Books Read in 2005 (Part 2)
Explore the second part of my 2005 reading journey with this curated list of books. Discover top reads, hidden gems, and literary favorites from that year.
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How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets
by Garth Stein
Evan had a hit single. But that was 10 years ago. Now 31, he's drifting, playing in a local band and teaching middle-aged guys to coax music from electric guitars. Beset at a young age by a life-threatening form of epilepsy, he's kept his condition a secret, even from his bandmates, only his family know, but they don't know about the accident that caused it. Offbeat and disarming, How Evan Broke His Head portrays a contemporary American family with unfailing and unflinching honesty.
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Undead and Unemployed
by MaryJanice Davidson
Undead, and unable to shake her penchant for shoes, Betsy Taylor, the new Queen of the Vampires, gets a job selling designer footwear at Macy's while trying to catch a vicious vampire slayer with the help of a gorgeous ally. Original.
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Prime
by Poppy Z. Brite
Two years after the opening of Liquor, New Orleans chefs Rickey and G-man are immersed in the life of their restaurant, enjoying a loyal cast of diners, and cooking great booze-laced food. All’s well until a bad review in a local paper not-so-subtly hints that their “silent” backer, celebrity chef Lenny Duveteaux, has ulterior motives. When Lenny is accused of serious criminal activity by eccentric D.A. Placide Treat, Rickey and G-man realize it may be time to end their dependence on him. When Rickey is offered a plum consulting job at a Dallas restaurant, it seems the perfect way to beef up their bank account. But taking the gig will mean a reunion with Cooper Stark, the older chef with whom Rickey shared an unsettling cocaine-fueled encounter back in culinary school, as well as dealing with gung-ho Texas businessman/restaurateur Frank Firestone. At G-man’s urging, Rickey finally accepts the offer and revamps Firestone’s menu to rave reviews. Home in New Orleans, Rickey has just settled back into his daily kitchen routine when he receives disturbing information that forces his return to Dallas. As Placide Treat’s machinations grow ever more bizarre, G-man learns that there’s more to the story—and that Rickey is in Texas-size danger.
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ID: 1400040965
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Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
by Roddy Doyle
Winner of the Booker Prize – Roddy Doyle’s witty, exuberant novel about a young boy trying to make sense of his changing world It is 1968. Patrick Clarke is ten. He loves Geronimo, the Three Stooges, and the smell of his hot water bottle. He can't stand his little brother Sinbad. His best friend is Kevin, and their names are all over Barrytown, written with sticks in wet cement. They play football, lepers, and jumping to the bottom of the sea. But why didn't anyone help him when Charles Leavy had been going to kill him? Why do his ma and da argue so much, but act like everything is fine? Paddy sees everything, but he understands less and less. Hilarious and poignant, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha charts the triumphs, indignities, and bewilderment of a young boy and his world, a place full of warmth, cruelty, confusion and love.
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The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove
by Christopher Moore
The town psychiatrist has decided to switch everybody in Pine Cove, California, from their normal antidepressants to placebos, so naturally—well, to be accurate, artificially—business is booming at the local blues bar. Trouble is, those lonely slide-guitar notes have also attracted a colossal sea beast named Steve with, shall we say, a thing for explosive oil tanker trucks. Suddenly, morose Pine Cove turns libidinous and is hit by a mysterious crime wave, and a beleaguered constable has to fight off his own gonzo appetites to find out what's wrong and what, if anything, to do about it.
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Offshore
by Penelope Fitzgerald
On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of eccentrics lives in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another. How each of their lives complicates the others is the stuff of this perfect little novel. Winner of a 1997 Booker Prize.
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The Plague
by Albert Camus
“Its relevance lashes you across the face.” —Stephen Metcalf, The Los Angeles Times • “A redemptive book, one that wills the reader to believe, even in a time of despair.” —Roger Lowenstein, The Washington Post A haunting tale of human resilience and hope in the face of unrelieved horror, Albert Camus' iconic novel about an epidemic ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature. The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. Each person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and a few, like Dr. Rieux, resist the terror. An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, The Plague is in part an allegory of France's suffering under the Nazi occupation, and a timeless story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence.
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Swordspoint
by Ellen Kushner
The cult classic fantasy of manners, now with three bonus stories “Swordspoint has an unforgettable opening and just gets better from there.”—George R. R. Martin Hailed by critics as “a bravura performance” (Locus) and “witty, sharp-eyed, [and] full of interesting people” (Newsday), this acclaimed novel, filled with remarkable plot twists and unexpected humor, takes fantasy to an unprecedented level of elegant writing and scintillating wit. Award-winning author Ellen Kushner has created a world of unforgettable characters whose political ambitions, passionate love affairs, and age-old rivalries collide with deadly results. On the treacherous streets of Riverside, a man lives and dies by the sword. Even the nobles on the Hill turn to duels to settle their disputes. Within this elite, dangerous world, Richard St. Vier is the undisputed master, as skilled as he is ruthless—until a death by the sword is met with outrage instead of awe, and the city discovers that the line between hero and villain can be altered in the blink of an eye.
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Wormwood
by Poppy Brite
“Big talent gives off thermonuclear vibes. I can feel them . . . this is the voice we’re going to be hearing for a long time.”—Harlan Ellison In an old car rocking down a North Carolina highway with the radio on so loud you can’t hear the music. . . Behind a dusty Georgia carny show. . . In a mausoleum in Baton Rouge, or in an alley in Calcutta. . . Here wanderers come to rest, the lost and lonely press their bodies up against each other, the heat rises, flesh yields, bones are bared, blood spills. This is the landscape of today’s most brilliant young horror writer, Poppy Z. Brite. Now, in a collection that sings like cutting edge rock ’n’ roll and shows the deft touch of a master storyteller, Poppy Z. Brite weaves her unique spell of the sensual, the frightening, and the forbidden. . . “Every page of Brite’s work stresses the beautiful and heartbreaking strangeness of the world.”—Fangoria
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Latter Days
by C. Jay Cox
The official movie tie-in to the winner of the Outstanding First Narrative Feature Award at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, and the Best Gay Male Feature Film Award at the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. A shallow LA party boy falls in love with a hunky, repressed Mormon missionary in this gay romantic drama from the writer of Sweet Home Alabama starring Reese Witherspoon. The theatrical release date of Latter Days is January 2004, starring Jacqueline Besset, Mary Jay Place, Wes Ramsey, Steve Sandvoss and Amber Benson.
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The Mezzanine
by Nicholson Baker
Turns an ordinary ride up an office escalator into a meditation on our relations with familiar objects--shoelaces, straws, and more. Baker's debut novel, and a favorite amongst many of us here.
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Vernon God Little
by D. B. C. Pierre
After a school shooting where sixteen kids are shot Vernon Little's best friend turns the gun on himself, leaving Vernon to be accused as an accessory to murder.
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Fire from Heaven
by Mary Renault
Alexander’s beauty, strength, and defiance were apparent from birth, but his boyhood honed those gifts into the makings of a king. His mother, Olympias, and his father, King Philip of Macedon, fought each other for their son’s loyalty, teaching Alexander politics and vengeance from the cradle. His love for the youth Hephaistion taught him trust, while Aristotle’s tutoring provoked his mind and Homer’s Iliad fueled his aspirations. Killing his first man in battle at the age of twelve, he became regent at sixteen and commander of Macedon’s cavalry at eighteen, so that by the time his father was murdered, Alexander’s skills had grown to match his fiery ambition.
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Breakfast at Tiffany's
by Truman Capote
Holly Golightly knows that nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's. In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Capote created a woman whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the literary landscape—her poignancy, wit, and naïveté continue to charm. This volume also includes three of Capote's best-known stories, “House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory,” which the Saturday Review called “one of the most moving stories in our language.” It is a tale of two innocents—a small boy and the old woman who is his best friend—whose sweetness contains a hard, sharp kernel of truth.
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The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists
by Gideon Defoe
Not since "Moby-Dick,.".No, not since "Treasure Island,.".Actually, not since Jonah and the Whale has there been a sea saga to rival "The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists," featuring the greatest sea-faring hero of all time, the immortal Pirate Captain, who, although he lives for months at a time at sea, somehow manages to keep his beard silky and in good condition. Worried that his pirates are growing bored with a life of winking at pretty native ladies and trying to stick enough jellyfish together to make a bouncy castle, the Pirate Captain decides it's high time to spearhead an adventure. While searching for some major pirate booty, he mistakenly attacks the young Charles Darwin's Beagle and then leads his ragtag crew from the exotic Galapagos Islands to the fog-filled streets of Victorian London. There they encounter grisly murder, vanishing ladies, radioactive elephants, and the Holy Ghost himself. And that's not even the half of it.