Chris Desert Book Club
Join Chris Desert Book Club for a curated list of must-read books. Discover top picks, reviews, and literary gems in our exclusive desert-themed reading community.
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
The “masterpiece” (Michael Herr) of the New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road, No Country for Old Men, The Passenger, and Stella Maris “Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable.”—Harold Bloom, from his Introduction “McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly—envied.”—Ralph Ellison One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Widely considered one of the finest novels by a living writer, Blood Meridian is an epic tale of the violence and corruption that attended America’s westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the “Wild West.” Its wounded hero, the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean, must confront the extraordinary brutality of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians. Seeming to preside over this nightmarish world is the diabolical Judge Holden, one of the most unforgettable characters in American fiction. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian represents a genius vision of the historical West, one whose stature has only grown in the years since its publication.
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Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
“A lacerating story of loss and of seeking, written in prose that is charged with emotion but is always held under impeccable control.”—Kansas City Star Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.
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ID: 0812980557
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the BuendĂa family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
The best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway's frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature, while his description of the German attack on Caporetto -- of lines of fired men marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized -- is one of the greatest moments in literary history. A story of love and pain, of loyalty and desertion, A Farewell to Arms, written when he was 30 years old, represents a new romanticism for Hemingway.
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Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
A definitive English translation of the sixteenth-century classic follows the adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through Spain and become subject to the noble knight-errant's fanciful imagination. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.
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Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel GarcĂa Márquez
Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza, her distinguished husband, and a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years.
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ID: 0743244583
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger's classic of adolescent angst is now available for the first time in trade paperback. Holden Caulfield, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.
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In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
Recounts the slaying of the Clutter family of Kansas, and the capture, trial and execution of their murderers.