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Reading Challenge A book less than 200 pages in length |
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Wedding of the foxes : essays
by Katherine Larson
An elegant collection of lyric essays that embraces fractures, contradictions, and the interconnectedness of life on Earth.
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Small things like these
by Claire Keegan
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
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Things my son needs to know about the world
by Fredrik Backman
As he conveys his profound awe at experiencing all the "firsts" that fill him with wonder and catch him completely unprepared, Fredrik Backman doesn't shy away from revealing his own false steps and fatherly flaws, tackling issues both great and small, from masculinity and mid-life crises to practical jokes and poop. In between the sleep-deprived lows and wonderful highs, Backman takes a step back to share the true story of falling in love with a woman who is his complete opposite, and learning to live a life that revolves around the people you care about unconditionally.
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Of mice and men
by John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck's classic novella follows an unlikely pair: George is small and quick and dark of face; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet together they have formed a family, clinging to each other in the face of loneliness, and alienation, and hardship. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him.
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We have always lived in the castle
by Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret takes readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.
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Giovanni's room
by James Baldwin
Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.
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The great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A young man newly rich tries to recapture the past and win back his former love, despite the fact that she has married.
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Fahrenheit 451
by Ray D. Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 is a novel set in the (perhaps near) future when firemen burn books forbidden by a totalitarian brave new world regime. The hero, according to Mr. Bradbury, is a book burner who suddenly discovers that books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out silently when put to the torch.
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Life : a love story
by Elizabeth Berg
As ninety-two-year-old Florence "Flo" Greene nears the end of her life, she writes a letter to Ruthie, the woman who grew up next door to her, describing the items Flo is leaving Ruthie in her will. But as it goes on, telling surprising stories about those "little" things Flo will leave behind (What could possibly be the worth of a rubber band kept in a matchbox tied up in red ribbon?), an unforgettable portrait of the life she has lived emerges.
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Night
by Elie Wiesel
Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.
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The alchemist
by Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different and far more satisfying than he ever imagined. Santiago's journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.
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Upstream : selected essays
by Mary Oliver
A collection of essays in which poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood 'friend' Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, 'a place to enter, and in which to feel,' and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love
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Between the world and me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. In his trademark style -- a mix of lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, essayistic argument, and reportage -- Coates provides readers a thrillingly illuminating new framework for understanding race: its history, our contemporary dilemma, and where we go from here
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On tyranny : twenty lessons from the twentieth century
by Timothy Snyder
The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. [The author believes that] today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.
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Against breaking : on the power of poetry
by Ada Limón
Ada Limón--celebrated poet laureate and 2023 MacArthur fellow--takes us on an inspiring journey into a world where poetry is both a soothing balm for the soul and a spark for transformation. With her blend of accessible yet profound prose, Lim n delivers a powerful message: poetry has the ability to heal, connect, and remind us of our shared humanity. Limón's mission to make poetry approachable shines brightly in this slim but impactful book. As Limón writes with heartfelt clarity, If you need to remember what makes us human, tender, brave, flawed, and worthy of love, you need poetry.
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Transcription
by Ben Lerner
The narrator of Ben Lerner's novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max....What unfolds...[is the] story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world.
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