The Start to a Great Book Shelf

Discover the perfect books to start your dream book shelf with our curated list of must-read titles. Build a great collection from the very first book!

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ID: 0141182636
(Type: books)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower Cover
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower

by Stephen Chbosky

Read the cult-favorite coming of age story that takes a sometimes heartbreaking, often hysterical, and always honest look at high school in all its glory. Now a major motion picture starring Logan Lerman and Emma Watson, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a funny, touching, and haunting modern classic. The critically acclaimed debut novel from Stephen Chbosky, Perks follows observant “wallflower” Charlie as he charts a course through the strange world between adolescence and adulthood. First dates, family drama, and new friends. Sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Devastating loss, young love, and life on the fringes. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie must learn to navigate those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up. A years-long #1 New York Times bestseller, an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults and Best Book for Reluctant Readers, and with millions of copies in print, this novel for teen readers (or “wallflowers” of more-advanced age) will make you laugh, cry, and perhaps feel nostalgic for those moments when you, too, tiptoed onto the dance floor of life.
Fight Club: A Novel Cover
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Fight Club: A Novel

by Chuck Palahniuk

"Fight Club's estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basement of bars."--P. [3] of cover.
Franny and Zooey Cover
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Franny and Zooey

by J.D. Salinger

Two children of the Glass family appear in separate stories set in twentieth-century New York.
Nineteen Eighty-four Cover
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Nineteen Eighty-four

by George Orwell

Eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity in this satire of totalitarian barbarism.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Cover
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

by Lewis Carroll

First published in 1865, these endearing tales of an imaginative child's dream world by Lewis Carroll, pen name for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, are written with charming simplicity. While delighting children with a heroine who represents their own thoughts and feelings about growing up, the tale is appreciated by adults as a gentle satire on education, politics, literature, and Victorian life in general. All the delightful and bizarre inhabitants of Wonderland are here: the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat, the hooka-smoking Caterpillar and the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Ugly Duchess. . . and, of course, Alice herself - growing alternately taller and smaller, attending demented tea parties and eccentric croquet games, observing everything with clarity and rational amazement.
Sophie's World Cover
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Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning--but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
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ID: 0451159411
(Type: books)
Go Ask Alice Cover
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Go Ask Alice

by Anonymous

A teen plunges into a downward spiral of addiction in this classic cautionary tale. January 24th After you’ve had it, there isn't even life without drugs… It started when she was served a soft drink laced with LSD in a dangerous party game. Within months, she was hooked, trapped in a downward spiral that took her from her comfortable home and loving family to the mean streets of an unforgiving city. It was a journey that would rob her of her innocence, her youth—and ultimately her life. Read her diary. Enter her world. You will never forget her. For thirty-five years, the acclaimed, bestselling first-person account of a teenage girl’s harrowing decent into the nightmarish world of drugs has left an indelible mark on generations of teen readers. As powerful—and as timely—today as ever, Go Ask Alice remains the definitive book on the horrors of addiction.
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ID: 0394747631
(Type: books)
The Catcher in the Rye Cover
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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.
Awakening Cover
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Awakening

by Kate Chopin

"She grew daring and reckless. Overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out. Where no woman had swum before."
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ID: 0140432620
(Type: books)
The Best American Short Stories 2004 Cover
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The Best American Short Stories 2004

 

No summary available.
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ID: 1593083815
(Type: books)