Laugh and Ponder
Discover a delightful collection of books that make you laugh and ponder. Explore witty, thought-provoking reads perfect for humor lovers and deep thinkers alike.
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Youth in Revolt
by C.D. Payne
The hilarious, take-no-prisoners novel about a cynical, sex-obsessed teenager's pining love for an intelligent girlâthe basis for the major motion picture starring Michael Cera. Youth in Revolt is the journals of Nick Twisp, California's most precocious diarist, whose ongoing struggles to make sense out of high school, deal with his divorced parents, and lose his virginity result in his transformation from an unassuming fourteen-year-old to a modern youth in open revolt. As his family splinters, worlds collide, and the police block all routes out of town, Nick must cope with economic deprivation, homelessness, the gulag of the public schools, a competitive type-A father, murderous canines, and an inconvenient hair trigger on his erectile responseâall while vying ardently for the affections of the beauteous Sheeni Saunders, teenage goddess, and ultimate intellectual goad.
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
by Hunter S. Thompson
50th Anniversary Edition ⢠With an introduction by Caity Weaver, acclaimed New York Times journalist This cult classic of gonzo journalism is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken. Also a major motion picture directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.
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The Beach
by Alex Garland
The irresistible novel that was adapted into a major motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The Khao San Road, Bangkok -- first stop for the hordes of rootless young Westerners traveling in Southeast Asia. On Richard's first night there, in a low-budget guest house, a fellow traveler slashes his wrists, bequeathing to Richard a meticulously drawn map to "the Beach." The Beach, as Richard has come to learn, is the subject of a legend among young travelers in Asia: a lagoon hidden from the sea, with white sand and coral gardens, freshwater falls surrounded by jungle, plants untouched for a thousand years. There, it is rumored, a carefully selected international few have settled in a communal Eden. Haunted by the figure of Mr. Duck -- the name by which the Thai police have identified the dead man -- and his own obsession with Vietnam movies, Richard sets off with a young French couple to an island hidden away in an archipelago forbidden to tourists. They discover the Beach, and it is as beautiful and idyllic as it is reputed to be. Yet over time it becomes clear that Beach culture, as Richard calls it, has troubling, even deadly, undercurrents. Spellbinding and hallucinogenic, The Beach by Alex Garland -- both a national bestseller and his debut -- is a highly accomplished and suspenseful novel that fixates on a generation in their twenties, who, burdened with the legacy of the preceding generation and saturated by popular culture, long for an unruined landscape, but find it difficult to experience the world firsthand.
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Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary. At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to some one dangerously sane -- a masterpiece of our time.
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Ishmael
by Daniel Quinn
One of the most beloved and bestselling novels of spiritual adventure ever published, Ishmael has earned a passionate following. This special twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new foreword and afterword by the author. âA thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the planet . . . laid out for us with an originality and a clarity that few would deny.ââThe New York Times Book Review Teacher Seeks Pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person. It was just a three-line ad in the personals section, but it launched the adventure of a lifetime. So begins an utterly unique and captivating novel. It is the story of a man who embarks on a highly provocative intellectual adventure with a gorillaâa journey of the mind and spirit that changes forever the way he sees the world and humankindâs place in it. In Ishmael, which received the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship for the best work of fiction offering positive solutions to global problems, Daniel Quinn parses humanityâs origins and its relationship with nature, in search of an answer to this challenging question: How can we save the world from ourselves? Explore Daniel Quinnâs spiritual Ishmael trilogy: ISHMAEL ⢠MY ISHMAEL ⢠THE STORY OF B Praise for Ishmael âAs suspenseful, inventive, and socially urgent as any fiction or nonfiction you are likely to read this or any other year.ââThe Austin Chronicle âBefore weâre halfway through this slim book . . . weâre in [Daniel Quinnâs] grip, we want Ishmael to teach us how to save the planet from ourselves. We want to change our lives.ââThe Washington Post âArthur Koestler, in an essay in which he wondered whether mankind would go the way of the dinosaur, formulated what he called the Dinosaurâs Prayer: âLord, a little more time!â Ishmael does its bit to answer that prayer and may just possibly have bought us all a little more time.ââLos Angeles Times
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Girl, Interrupted
by Susanna Kaysen
30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION ⢠NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. Her memoir of the next two years is a "poignant, honest ... triumphantly funny ... and heartbreaking story" (The New York Times Book Review). WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was as renowned for its famous clienteleâSylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charlesâas for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
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The Giver
by Lois Lowry
In a future society, young Jonas is given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.
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Animal Farm
by George Orwell
75th Anniversary EditionâIncludes a New Introduction by TĂŠa Obreht George Orwell's timeless and timely allegorical novelâa scathing satire on a downtrodden societyâs blind march towards totalitarianism. âAll animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.â A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever pennedâa razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible. When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwellâs masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.
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Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's story shows a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability. An ominous warning to the world's population, this literary classic is a must-read.
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Feed
by M. T. Anderson
In a future where most people have computer implants in their heads to control their environment, a boy meets an unusual girl who is in serious trouble.
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Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegutâs masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is âa desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth centuryâ (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time ⢠One of The Atlanticâs Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the worldâs great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barberâs son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming âunstuck in time.â An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegutâs writingâthe political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive witâthat have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim OâBrien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegutâs words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as âthe kind of writer who made peopleâyoung people especiallyâwant to write.â George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be âthe great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.â More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegutâs portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own eraâs uncertainties.
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Watership Down
by Richard Adams
One of the most beloved novels of our time, Richard Adams's Watership Down takes us to a world we have never truly seen: to the remarkable life that teems in the fields, forests and riverbanks far beyond our cities and towns. It is a powerful saga of courage, leadership and survival; an epic tale of a hardy band of adventurers forced to flee the destruction of their fragile community...and their trials and triumphs in the face of extraordinary adversity as they pursue a glorious dream called "home." Watership Down is a remarkable tale of exile and survival, of heroism and leadership...the epic novel of a group of adventurers who desert their doomed city, and venture forth against all odds on a quest for a new home, a sturdier future,
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Cat's Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut
âA free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!ââThe New York Times Catâs Cradle is Kurt Vonnegutâs satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planetâs ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Catâs Cradle is one of the twentieth centuryâs most important worksâand Vonnegut at his very best. â[Vonnegut is] an unimitative and inimitable social satirist.ââHarperâs Magazine âOur finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense.ââAtlantic Monthly
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The Sirens of Titan
by Kurt Vonnegut
â[Kurt Vonnegutâs] best book . . . He dares not only ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it.ââEsquire Nominated as one of Americaâs best-loved novels by PBSâs The Great American Read The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course thereâ s a catch to the invitationâand a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell. âReading Vonnegut is addictive!ââCommonweal
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Mother Night
by Kurt Vonnegut
âVonnegut is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer . . . a zany but moral mad scientist.ââTime Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all. âA great artist.ââCincinnati Enquirer âA shaking up in the kaleidoscope of laughter . . . Reading Vonnegut is addictive!ââCommonweal
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