Reading List from before my second life
Explore a curated reading list from before my second life—discover inspiring books that shaped my journey. Perfect for avid readers seeking life-changing literature.
Item Not Found
ID: 0521555833
(Type: books)
Book
The Russian Debutante's Handbook
by Gary Shteyngart
NAMED ONE OF THE ATLANTIC'S GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS OF THE PAST 100 YEARS A visionary novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Little Failure. The Russian Debutante's Handbook introduces Vladimir Girshkin, one of the most original and unlikely heroes of recent times. The twenty-five-year-old unhappy lover to a fat dungeon mistress, affectionately nicknamed "Little Failure" by his high-achieving mother, Vladimir toils his days away as a lowly clerk at the bureaucratic Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society. When a wealthy but psychotic old Russian war hero appears, Vladimir embarks on an adventure of unrelenting lunacy that takes us from New York's Lower East Side to the hip frontier wilderness of Prava--the Eastern European Paris of the nineties. With the help of a murderous but fun-loving Russian mafioso, Vladimir infiltrates the Prava expat community and launches a scheme as ridiculous as it is brilliant. Bursting with wit, humor, and rare insight, The Russian Debutante's Handbook is both a highly imaginative romp and a serious exploration of what it means to be an immigrant in America.
Book
Thank You for Smoking
by Christopher Buckley
Nick Taylor, chief spokesman for The Academy of Tobacco studies, pitted against an increasingly self-righteous anti-smoking society--and against someone who wants him stubbed out for good.
Book
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
by Richard Phillips Feynman
In this phenomenal bestseller, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman recounts his adventures trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and Bohr and ideas on gambling with Nick the Greek, painting a naked female toreador, accompanying a ballet on his bongo drums--and much else of an eyebrow-raising and hilarious nature. Photos.
Book
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
by Oliver Sacks
Explores neurological disorders and their effects upon the minds and lives of those affected with an entertaining voice.
Item Not Found
ID: 0451525159
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0679601481
(Type: books)
Book
The Agony and the Ecstasy
by Irving Stone
A novel of Michelangelo who was the creator of David, painter of the Sistine ceiling, and architect of the dome of St. Peter's.
Item Not Found
ID: 0201408252
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0140444696
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0023406003
(Type: books)
Book
The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, The Magic Mountain is an enduring classic. With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps–a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an “ordinary young man” who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.
Item Not Found
ID: 0415227127
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0374510636
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0201328429
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0691066523
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 3423122595
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0802135234
(Type: books)
Book
Cancer Ward
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the "cancerous" Soviet police state. --Publisher
Item Not Found
ID: 0553262378
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0192815059
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 1565121988
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0801414601
(Type: books)
Book
The Stranger
by Albert Camus
With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The Stranger—Camus's masterpiece—gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. With an Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie; translated by Matthew Ward. Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. “The Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward’s translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus’s stoical anti-hero and devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity.” –from the Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie First published in 1946; now in translation by Matthew Ward.