Forged In Grace
Grace can heal the flesh of others, but can she heal her own? Can she soothe the darkness which threatens to eat Marly from the inside out, or will it consume Grace with it?
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Books I Have Read Which Are Not Included on the List “1,001 Books to Read Before You Die.”
Lucky
Best-known as the author of The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s “Lucky” is her memoir of having been raped as a freshman in college, and the effect that it had on her life.
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Mermaids in the Basement
Renata DeChavannes is a slightly overweight screenwriter who has just seen her superstar long-term boyfriend splashed on the cover of a tabloid with a hot young starlet wrapped around him. Furious, unable to reach him, and in the wake of her mother and stepfather’s untimely deaths in a plane crash, Renata storms through her house, ultimately coming upon a note written by her mother. “If you’re reading this, I’m dead,” the note begins…
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The Help
One thing that is pointed out is how susceptible children are to their parents’ attitudes – the white children in the novel grow up adoring their nannies, and yet, as soon as they are old enough to understand their parents’ ridiculous notions about race, start treating these women exactly the way their parents do.
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The Year of Living Biblically
One passage which stuck with me was when he questions why God would need to be praised all of the time – if he is the greatest being in the universe, surely he doesn’t have a self-esteem problem which would require constant reassurance.
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Water for Elephants
This story begins in the mind of ninety (or ninety-three, he can’t remember which) year-old Jacob Jankowski. Not-quite-forgotten in a nursing home, he contents himself with harassing his nurses and complaining about the food. That is, until the circus comes to town.
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Atlas Shrugged
The book is based on the not-too-farfetched premise that all of the producers of the world – producers in the sense that these are the hardworking, brilliant, movers and shakers and people of ideas in the world – get fed up with carrying the metaphorical burden of society. “What if Atlas shrugged?”
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I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.
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American Gods
So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true. Even so, the next thing that happened, happened like this:
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Reasons to Live / The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
When I go to sleep, I sleep on the side of the bed my mother used to sleep on. Sometimes, at dawn, I wake up and find myself in the pose my mother died in — lying on her side, her arm reaching from under her head as though she were doing the sidestroke in a pool, the pills she had swallowed weighing her down like so many pebbles in her pockets.
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The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
During a snowstorm in late 1964, Dr. David Henry and his wife rush to his small clinic in the middle of the night to give birth to their first child. The delivery unexpectedly produces boy / girl twins, and David immediately recognizes the signs of Down’s Syndrome in the little girl.
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Girl With a Pearl Earring
Van Ruijevn takes an instant interest in Griet and sexually harasses her. She narrowly escapes and vows to avoid him in the future, but Van Ruijevn demands that Johannes paint the girl for him, using the commissioned portrait as a ruse to further intimidate Griet. Vermeer can hardly refuse, as his livelihood depends on giving the patrons of the arts what they desire. To make matters yet more uncomfortable, Johannes has decided that Griet should wear his wife’s beautiful pearl earrings when she sits for him.
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