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Scottjb9

Scottjb9

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The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans

Gertrude Stein

2.0 (3)

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard.

#477
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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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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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Tropic of Cancer

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller

3.0 (8)

I am living at the Villa Borghese.

#201
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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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Dubliners

Dubliners

James Joyce

3.71 (7)

The Sisters - There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke.An encounter: It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us.Araby: North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free.Eveline: She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.After the race: The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road.Two Gallants: The grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city, and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets.The boarding house: Mrs Mooney was a butcher's daughter.A little cloud: Eight years before he had seen his friend off at the North Wall and wished him God-speed.Counterparts: The bell rang furiously and, when Miss Parker went to the tube, a furious voice called out in a piercing North of Ireland accent: "Send Farrington here!"Clay: The matron had given her leave to go out as soon as the women's tea was over, and Maria looked forward to her evening out.A painful case: Mr James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern, and pretentious.Ivy Day in the committee room: Old Jack raked the cinders together with a piece of cardboard and spread them judiciously over the whitening dome of coals.A mother: Mr Holohan, assistant secretary of the Eire Abu Society, had been walking up and down Dublin for nearly a month, with his hands and pockets full of dirty pieces of paper, arranging about the series of concerts.Grace: Two gentlemen who were in the lavatory at the time tried to lift him up: but he was quite helpless.The dead: Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet.

#183
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Cane

Cane

Jean Toomer

4.0 (2)

#541
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469
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The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman

John Fowles

4.0 (2)

An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay - Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England's outstretched south-western leg - and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong possibilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.

#236
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Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson

3.67 (3)

The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the window.

#305
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Look Homeward, Angel

Look Homeward, Angel

Thomas Wolfe

5.0 (1)

A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.

#420
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War and Peace

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

4.38 (13)

"Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family."Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. (Maude/Maude)

#92
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The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky

4.56 (9)

Alexey Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his tragic and obscure death, which happened just thirteen years ago, and of which I shall speak in its proper place. (Garnett, 1912)Aleksei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a landowner of our district, extremely well known in his time (and to this day still remembered in these parts) on account of his violent and mysterious death exactly thirteen years ago, the circumstances of which I shall relate in due course. (Avsey 1994)Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. (Garnett, Great Books, 1952)Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of a landowner from our district, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, well known in his own day (and still remembered among us) because of his dark and tragic death, which happened exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall speak of in its proper place. (Pevear/Volokhonsky, 1990)

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Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert

3.18 (11)

Nous étions à l'Etude, quand le Proviseur entra suivi d'un "nouveau" habillé en bourgeois et d'un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre.We were in study hall when the headmaster walked in, followed by a new boy not wearing a school uniform, and by a janitor carrying a large desk.We were at prep, when the Head came in, followed by a new boy not in uniform and a school-servant carrying a big desk.We were at prep when the Headmaster came in, followed by a 'new boy' not wearing school uniform, and by a school servant carrying a large desk.We were in class when the head master came in, followed by a "new fellow," not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk.

#88
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain

4.0 (28)

You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but that ain't no matter.You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.

#14
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Great Expectations

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens

4.05 (21)

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

#28
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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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9,558
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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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The Good Soldier

The Good Soldier

Ford Madox Ford

3.57 (7)

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

#281
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2,079
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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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The Pickwick Papers

The Pickwick Papers

Charles Dickens

4.0 (5)

The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.

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Candide

Candide

Voltaire

4.13 (8)

There lived in Westphalia, at the country seat of Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh, a young lad blessed by Nature with the most agreeable manners.In the castle of Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia there lived a youth, endowed by Nature with the most gentle character.

#177
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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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The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

4.29 (17)

Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before. It was a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a “Penang lawyer.” Just under the head was a broad silver band nearly an inch across. “To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., from his friends of the C.C.H.,” was engraved upon it, with the date “1884.” It was just such a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry—dignified, solid, and reassuring.

#60
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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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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 Room with a View

A Room with a View

E. M. Forster

3.86 (7)

"The Signora had no business to do it," said Miss Bartlett, "no business at all. She promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here are north rooms, looking into a courtyard, and a long way apart. Oh, Lucy!"<br>

#138
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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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16,258
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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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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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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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Winnie-the-Pooh

Winnie-the-Pooh

A. A. Milne

4.19 (21)

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.

#24
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22,158
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Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison

4.14 (7)

The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o'clock.

#166
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4,574
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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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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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17,074
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The World According to Garp

The World According to Garp

John Irving

3.82 (11)

Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater.

#110
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Jazz

Jazz

Toni Morrison

3.25 (4)

Sth, I know that woman.

#339
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1,630
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Ethan Frome

Ethan Frome

Edith Wharton

3.86 (7)

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. (Author's Introductory Note)The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners.

#156
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Orlando: A Biography

Orlando: A Biography

Virginia Woolf

3.25 (4)

He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it - was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.

#313
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1,816
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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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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Gertrude Stein

4.0 (3)

I was born in San Francisco, California.

#428
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1,000
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The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds

H. G. Wells

3.67 (9)

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

#94
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8,851
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The Little Prince

The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

4.5 (24)

Once when I was six years old I saw a beautiful picture in a book about the primeval forest called "True Stories".

#45
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13,583
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The Wanderer

The Wanderer

Alain-Fournier

5.0 (3)

He appeared at our house on a Sunday in November 189... (Davison translation)

#467
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769
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Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett

4.27 (11)

Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before. Enter Vladimir ESTRAGON: (giving up again) Nothing to be done.

#119
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6,910
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The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

5.0 (1)

How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago?

#259
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The Diary of a Young Girl

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank

4.42 (19)

On Friday, 12th June, I woke up at six o' clock and no wonder; it was my birthday

#21
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22,484
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Four Plays

Four Plays

Eugene Ionesco

3.0 (3)

The Bald Soprano: Anti-play Scene: A middle class English interior, with English armchairs.

#421
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1,034
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Six Characters in Search of an Author

Six Characters in Search of an Author

Luigi Pirandello

3.25 (4)

When the audience arrives in the theater, the curtain is raised; and the stage, as normally in the daytime, is without wings or scenery and almost completely dark and empty.

#346
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1,576
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A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

3.5 (6)

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction -- what has that got to do with a room of one's own? I will try to explain.

#250
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Our Lady of the Flowers

Our Lady of the Flowers

Jean Genet

2.67 (3)

#551
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David Copperfield

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens

4.86 (14)

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

#80
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

Lewis Carroll

3.92 (24)

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do; once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversation in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"

#15
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24,659
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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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Austerlitz

Austerlitz

W.G. Sebald

4.33 (3)

In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks.

#417
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1,041
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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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Bible: King James Version

Bible: King James Version

KJV

3.93 (13)

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.Bibliographical introduction. Mainly, no doubt, because of the predominance of French as the language of educated people in England from the time of the Norman Conquest until the middle of the fourteenth century, the Bible, as a whole, remained untranslated into English until the last years of the life of Wyclif.

#71
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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

4.25 (4)

William Shakespeare's date of birth is not precisely known, but it probably preceded his baptism on April 26, 1564, in Stratfordon-Avon, by only a few days.

#133
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5,784
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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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The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini

4.33 (12)

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.

#82
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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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Life of Pi

Life of Pi

Yann Martel

4.35 (17)

My suffering left me sad and gloomy.

#61
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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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A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens

4.1 (10)

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

#47
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The Remains of the day

The Remains of the day

Kazuo Ishiguro

4.11 (9)

It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.

#163
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4,613
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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

4.42 (12)

To Sherlock Holmes she is always ithe/i woman.

#113
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Watership Down

Watership Down

Richard Adams

4.55 (11)

The primroses were over.

#68
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11,051
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Hamlet

Hamlet

William Shakespeare

4.09 (11)

<B>Act 1, Scene 1</B><BR><I>Enter</I> <B>Barnardo</B> <I>and</I> <B>Francisco</B><I>, two sentinels.</I><BR><BR><B>Barnardo</B><BR>Who's there?

#39
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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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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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Treasure Island

Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson

3.55 (11)

Squire Trelawny, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17--, and go back to the time when my father kept the "Admiral Benbow" inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.

#91
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Black Beauty

Black Beauty

Anna Sewell

3.67 (6)

The first place that I can well remember, was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it.

#109
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The Godfather

The Godfather

Mario Puzo

5.0 (7)

Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court No. 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.

#170
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The Alchemist

The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho

3.0 (17)

The boy's name was Santiago.

#130
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Kane and Abel

Kane and Abel

Jeffrey Archer

3.67 (3)

April 18, 1906 - Slonim, Poland - She only stopped screaming when she died.

#331
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Tales of the City

Tales of the City

Armistead Maupin

4.0 (3)

Mary Ann Singleton was twenty-five years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time.

#380
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

3.67 (3)

I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning.

#225
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2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey

Arthur C. Clarke

4.5 (6)

The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. Here on the Equator, in the continent which would one day be known as Africa, the battle for existence had reached a new climax of ferocity, and the victor was not yet in sight.

#200
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

3.8 (5)

As usual, at five o'clock that morning reveille was sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters.

#206
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Cry, the Beloved Country

Cry, the Beloved Country

Alan Paton

4.5 (2)

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills.

#275
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Commedia

Commedia

Dante Alighieri

3.17 (6)

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,/chè la diritta via era smarrita.Mildway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

#218
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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.

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The Prince

The Prince

Niccolò Machiavelli

3.83 (6)

All the states, all the dominions under whose authority men have lived in the past and live now have been and are either republics or principalities.It is customary for those who wish to gain the favour of a prince to endeavour to do so by offering him gifts of those things which they hold most precious, or in which they know him to take especial delight.

#148
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King Lear

King Lear

William Shakespeare

4.4 (5)

I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

#122
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Othello

Othello

William Shakespeare

4.43 (6)

Never tell me; I take it much unkindly That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this.

#97
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The Sonnets

The Sonnets

William Shakespeare

4.6 (5)

From fairest creatures we desire increase,<br> That thereby beauty's rose might never die,<br>But as the riper should by time decrease,<br>His tender heir might bear his memory:<br>But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,<br>Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,<br>Making a famine where abundance lies,<br>Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

#171
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The Sonnets

The Sonnets

William Shakespeare

4.6 (5)

From fairest creatures we desire increase,<br> That thereby beauty's rose might never die,<br>But as the riper should by time decrease,<br>His tender heir might bear his memory:<br>But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,<br>Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,<br>Making a famine where abundance lies,<br>Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

#171
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Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman

4.33 (6)

#202
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Malcolm X

5.0 (1)

When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.

#318
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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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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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Where the Wild Things Are

Where the Wild Things Are

Maurice Sendak

4.47 (15)

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him wild thing. And so he said, "I'll eat you UP!" And so he was sent to bed without eating anything.

#46
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Sula

Sula

Toni Morrison

5.0 (3)

In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from the roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.

#330
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Rubyfruit Jungle

Rubyfruit Jungle

Rita Mae Brown

4.0 (3)

No one remembers her beginnings.

#440
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The Prince of Tides

The Prince of Tides

Pat Conroy

5.0 (2)

My wound is geography.

#284
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A Moveable Feast

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway

3.67 (3)

Then there was the bad weather.

#232
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The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

Howard Pyle

3.67 (6)

In merry England in the time of old, when good King Henry the Second ruled the land, there lived within the green glades of Sherwood Forest, near Nottingham Town, a famous outlaw whose name was Robin Hood.

#243
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The Razor's Edge

The Razor's Edge

W. Somerset Maugham

4.5 (2)

I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don't know what else to call it.

#381
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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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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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Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson

3.83 (12)

Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.

#67
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The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde

4.56 (18)

The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amid the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink flowering thorn.La fragancia de las rosas llenaba el estudio y, al soplar entre los árboles del jardín la suave brisa estival, entraba por la puerta abierta el fuerte olor de las lilas o el perfume más sutil del rosado espino en flor.

#69
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Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy

4.67 (3)

The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.

#233
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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 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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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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The Chronicles of Narnia

The Chronicles of Narnia

C. S. Lewis

4.11 (28)

There is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. (From <i>The Magician's Nephew</i>, first in chronological order)Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. (From <i>The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe</i>, first in publication order)

#12
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2025 Reading Goal

0/50

Books Read

50 books to go!