Personal Truths - My Favorites
Discover a curated list of favorite books that reveal personal truths and inspire growth. Explore must-read titles for self-discovery and profound insights.
Book
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel GarcĂa Márquez
The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the BuendĂa family.
Book
The Great Gatsby
by Francis Scott Fitzgerald
Tells the tragic love story of Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.
Book
A Widow for One Year
by John Irving
“A Widow For One Year will appeal to readers who like old-fashioned storytelling mixed with modern sensitivities. . . . Irving is among the few novelists who can write a novel about grief and fill it with ribald humor soaked in irony.”—USA Today In A Widow for One Year, we follow Ruth Cole through three of the most pivotal times in her life: from her girlhood on Long Island (in the summer of 1958) through the fall of 1990 (when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career), and at last in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother (and she’s about to fall in love for the first time). Both elegiac and sensual, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Praise for A Widow for One Year “Compelling . . . By turns antic and moving, lusty and tragic, A Widow for One Year is bursting with memorable moments. . . . A testament to one of life’s most difficult lessons: In the end, you just have to find a way to keep going.”—San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle “A sprawling 19th-century production, chock full of bizarre coincidences, multiple plot lines, lengthy digressions, and stories within stories. . . . An engaging and often affecting fable, a fairy tale that manages to be old-fashioned and modern all at once.”—The New York Times “[Irving’s] characters can beguile us onto thin ice and persuade us to dance there. His instinctive mark is the moral choice stripped bare, and his aim is impressive. What’s more, there’s hardly a writer alive who can match his control of the omniscient point of view.”—The Washington Post Book World “In the sprawling, deeply felt A Widow for One Year, John Irving has delivered his best novel since The World According to Garp. . . . Like a warm bath, it’s a great pleasure to immerse yourself in.”—Entertainment Weekly “John Irving is arguably the American Balzac, or perhaps our Dickens—a rip-roaring storyteller whose intricate plot machinery is propelled by good old-fashioned greed, foolishness and passion.”—The Nation “Powerful . . . a masterpiece.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Book
The Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.
Book
Stones from the River
by Ursula Hegi
From the acclaimed author of Floating in My Mother’s Palm and Children and Fire, a stunning story about ordinary people living in extraordinary times—“epic, daring, magnificent, the product of a defining and mesmerizing vision” (Los Angeles Times). Trudi Montag is a Zwerg—a dwarf—short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans share—from her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he’s a girl, to the Jews Trudi harbors in her cellar. Ursula Hegi brings us a timeless and unforgettable story in Trudi and a small town, weaving together a profound tapestry of emotional power, humanity, and truth.
Item Not Found
ID: 1551113082
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0802138438
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0679755411
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0684804522
(Type: books)
Book
The Celluloid Closet
by Vito Russo
Examines the portrayal of homosexual characters in the movies and how it reflects society's beliefs and misconceptions.
Item Not Found
ID: 014071491X
(Type: books)
Book
The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins’ classic tale of murder, intrigue, madness, and mistaken identity ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME “There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood thefigure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments.” Generally considered the first English sensation novel, The Woman in Whitefeatures the remarkable heroine Marian Halcombe and her sleuthing partner, drawing master Walter Hartright, pitted against the diabolical team of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde. After more than a century since its publication, Wilkie Collins’s psychological thriller has never been out of print.
Item Not Found
ID: 0451167783
(Type: books)
Book
Chocolat
by Joanne Harris
An exotic stranger arrives in the French village of Lansquenet and opens a chocolate boutique directly opposite the church. The priest is a firm believer in the virtues of self-denial and austerity.
Book
The Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields
An aged woman discovers herself as she reflects upon her life in the 20th century.
Book
Emma
by Jane Austen
Emma, first published in 1816, was written when Jane Austen was at the height of her powers. In a novel remarkable for its sparkling wit and modernity, Austen presents readers with two of literature’s greatest comic creations—the eccentric Mr. Woodhouse and that quintessential bore, Miss Bates. Here, too, we have what may well be Jane Austen’s most profound characterization: the witty, imaginative, self-deluded Emma, a heroine the author declared “no one but myself will much like,” but who has been much loved by generations of readers. Delightfully funny, full of rich irony, Emma is regarded as one of Jane Austen’s finest achievements.
Item Not Found
ID: 1551111896
(Type: books)
Book
The Underpainter
by Jane Urquhart
In Rochester, New York, a seventy-five-year-old artist, Austin Fraser, is creating a new series of paintings recalling the details of his life and of the lives of those individuals who have affected him—his peculiar mother, a young Canadian soldier and china painter, a First World War nurse, the well-known American painter Rockwell Kent, and Sara, a waitress from the wilderness mining settlement of Silver Islet, Ontario, who became Austin's model and mistress. Spanning more than seven decades, from the turn of the century to the mid-seventies, The Underpainter—in range, in the sheer power of its prose, and in its brilliant depiction of landscape and the geography of imagination—is Jane Urquhart's most accomplished novel to date, with one of the most powerful climaxes in contemporary fiction.
Book
Fall On Your Knees
by Ann-Marie MacDonald
The Piper family is steeped in secrets, lies, and unspoken truths. At the eye of the storm is one secret that threatens to shake their lives -- even destroy them. Set on stormy Cape Breton Island off Nova Scotia, Fall on Your Knees is an internationally acclaimed multigenerational saga that chronicles the lives of four unforgettable sisters. Theirs is a world filled with driving ambition, inescapable family bonds, and forbidden love. Compellingly written, by turns menacingly dark and hilariously funny, this is an epic tale of five generations of sin, guilt, and redemption.
Item Not Found
ID: 0140437843
(Type: books)