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Lolita

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

4.14 (36)

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three, on the teeth.

#32
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17,173
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Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake

James Joyce

3.25 (4)

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

#256
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2,403
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Under the Volcano

Under the Volcano

Malcolm Lowry

4.2 (5)

Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus.

#289
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2,009
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To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

3.43 (14)

"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark," she added.

#118
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6,984
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Invisible Man

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison

4.31 (16)

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me."

#76
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10,197
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The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

3.48 (23)

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.

#65
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11,322
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The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

3.95 (97)

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

#1
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45,295
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Catch-22

Catch-22

Joseph Heller

4.06 (31)

It was love at first sight.

#31
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19,027
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Tropic of Cancer

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller

3.0 (8)

I am living at the Villa Borghese.

#201
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3,596
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On the Road

On the Road

Jack Kerouac

3.4 (15)

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.

#55
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12,599
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A Passage to India

A Passage to India

E. M. Forster

3.88 (8)

Except for the Marabar caves--and they are twenty miles off--the city of Chrandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.

#125
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6,487
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Native Son

Native Son

Richard Wright

3.86 (7)

Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng! An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room.

#141
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5,281
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The Day of the Locust

The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West

3.67 (3)

Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard a great din on the road outside his office.

#356
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1,538
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Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

4.0 (29)

All this happened, more or less.

#34
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16,830
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The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing

4.0 (4)

The two women were alone in the London flat.

#244
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2,727
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Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

4.0 (3)

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

#405
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1,158
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A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

4.0 (20)

'What's it going to be then, eh?'

#48
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13,216
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The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles

4.0 (4)

He awoke, opened his eyes.Si svegliò, aprì gli occhi. La stanza gli diceva poco o niente, profondamente immerso com'era nel non-essere da cui era appena affiorato. Se l'energia di accertare la propria collocazione nel tempo e nello spazio gli mancava, gliene mancava anche il desiderio. Sapeva soltanto di esistere, d'avere attraversato vaste regioni per ritornare dal nulla; c'era, al centro della sua coscienza, la certezza di una tristezza infinita e al tempo stesso rassicurante, perché era la sola ad essergli familiare.

#452
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An American Tragedy

An American Tragedy

Theodore Dreiser

4.25 (4)

Dusk - of a summer night.

#228
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3,003
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Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

3.47 (17)

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

#43
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Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

3.75 (32)

#22
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22,344
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Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

3.97 (30)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

#11
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27,935
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Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

4.17 (35)

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.

#17
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24,166
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Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

4.08 (12)

Okonkwo was well-known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honour to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat.

#86
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My Ántonia

My Ántonia

Willa Cather

3.67 (9)

I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I traveled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the “hands” on my father’s old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather. Jake’s experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.

#149
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5,018
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The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton

4.0 (7)

On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

#134
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5,703
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Herzog

Herzog

Saul Bellow

3.0 (3)

If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

#277
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2,118
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Call it Sleep

Call it Sleep

Henry Roth

3.5 (2)

#498
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621
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Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh

4.44 (9)

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.

#155
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4,825
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Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell

4.36 (69)

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

#3
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37,302
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Frankenstein

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

3.87 (31)

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. i- preface by P.B. Shelley/i

#27
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19,894
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Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell

4.45 (22)

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm, as the Tarleton twins were.

#36
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15,623
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Darkness at Noon

Darkness at Noon

Arthur Koestler

4.33 (3)

The cell door slammed behind Rubashov.

#371
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1,380
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Sons and Lovers

Sons and Lovers

D. H. Lawrence

3.6 (5)

"The Bottoms" succeeded to "Hell Row."

#161
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4,642
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The Way of All Flesh

The Way of All Flesh

Samuel Butler

3.67 (3)

When I was a small boy at the beginning of the century I remember an old man who wore knee-breeches and worsted stockings, and who used to hobble about the street of our village with the help of a stick. He must have been getting on for eighty in the year 1807, earlier than which date I suppose I can hardly remember him, for I was born in 1802.

#437
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963
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I, Claudius

I, Claudius

Robert Graves

4.17 (6)

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot", or "That Claudius", or "Claudius the Stammerer", or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius", am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled.

#207
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The Heart is A Lonely Hunter

The Heart is A Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

4.38 (8)

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.

#178
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4,228
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Appointment in Samarra

Appointment in Samarra

John O'Hara

4.0 (1)

Our story opens in the mind of Luther L. (L. for LeRoy) Fliegler, who is lying in his bed, not thinking of anything, but just aware of sounds, conscious of his own breathing, and sensitive to his own heartbeats.

#445
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921
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Animal Farm

Animal Farm

George Orwell

4.17 (46)

Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes.

#6
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33,773
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A handful of dust

A handful of dust

Evelyn Waugh

4.25 (4)

"Was anyone hurt?"

#390
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1,260
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As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner

3.25 (11)

Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file.

#115
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7,188
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All the King's Men

All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren

4.4 (5)

MASON CITY.<br> To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it.</b>

#190
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3,949
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The bridge of San Luis Rey

The bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder

3.8 (5)

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.

#258
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2,367
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Go Tell It on the Mountain

Go Tell It on the Mountain

James Baldwin

3.5 (4)

Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father.

#222
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3,059
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The Heart of the Matter

The Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene

5.0 (1)

Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.

#389
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1,261
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Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies

William Golding

3.89 (45)

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.

#7
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32,779
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Deliverance

Deliverance

James Dickey

3.5 (2)

Before: It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose. The whole land was very tense until we put our four steins on its corners and laid the river out to run for us through the mountains 150 miles north.

#294
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1,981
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A Dance to the Music of Time

A Dance to the Music of Time

Anthony Powell

3.5 (2)

The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of a camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drainpipes.

#447
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903
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Portnoy's Complaint

Portnoy's Complaint

Philip Roth

2.5 (4)

She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seemed to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.

#239
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2,790
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Light in August

Light in August

William Faulkner

4.2 (5)

Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, 'I have come from Alabama: a fur piece.'

#229
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3,000
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The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett

4.11 (9)

Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth.

#195
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3,692
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The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer

Walker Percy

3.67 (3)

This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch.

#373
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1,360
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Death Comes for the Archbishop

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather

4.0 (2)

One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.

#355
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1,544
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A House for Mr.Biswas

A House for Mr.Biswas

V. S. Naipaul

4.0 (1)

Ten weeks before he died, Mr. Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St. James, Port of Spain, was sacked.

#442
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953
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Muriel Spark

3.8 (5)

The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment, the boys were likely to be away.

#226
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3,011
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The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow

4.0 (1)

I am an American, Chicago born–Chicago, that somber city–and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; and sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

#383
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1,326
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The Death of the Heart

The Death of the Heart

Elizabeth Bowen

3.5 (2)

That mornining's ice, no more than brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments.

#530
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504
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Lord Jim

Lord Jim

Joseph Conrad

3.5 (2)

He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular.

#265
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2,295
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Ragtime

Ragtime

E. L. Doctorow

4.0 (3)

In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle.

#269
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2,209
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The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild

Jack London

3.65 (20)

Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.

#35
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Loving

Loving

Henry Green

4.0 (1)

#569
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383
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Tobacco Road

Tobacco Road

Erskine Caldwell

5.0 (1)

Lov Bensey trudged homeward through the deep white sand of the gully-washed tobacco road with a sack of winter turnips on his back.

#422
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1,031
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The Magus

The Magus

John Fowles

4.0 (4)

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf, Queen Victoria.

#268
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2,221
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Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

3.5 (6)

They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.

#211
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3,313
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Under the Net

Under the Net

Iris Murdoch

3.0 (2)

When I saw Finn waiting for me at the corner of the street I knew at once that something had gone wrong. Finn usually waits for me in bed, or leaning up against the side of the door with his eyes closed.

#495
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627
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Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice

William Styron

3.0 (1)

In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn.

#173
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4,348
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To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee

4.41 (64)

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

#2
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43,048
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The Color Purple

The Color Purple

Alice Walker

4.07 (15)

You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy.

#44
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13,645
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Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck

4.03 (38)

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.

#9
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29,660
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Charlotte's Web

Charlotte's Web

E. B. White

4.27 (26)

Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.

#8
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30,417
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey

4.5 (16)

"They're out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them."They're out there.

#59
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11,902
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For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway

4.0 (12)

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.

#73
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10,407
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The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway

3.44 (25)

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.

#33
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The Fountainhead

The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand

4.14 (7)

Howard Roark laughed.

#151
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4,904
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Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf

3.38 (13)

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.<br> <br> For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

#116
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In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote

4.33 (12)

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call 'out there'.

#111
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7,398
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

4.32 (28)

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

#30
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19,439
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Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs

2.83 (6)

I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil-doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square station, vault and turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train.

#271
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2,191
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White Noise

White Noise

Don DeLillo

3.75 (4)

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus.

#238
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2,798
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Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

3.53 (15)

"Who is John Galt?"

#147
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5,051
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Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run

John Updike

4.25 (4)

Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it.

#221
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3,113
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The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler

4.0 (7)

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.

#192
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3,838
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Lucky Jim

Lucky Jim

Kingsley Amis

4.0 (4)

"They made a silly mistake, though," the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory.

#286
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2,033
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Money

Money

Martin Amis

3.0 (4)

As my cab pulled of FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds, a low-slung Tomohawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane and slopped in fast right across our bows.

#471
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730
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Atonement

Atonement

Ian McEwan

4.1 (10)

The play – for which Briony had designed posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper – was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.

#102
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American Pastoral

American Pastoral

Philip Roth

4.0 (3)

The swede.

#387
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1,275
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

J. K. Rowling

4.53 (45)

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

#4
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36,649
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The Hobbit

The Hobbit

J. R. R. Tolkien

4.37 (30)

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

#10
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Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs of a Geisha

Arthur Golden

4.54 (13)

One evening in the spring of 1936, when I was a boy of fourteen, my father took me to a dance performance in Kyoto.Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, 'That afternoon when I met so-and-so ... was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon.'

#62
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A Prayer for Owen Meany

A Prayer for Owen Meany

John Irving

4.5 (8)

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God;- I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

#117
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The Handmaid’s Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood

3.93 (15)

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

#58
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12,202
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Dune

Dune

Frank Herbert

4.53 (17)

<i>A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. . . .</i><br><br><b>from "Manual of Muad'dib" by the Princess Irulan</b>In the week before their departure to Arakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.

#98
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8,587
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The Secret History

The Secret History

Donna Tartt

4.25 (8)

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. (Prologue)Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

#254
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2,431
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The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

4.0 (8)

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

#81
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Possession

Possession

A.S. Byatt

3.67 (6)

The book was thick and black and covered with dust.

#247
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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

J. K. Rowling

4.59 (27)

Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.

#20
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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

J. K. Rowling

4.61 (28)

The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it 'the Riddle House', even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there.

#16
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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

J. K. Rowling

4.62 (26)

Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.

#25
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21,805
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The Pillars of The Earth

The Pillars of The Earth

Ken Follett

4.6 (10)

The small boys came early to the hanging. (Preface)In a broad valley, at the foot of a sloping hillside, beside a clear bubbling stream, Tom was building a house. (Chapter 1)

#175
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4,301
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The Stand

The Stand

Stephen King

4.6 (10)

Hapscomb's Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston."Sally."

#121
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6,723
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The Thornbirds

The Thornbirds

Colleen McCullough

5.0 (2)

On December 8th, 1915, Meggie Cleary had her fourth birthday.

#185
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4,124
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Matilda

Matilda

Roald Dahl

4.62 (13)

It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers.

#85
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The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer

4.0 (11)

When the sweet showers of April have pierced/<br>The drought of March, and pierced it to the root,/<br>And every vein is bathed in that moisture/<br>Whose quickening force will engender the flower;/<br>And when the west wind too with its sweet breath/<br>Has given life in every wood and field/<br>To tender shoots, and when the stripling sun/<br>Has run his half-course in Aries, the Ram,/<br>And when small birds are making melodies,/<br>That sleep all the night long with open eyes,/<br>(Nature so prompts them, and encourages);/<br>Then people long to go on pilgrimages,/<br>And palmers to take ship for foreign shores,/<br>And distant shrines, famous in different lands;/<br>And most especially, from all the shires/<br>Of England, to Canterbury they come,/<br>The holy blessed martyr there to seek,/<br>Who gave his help to them when they were sick.When in April the sweet showers fall<br>And pierce the drought of March to the root, and all<br>The veins are bathed in liquor of such power<br>As brings about the engendering of the flower,<br>When also Zephyrus with his sweet breath<br>Exhales an air in every grove and heath<br>Upon the tender shoots, and the young sun<br>His half-course in the sign of the <i>Ram</i> has run,<br>And the small fowl are making melody<br>That sleep away the night with open eye<br>(So nature pricks them and their heart engages)<br>Then people long to go on pilgrimages<br>And palmers long to seek the stranger strands<br>Of far-off saints, hallowed in sundry lands,<br>And specially, from every shire's end<br>Of England, down to Canterbury they wend<br>To seek the holy blissful martyr, quick<br>To give his help to them when they were sick.<br><br><b>(translated by Nevill Coghill, 1951)</b>Once upon a time, as old stories tell us, there was a duke named Theseus;  Of Athens he was a lord and governor, And in his time such a conqueror, That greater was there none under the sum.

#75
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Night

Night

Elie Wiesel

4.29 (7)

They called him Moshe the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life.

#124
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6,509
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Angela's Ashes

Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt

4.5 (6)

My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born.

#123
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6,672
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Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

4.09 (23)

It was a pleasure to burn.

#42
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13,959
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith

4.4 (5)

Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.

#176
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4,293
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The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan

4.4 (5)

The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum.

#144
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5,157
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The Alienist

The Alienist

Caleb Carr

4.33 (3)

<i>January 8th, 1919</i><br> Theodore is in the ground.

#349
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1,571
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A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine L'Engle

4.0 (12)

It was a dark and stormy night.<br> In her attic bedroom Meg Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind.

#72
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10,568
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Watchmen

Watchmen

Alan Moore

4.7 (10)

Rorschach's Journal. October 12th, 1985: <br>Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.

#197
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3,633
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The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner

3.56 (15)

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.

#90
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9,135
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Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston

3.9 (10)

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.

#101
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8,146
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Don Quixote

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes

4.89 (9)

Idle reader, you can believe without any oath of mine that I would wish this book, as the child of my brain, to be the most beautiful, the liveliest and the cleverest imaginable.Prologue: Idle reader: I don't have to swear any oaths to persuade you that I should like this book, since it is the son of my brain, to be the most beautiful and elegant and intelligent book imaginable.Chapter 1: In a village in La Mancha, the name of which I cannot quite recall, there lived not long ago one of those country gentlemen or hidalgos who keep a lance in a rack, an ancient leather shield, a scrawny hack and a greyhound for coursing.

#78
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9,994
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Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

2.78 (18)

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

#41
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Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon

3.75 (4)

A screaming comes across the sky.

#262
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2,331
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Beloved

Beloved

Toni Morrison

4.07 (14)

124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.

#66
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11,165
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Little Women

Little Women

Louisa May Alcott

3.68 (19)

“Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

#23
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22,254
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The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger

3.58 (45)

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want the truth."

#5
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The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

4.31 (35)

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.

#18
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The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien

4.56 (36)

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

#13
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26,139
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Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie

4.22 (9)

I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time.

#150
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5,001
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Brave New World

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

4.07 (30)

A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.

#19
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23,022
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A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway

4.38 (8)

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.

#74
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10,392
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Housekeeping

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson

3.75 (4)

My name is Ruth.

#334
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1,698
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2025 Reading Goal

0/50

Books Read

50 books to go!