Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
[2007]
Description
Lauren Weedman's hilarious essays read like a compendium of what not to do as a fully-realized, functional adult. From the uproarious account of her time at the Daily Show, where she developed an entirely one-sided infatuation with Jon Stewart, to the time she read her boyfriend's diary with disastrous results, Lauren's work is filled with the wit, honesty, and personality that make for great personal writing.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.7 - AR Pts: 16
Formats
Description
First Published in 1916, this story is one of the masterpieces of modern fiction. James Joyce's semi-autobiographical first novel, this is the story of Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and creative youth who rebels against his family, his education, and his country by committing himself to the artistic life. Joyce's brilliant rendering of the impressions and experiences of childhood broke new ground in the use of language and in the structure of the...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.5 - AR Pts: 13
Description
"Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, in Jeannette Walls's magnificent, true-life novel based on her no-nonsense, resourceful, hard working, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, all alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I...
4) Yondering
Author
Series
Description
These stories take place in a variety of locales. They are stories of people living under conditions similar to the way they might have lived on the frontier.
5) Villette
Author
Formats
Description
Charlotte Bronte's last and most autobiographical novel, Villette, explores the inner life of a lonely young Englishwoman, Lucy Snowe, who leaves an unhappy existence in England to become a teacher in the capital of a fictional European country. Drawn to the school's headmaster, Lucy must face the pain of unrequited love and the question of her place in society.
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune-in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running through the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest. Stegner portrays more than thirty years in the life of the Mason family in this masterful, harrwoing saga of people trying...
8) Martin Eden
Author
Formats
Description
Recounts the story of Martin Eden, a young seaman struggling to obtain social and intellectual recognition as a writer.
13) Shantaram
Author
Series
Shantaram volume 1
Description
Crime and punishment, passion and loyalty, betrayal and redemption are only a few of the ingredients in Shantaram, a massive, over-the-top, mostly autobiographical novel. Shantaram is the name given Mr. Lindsay, or Linbaba, the larger-than-life hero. It means "man of God's peace," which is what the Indian people know of Lin. What they do not know is that prior to his arrival in Bombay he escaped from an Australian prison where he had begun serving...
14) On the road
Author
Series
Description
Follows the counterculture escapades of members of the Beat generation as they seek pleasure and meaning while traveling coast to coast. As he travels across 1950s America, aspiring writer Sal Paradise chronicles his escapades with the charismatic Dean Moriarty. Sal admires Dean's passion for experiencing as much as possible of life and his wild flights of poetic fancy
Author
Description
First published in 1970, nine years after Ernest Hemingway's death, Islands in the Stream is the story of an artist and adventurer -- a man much like Hemingway himself. Rich with the uncanny sense of life and action characteristic of his writing -- from his earliest stories (In Our Time) to his last novella (The Old Man and the Sea) -- this compelling novel contains both the warmth of recollection that inspired A Moveable Feast and a rare glimpse...
16) Swann's way
Author
Series
Description
The first volume of Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, also known as Remembrance of Things Past, Swann's Way is the auspicious beginning of Proust's most prominent work. A mature, unnamed man recalls the details of his commonplace, idyllic existence as a sensitive and intuitive boy in Combray. For a time, the story is narrated through his younger mind in beautiful, almost dream-like prose. In a subsequent section of the volume, the...
17) The bell jar
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.2 - AR Pts: 11
Formats
Description
This extraordinary work--echoing Plath's own experiences as a rising writer/editor in the early 1950s--chronicles the nervous breakdown of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful, but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.5 - AR Pts: 66
Formats
Description
Growing Up! Young David Copperfield, orphaned as a child, abandoned by a vicious stepfather, must learn to make a life for himself. In Charles Dickens' brilliant novel, we learn of David's early harsh years... his adoption by his eccentric aunt... his betrayal by a childhood friend... the pressures of starting a career... immature, young love... and finally career success and personal happiness. Charles Dickens' sensitive portrayal of David's early...
Author
Description
When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a childhood wearing winter shoes made out of used bread sacks. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it.
20) The pledge
Author
Pub. Date
[1988]
Description
As a foreign correspondent, Bruce Bacon has made his mark as a courageous articulate, and professionally respected reporter. As a human being, he had gained a far greater understanding of the moral dimension of civilization and the fragility of humankind. During his assignment to India, when World War II was coming to an end, he had followed up a variety of leads concerning people of all political persuasions, and as a result of his brief contact...