My September 2005 reading list
Explore my September 2005 reading list featuring top books from 2005. Discover must-read titles and recommendations for your next literary adventure.
Book
The Song of the Lark
by Willa Cather
A story of a young woman's awakening as an artist and her struggle to escape the constraints of a small town in Colorado.
Item Not Found
ID: 0143039113
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0142437913
(Type: books)
![We Die Alone. [Illustr.]- New York: Macmillan 1955. X, 231 S. 8° Cover](https://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/1558219730.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
Book
We Die Alone. [Illustr.]- New York: Macmillan 1955. X, 231 S. 8°
by David Armine Howarth
Adventures of Jan Baalsrud, a member of the Norwegian resistance during the World War.
Item Not Found
ID: 0141441178
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0140113827
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0446608874
(Type: books)
Book
The Incredible Shrinking Man
by Richard Matheson
A collection of writings by Richard Matheson, including the novel "The Incredible Shrinking Man."
Item Not Found
ID: 0786715480
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 1575667223
(Type: books)
Book
The Westing Game
by Ellen Raskin
NEWBERY MEDAL WINNER • Ellen Raskin's unforgettable, timeless classic continues to be cherished by young readers of each new generation. "Great fun for those who enjoy illusion, word play, or sleight of hand." —The New York Times Book Review A highly inventive mystery begins when sixteen unlikely people gather for the reading of the very strange will of the very rich Samuel W. Westing. They could become millionaires, depending on how they play a game. All they have to do is find the answer—but the answer to what? The Westing game is tricky and dangerous, but the heirs play on—through blizzards, burglaries, and bombings. Sam Westing may be dead ... but that won't stop him from playing one last game! Ellen Raskin has created a remarkable cast of characters in a puzzle-knotted, word-twisting plot filled with humor, intrigue, and suspense. Winner of the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award • An ALA Notable Book • A School Library Journal One Hundred Books That Shaped the Century
Item Not Found
ID: 0345312007
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0380725398
(Type: books)
Book
Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s 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 barber’s 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 “unstuck in time.” 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 Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that 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 O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the 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.” More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.
Book
The Octopus
by Frank Norris
Like the tentacles of an octopus, the tracks of the railroad reached out across California, as if to grasp everything of value in the state Based on an actual, bloody dispute between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1880, The Octopus is a stunning novel of the waning days of the frontier West. To the tough-minded and self-reliant farmers, the monopolistic, land-grabbing railroad represented everything they despised: consolidation, organization, conformity. But Norris idealizes no one in this epic depiction of the volatile situation, for the farmers themselves ruthlessly exploited the land, and in their hunger for larger holdings they resorted to the same tactics used by the railroad: subversion, coercion and outright violence. In his introduction, Kevin Starr discusses Norris's debt to Zola for the novel's extraordinary sweep, scale and abundance of characters and details.
Book
Dragonwyck
by Anya Seton
Longing for an adventure away from her farm duties, eighteen-year-old Miranda Wells accepts her distant cousin's invitation to spend time with him at his gothic Hudson River estate in 1844.
Item Not Found
ID: 0312033567
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0671003526
(Type: books)
Book
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
The biblical account of Cain and Abel is echoed in the history of two generations of the Trask family in California.
Item Not Found
ID: 0688177751
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 1421903725
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0393038491
(Type: books)