An obsessive word lover’s account of reading the Oxford English Dictionary cover to cover. “I’m reading the OED so you don’t have to. If you are interested in vocabulary that is both spectacularly useful and beautifully useless, read on...” So reports Ammon Shea, the tireless, word-obsessed, and more than slightly masochistic author of Re...more
Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor. Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space...more
Medical school dropout Victor Mancini comes up with a complicated but ingenious scam to pay for his mother's elder care--pretend to be choking in a restaurant and con the individuals who "save" him into giving him money--while he cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his sick mother, whose Alzheimer's disease hides the bizarre truth a...more
Deeply sensuous and extraordinarily suspenseful, TWILIGHT captures the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires. This is a love story with bite.Isabella Swan+s move to Forks, a small, perpetually rainy town in Washington, could have been the most boring move she ever made. But once she meets the mysterious and alluring Edwa...more
Narrator Landen Carter recalls 1958, his last year in high school, when Jamie, the reserved daughter of a local Baptist minister, revealed to him the secrets of the human heart. Reissue. (A new feature film, produced by Denise DeNovi, releasing January 2002, starring Mandy Moore, Shane West, Daryl Hannah, & Peter Coyote) (General Fiction)
"Somewhere," muses Noah Calhoun, while sitting on his porch in the moonight, "there were people making love." The Notebook, a Southern-fried story of love-lost-and-found-again, revolves around a single time-honored romantic dilemma: will beautiful Allison Nelson stay with Mr. Respectability (to whom she happens to be engaged), or will she choose No...more
Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an award Hemingway gladly accepted, desp...more
A monster assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies develops a mind of his own as he learns to loathe himself and hate his creator. Includes illustrated notes throughout the text explaining the historical background of the story.
In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their Georgia peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that as a child, in unc...more