Better Than Drugs or Best Books by Jesi
Discover Jesi's top book recommendations that are better than drugs! Explore a curated list of transformative reads to uplift your mind and soul naturally.
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The Passion
by Jeanette Winterson
Winner of the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, this novel explores the many faces of passion. Set in Napoleon's Europe, it is an evocative exploration of love, war and chance.
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The PowerBook
by Jeanette Winterson
Adding to an already astounding body of work that explores the nature of love and desire, Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion) presents a stunning novel that probes the boundaries of the Internet. Ali writes stories on email for anyone who wants them. She promises âfreedom just for one night,â but she does not do so without a warning: the story might change you. Ask for an epic love story and you will get one, but Ali will be cast in it, too, and the lines between the real and imagined may blur. Plucking characters from history and myth, Winterson journeys through time and stops in London, Paris, and Capri, all the while melding the language of love with that of computers. In The PowerBook she has found a brilliant conceit through which to showcase her increasingly bold voice.
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Sula
by Toni Morrison
In clear, dark, resonant language, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people. Unabridged. 5 CDs.
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Mama Day
by Gloria Naylor
A powerful generational saga at once tender and suspenseful, overflowing with magic and common sense, this book "resonates with genuine excitement ⊠a big, strong, admirable novelâ (New York Times Book Review). On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces.
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Dreaming in Cuban
by Cristina GarcĂa
âImpressive . . . [Cristina GarcĂaâs] story is about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. Her special feat is to tell it in a style as warm and gentle as the âsustaining aromas of vanilla and almond,â as rhythmic as the music of Beny MorĂ©.ââTime Cristina GarcĂaâs acclaimed book is the haunting, bittersweet story of a family experiencing a countryâs revolution and the revelations that follow. The lives of Celia del Pino and her husband, daughters, and grandchildren mirror the magical realism of Cuba itself, a landscape of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban is âa work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquezâ (The New York Times). In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novelâs original publication, this edition features a new introduction by the author. Praise for Dreaming in Cuban âRemarkable . . . an intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic . . . evocative and lush.ââSan Francisco Chronicle âCaptures the pain, the distance, the frustrations and the dreams of these family dramas with a vivid, poetic prose.ââThe Washington Post âBrilliant . . . With tremendous skill, passion and humor, GarcĂa just may have written the definitive story of Cuban exiles and some of those they left behind.ââThe Denver Post
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Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and a baffling new world, the characters in Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.
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Survivor
by Chuck Palahniuk
From the author of the cult sensation Fight Club (now a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter) comes Survivor. "A turbo-charged, deliciously manic satire of contemporary American life." --"Newsday "The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage," according to the "been there, done that" wisdom of Tender Branson, last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult. At the opening of Chuck Palahniuk's hilariously unnerving second novel, Tender is cruising on autopilot, 39,000 feet up, dictating the whole of his life story into Flight 2039's "black box" in the final moments before crashing into the vast Australian outback. Not since Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night has there been as dark and telling a satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world. Wickedly incisive and mesmerizing, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak.
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The Big Bang
by Lorelei Sharkey
From the creators of the popular Web site Nierve.com comes a humorous, comprehensive guide to human sexuality, complete with step-by-step guidelines and practical advice on everything from how to choose the right condom to bondage for beginners. Original.
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As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren familyâs odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others, the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. âI set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.â âWilliam Faulkner on As I Lay Dying This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.
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Wuthering Heights
by Emily Bronte
Nominated as one of Americaâs best-loved novels by PBSâs The Great American Read Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, the year before the author's death at the age of thirty, endures today as perhaps the most powerful and intensely original novel in the English language. âOnly Emily BrontĂ«,â V.S. Pritchett said about the author and her contemporaries, âexposes her imagination to the dark spirit.â And Virginia Woolf wrote, âIt is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts, with few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.â
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Endless Love
by Scott Spencer
The classic novel that has been translated into over twenty languages and has sold more than two million copies worldwide One of the most celebrated novels of its time, Endless Love remains perhaps the most powerful book ever written about young love. Riveting, compulsively readable, and ferociously sexual, Endless Love tells the story of David Axelrod and his overwhelming love for Jade Butterfield. David and Jade are consumed with each other: their rapport, their desire, their sexuality, take them further than they understand. And when Jade's father banishes David from the home, he fantasizes the forgiveness his rescue of the family will bring, and he sets a "perfectly safe" fire to their house. What unfolds is a nightmare, a dark world in which David's love is a crime and a disease, a world of anonymous phone calls, crazy letters, and new fearsâand the inevitable and punishing pursuit of the one thing that remains most real to him: his endless love for Jade and her family. Published in 1979 and hailed as "one of the best books of the year" by the New York Times, Endless Love is the novel that first established Scott Spencer as "the contemporary American master of the love story" (Publishers Weekly).
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Still Life with Woodpecker
by Tom Robbins
âRobbinsâs comic philosophical musings reveal a flamboyant genius.ââPeople Still Life with Woodpecker is a sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. It also deals with the problem of redheads.
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How the GarcĂa Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez
YA. 15 inter-related stories chronicling the assimilation of four Dominican sisters into American society.
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Cat's Eye
by Margaret Atwood
A breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knot of her lifeâfrom the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments Disturbing, humorous, and compassionate, Catâs Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and a womanâbut above all she must seek release form her haunting memories.
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An Unquiet Mind
by Kay Redfield Jamison
NATIONAL BESTSELLER âą A deeply powerful memoir about bipolar illness that has both transformed and saved livesâwith a new preface by the author. Dr. Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. For even while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, Jamison found herself succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients, as her disorder launched her into ruinous spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempted suicide. Here Jamison examines bipolar illness from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, revealing both its terrors and the cruel allure that at times prompted her to resist taking medication.