50 Book Challenge Part I
Join the 50 Book Challenge Part I with this curated list of must-read books! Discover top picks to kickstart your reading journey and track your progress.
Book
Beyond Black
by Hilary Mantel
Trouble spirals out of control for a psychic and her personal assistant when they take up with a spirit guide and his drowned therapist after moving to a suburban wasteland.
Item Not Found
ID: 0140167188
(Type: books)
Book
Choke
by Chuck Palahniuk
Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.
Book
A Changed Man
by Francine Prose
Holocaust survivor Meyer Maslow, the head of a human rights foundation, is baffled by the entreaties of Vincent Nolan, a young neo-Nazi who inadvertently transforms the lives of other people in his attempts to change his own life. By the author of The Lives of the Muses.
Item Not Found
ID: 0676977804
(Type: books)
Book
Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
A young Englishman embarks on a humorous crusade against traditional class structures.
Book
The Robber Bride
by Margaret Atwood
From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—one of Margaret Atwood’s most unforgettable characters lurks at the center of this intricate novel like a spider in a web. The glamorous, irresistible, unscrupulous Zenia is nothing less than a fairy-tale villain in the memories of her former friends. Roz, Charis, and Tony—university classmates decades ago—were reunited at Zenia’s funeral and have met monthly for lunch ever since, obsessively retracing the destructive swath she once cut through their lives. A brilliantly inventive fabulist, Zenia had a talent for exploiting her friends’ weaknesses, wielding intimacy as a weapon and cheating them of money, time, sympathy, and men. But one day, five years after her funeral, they are shocked to catch sight of Zenia: even her death appears to have been yet another fiction. As the three women plot to confront their larger-than-life nemesis, Atwood proves herself a gleefully acute observer of the treacherous shoals of friendship, trust, desire, and power.
Item Not Found
ID: 0818403950
(Type: books)
Book
Valley of the Dolls
by Jacqueline Susann
Three women seek escape as they learn about the bitterness, corruption, and falsehoods of the show-business world.
Item Not Found
ID: 0679758666
(Type: books)
Book
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A reunion with two childhood friends draws Kathy and her companions on a nostalgic odyssey into their lives at Hailsham, an isolated private school in the English countryside, and a confrontation with the truth about their childhoods.
Book
The Trial
by Franz Kafka
From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis: Written in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.
Item Not Found
ID: 1582344841
(Type: books)
Book
The Third Policeman
by Flann O'Brien
With the publication of The Third Policeman, Dalkey Archive Press now has all of O'Brien's fiction back in print.
Book
The Thin Place
by Kathryn Davis
Discovering a dead body at a lake near the Canadian border, twelve-year-old Mees Kipp inexplicably brings the man back to life and realizes that she possesses an extraordinary gift that irrevocably shapes the lives of Mees, her two friends, and their community. By the author of Versailles.
Item Not Found
ID: 1594489017
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0141002018
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 041372140X
(Type: books)
Book
Slow Man
by J. M. Coetzee
Dependent on others after losing his leg in an accident, sixty-year-old Paul Rayment finds himself falling in love with a down-to-earth Croatian nurse and encouraged by a mysterious writer to take an activist role in his own life.
Item Not Found
ID: 0413718204
(Type: books)
Book
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the BuendĂa family.
Book
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
Oedipa Maas finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy.
Book
The Accidental
by Ali Smith
Talking her way into the Norfolk cottage that the Smart family is renting for the summer, Amber, an enigmatic con artist, insinuates herself into the lives of Eve, her husband Michael, and their children.