portrayal of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, who seeks and finds passionate physical love outside the confines of her domestic situation.
Although the theme of marital infidelity no longer shocks, few novels have plumbed the psychology of a woman involved in an illicit relationship with the perception, artistry, and honesty that Kate Chopin brought to The Awakening.
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The bell jar : a novel
by
Sylvia Plath
Chronicles one young woman's emotional breakdown as she journeys from the glamorous world of Manhattan publishing to the isolation of the asylum.
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Beloved
by
Toni Morrison
Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is haunted persistently by the ghost of the dead baby girl whom she sacrificed, in a new edition of the Nobel Laureate's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
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Bless me, Ultima
by
Rudolfo A. Anaya
Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.
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Brave new world
by
Aldous Huxley
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, inhabited by genetically modified citizens and an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist.
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Bury my heart at Wounded Knee : an Indian history of the American West
by
Dee Brown
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows the great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was really won.
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The catcher in the rye
by
J. D. Salinger
The hero-narrator of this novel is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.
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The crucible : a play in four acts
by
Arthur Miller
A play revealing the Salem witch trials of the late seventeenth century and the problem of guilt by association. Written in 1953, The Crucible is a mirror Miller uses to reflect the anti-communist hysteria inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy's "witch-hunts" in the United States. Within the text itself, Miller contemplates the parallels, writing, "Political opposition... is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence."
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The diary of a young girl
by
Anne Frank
The autobiographical reminiscences of a young Jewish girl coming of age during World War II describes her life in hiding from the Nazis and offers a poignant study of the tragedy of the Holocaust.
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Fahrenheit 451
by
Ray Bradbury
A book burner in a future fascist state finds out books are a vital part of a culture he never knew. He clandestinely pursues reading, until he is betrayed
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A farewell to arms
by
Ernest Hemingway
A tragic wartime romance set against the brutal and chaotic backdrop of World War I is the classic story of a volunteer ambulance driver wounded on the Italian front and the English nurse he loves and leaves behind.
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Flowers for Algernon
by
Daniel Keyes
Charlie Gordon, a youth with limited mental capabilities, along with a laboratory rat named Algernon become the joint objects of a scientific alteration to see if Charlie can become "normal."
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Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus
by
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
A monster assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies develops a mind of his own as he learns to loathe himself and hate his creator
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Go tell it on the mountain
by
James Baldwin
Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.
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The God of Small Things
by
Arundhati Roy
In 1969 Kerala, India, Rahel and her twin brother, Estha, struggle to forge a childhood for themselves amid the destruction of their family life, as they discover that the entire world can be transformed in a single moment. Winner of the Booker Prize.
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The Grapes of Wrath
by
John Steinbeck
In the midst of America's Great Depression, the Joad family travel from Oklahoma to California in search of work, only to discover thousands like them have also been on the move. Just as their money and food run out, they find work on a peach farm - but discover they're breaking a strike led by their old friend, Casy the Preacher.
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Great expectations
by
Charles Dickens
In what may be Dickens's best novel, humble, orphaned Pip is apprenticed to the dirty work of the forge but dares to dream of becoming a gentleman — and one day, under sudden and enigmatic circumstances, he finds himself in possession of "great expectations." In this gripping tale of crime and guilt, revenge and reward, the compelling characters include Magwitch, the fearful and fearsome convict; Estella, whose beauty is excelled only by her haughtiness; and the embittered Miss Havisham, an eccentric jilted bride
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The great Gatsby
by
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Narrator Nick Carraway-a transplant from the Midwest like Fitzgerald himself-observes the wasteful lives of his well-to-do neighbors in this tale of money, love, and the pursuit of the American dream. The unforgettable cast is headed by Jay Gatsby, a self-made man whose determination to realize his fantasies embodies both the glories of imagination and the grimness of reality. Above all, The Great Gatsby is animated by the magic of Fitzgerald's incandescent prose and its timeless exploration of the importance of honesty, the temptations of wealth, and the struggle to escape the past.
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Hamlet
by
William Shakespeare
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is faced by a ghost bearing a grim message of murder and revenge, driving the prince to the edge of madness by his struggle to understand the situation and to perform his duty
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The handmaid's tale
by
Margaret Atwood
Offred, a Handmaid, describes life in what was once the United States, now the Republic of Gilead, a shockingly repressive and intolerant monotheocracy, in a satirical tour de force set in the near future.
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Hiroshima
by
John Hersey
The classic tale of the day the first atom bomb was dropped offers a haunting evocation of the memories of survivors and an appeal to the conscience of humanity
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The hobbit, or, There and back again
by
J. R. R. Tolkien
Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to take part in an adventure from which he may never return.
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The house on Mango Street
by
Sandra Cisneros
For Esperanza, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, life is an endless landscape of concrete and run-down tenements, and she tries to rise above the hopelessness.
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Invisible man
by
Ralph Ellison
An African-American man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.
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The Joy Luck Club
by
Amy Tan
Encompassing two generations and a rich blend of Chinese and American history, the story of four struggling, strong women also reveals their daughter's memories and feelings.
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King Lear
by
William Shakespeare
The play tells us about families struggling between greed and cruelty, on the one hand, and support and consolation, on the other. Emotions are extreme, magnified to gigantic proportions. We also see old age portrayed in all its vulnerability, pride, and, perhaps, wisdom—one reason this most devastating of Shakespeare’s tragedies is also perhaps his most moving.
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Lord of the flies : a novel
by
William Golding
The classical study of human nature depicts the degeneration of a group of schoolboys, aged 6 to 12, who are marooned on a tropical island after a plane crash.
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The metamorphosis
by
Franz Kafka
"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Franz Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing--though absurdly comic--meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.
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Night : a memoir
by
Elie Wiesel
A memorial edition of the seminal memoir of surviving the Nazi death camps includes the unpublished text of a speech that the author delivered before the United Nations General Assembly on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, as well as a memorial tribute by President Barack Obama.
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The Odyssey
by
Homer
Presents the classic poem concerning the wanderings of the hero Odysseus and his miraculous return to Ithaca and a faithful wife
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One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
by
Ken Kesey
Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy – the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey's extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness.
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Persepolis : The Story of a Childhood
by
Marjane Satrapi
The great-granddaughter of Iran's last emperor and the daughter of ardent Marxists describes growing up in Tehran in a country plagued by political upheaval and vast contradictions between public and private life. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.
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The plague of doves
by
Louise Erdrich
Unaware of a violent event that marked the beginning of her mixed ancestry, ambitious young Evelina Harp, a part-Ojibwe, part-white girl prone to falling hopelessly in love, learns disturbing truths from her gifted storyteller grandfather, while a sentimental judge weighs the legacy of a century-old crime as reflected by his own love life.
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Pride & prejudice
by
Jane Austen
In early nineteenth-century England, a spirited young woman copes with the suit of a snobbish gentleman, as well as the romantic entanglements of her four sisters
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The Road
by
Cormac McCarthy
In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.
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The scarlet letter
by
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hester Prynne is ostracized from her seventeenth-century Puritan community for refusing to name the father of her child, the product of an adulterous relationship
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Slaughterhouse-five
by
Kurt Vonnegut
Billy Pilgrim returns home from the Second World War only to be kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who teach him that time is an eternal present
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The sound and the fury
by
William Faulkner
Retells the tragic times of the Compson family, including beautiful, rebellious Caddy; manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their Black servant.
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Their eyes were watching God : A Novel
by
Zora Neale Hurston
When Janie Starks returns to her rural Florida home, she reminisces to her best friend, Pheoby, about her marriages and her relationship with a younger man.
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Things fall apart
by
Chinua Achebe
A classic novel about the confrontation of African tribal life with colonial rule tells the tragic story of a warrior whose manly, fearless exterior conceals bewilderment, fear, and anger at the breakdown of his society.
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The things they carried
by
Tim O'Brien
Heroic young men carry the emotional weight of their lives to war in Vietnam in a patchwork account of a modern journey into the heart of darkness.
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To kill a mockingbird
by
Harper Lee
The explosion of racial hate and violence in a small Alabama town is viewed by a little girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape.
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A tree grows in Brooklyn
by
Betty Smith
Young Francie Nolan, having inherited both her father's romantic and her mother's practical nature, struggles to survive and thrive growing up in the slums of Brooklyn in the early twentieth century.
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The ugly American
by
William J. Lederer
The ineffectual Ambassador is just one of the handicaps facing the Americans as Southeast Asia becomes increasingly involved with Communism.
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Wuthering Heights
by
Emily Brontë
Against a background of English moors in the eighteenth century, the lives of two families become intertwined through marriage, passion, and the dominating force of a man called Heathcliff.
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Washoe County Library System | 301 S. Center St. Reno, NV
89501 | 775-327-8300
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