Really Good Books
Discover a curated list of Really Good Books across genres. Find your next favorite read with our top recommendations for bestsellers, classics, and hidden gems.
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Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel GarcĂa MĂĄrquez
Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years, on the day of her husband's funeral. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.
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Summer Sisters: A Read with Jenna Pick
by Judy Blume
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ⢠READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY ⢠âSummer Sisters is a book to return to again and again.ââColleen Hoover âAs warm as a summer breeze blowing through your hair, as nostalgic as James Taylor singing âHow Sweet It Is.â You remember. So does Judy Blume. How sweet it was.ââChicago Tribune In the summer of 1977, Victoria Leonardâs world changes forever when Caitlin Somers chooses her as a friend. Dazzling, reckless Caitlin welcomes Vix into the heart of her sprawling, eccentric family, opening doors to a world of unimaginable privilege, sweeping her away to vacations on Marthaâs Vineyard, an enchanting place where the two friends become âsummer sisters.â Now, years later, Vix is working in New York City. Caitlin is getting married on the Vineyard. And the early magic of their long, complicated friendship has faded. But Caitlin begs Vix to come to her wedding, to be her maid of honor. And Vix knows that she will goâbecause she wants to understand what happened during that last shattering summer. And, after all these years, she needs to know why her best friendâher summer sisterâstill has the power to break her heart.
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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingwayâs classic novel of love during wartime. Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield, this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep. Hemingway famously rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right. A classic novel of love during wartime, âA Farewell to Arms stands, more than eighty years after its first appearance, as a towering ornament of American literatureâ (The Washington Times).
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Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden
A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. Nominated as one of Americaâs best-loved novels by PBSâs The Great American Read Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it. In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fictionâat once romantic, erotic, suspensefulâand completely unforgettable.
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
A young girl from an impoverished family comes of age in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth-century.
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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST ⢠A "A beautifully ragged, laugh-out-loud funny and utterly unforgettable book" (San Francisco Chronicle) that redefines both family and narrative. ⢠From the bestselling author of The Circle. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. This exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The rise and fall, birth and death, of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the BuendĂa family.
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Kaaterskill Falls
by Allegra Goodman
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠âA richly textured portrait . . . an intimate look at a closed Orthodox community.ââLos Angeles Times Book Review NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ⢠A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK It is 1976. And the tiny upstate New York town of Kaaterskill Falls is bustling with summer people in dark coats, fedoras, and long, modest dresses. Living side by side with Yankee year-rounders, they are the disciples of Rav Elijah Kirshner. Elizabeth Shulman is a restless wife and mother of five daughters; her imagination transcends her cloistered community. Across the street Andras Melish is drawn to Kaaterskill by his adoring older sisters. Comforted, yet crippled by his sistersâ love, he cannot overcome the ambivalence he feels toward his own children and his young wife. At the top of the hill, Rav Kirshner is nearing the end of his life. As he struggles to decide which of his sons should succeed himâthe pious but stolid Isaiah or the brilliant but rebellious Jeremyâhis followers wrestle with their future and their past. With this community, Allegra Goodman weaves magic. The nationally bestselling author of The Family Markowitz crafts a tale of family and traditionâone that confirms this authorâs place as a virtuoso of her generation.