Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else

How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else

by Michael Gates Gill

Now in paperback, the national bestselling riches-to-rags true story of an advertising executive who had it all, then lost it all—and was finally redeemed by his new job, and his twenty-eight-year-old boss, at Starbucks . In his fifties, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a mansion in the suburbs, a wife and loving children, a six-figure salary, and an Ivy League education. But in a few short years, he lost his job,... (more)

Disgrace

by J. M. Coetzee

Disgrace --set in post--apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape--is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A heartbreaking novel about a man and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love. At fifty--two Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire but lacking passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and... (more)

How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else

by Michael Gill

In his fifties, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house in the suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he turned sixty, he had lost everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First, he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his twenty-year marriage. Then, he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis... (more)

Replay

by Ken Grimwood

Jeff Winston, forty-three, didn't know he was a replayer until he died and woke up twenty-five years younger in his college dorm room; he lived another life. And died again. And lived again and died again -- in a continuous twenty-five-year cycle -- each time starting from scratch at the age of eighteen to reclaim lost loves, remedy past mistakes, or make a fortune in the stock market. A novel of gripping... (more)

The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation

The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation

by Elizabeth Berg

Exhilarating short stories of women breaking free from convention Every now and then, right in the middle of an ordinary day, a woman rebels, kicks up her heels, and commits a small act of liberation. What would you do, if you were going to break out and away? Go AWOL from Weight Watchers and spend an entire day eating every single thing you want–and then some? Start a dating service for people over fifty to... (more)

Eureka: A Novel

by Jim Lehrer

Ever reliable and responsible, Otis Halstead is a father, a husband (one half of a “well-dressed couple of substance”), and the CEO of Kansas Central Fire and Casualty. He has never done anything out of the ordinary. Until now. The change in Otis starts with an antique toy fire truck, the exact model he had pined for at age ten but never received. Though it is now a collectible costing $12,350, he will buy... (more)

Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone

Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone

by Beth Lisick

Grappling with her lifelong phobia of anything slick, cheesy, or remotely claiming to provide self-empowerment, Beth Lisick wakes up on New Year's Day 2006 with an unprecedented feeling. She is finally able to admit to herself that she's grown tired of embracing the same old set of nagging problems year after year. She has no savings account. Her house feels unorganized and chaotic. She and her husband never... (more)

Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)

Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)

by J. M. Coetzee

These deluxe editions are packaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front. "A real literary event."-- The New York Times Book Review "A story of profound beauty, clarity and eloquence, which even at its most melodramatic holds to a biblical nobility."-- Chicago Tribune Book World Other Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Heart of Darkness by Joseph... (more)

American Beauty: The Shooting Script (Newmarket Shooting Scripts)

American Beauty: The Shooting Script (Newmarket Shooting Scripts)

by Alan Ball

The shooting script of the acclaimed DreamWorks film starring Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, directed by Sam Mendes, winner of the 1999 Golden Globe Award for Best Picture. In the widely praised Newmarket Shooting Script(tm) series format, here is the complete shooting script of one of the best films of 1999. Also included in this volume are a fascinating essay about the screenplay and the making of the film by... (more)

Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

by Esther Perel

Why does great sex so often fade for couples who claim to love each other as much as ever? Can we want what we already have? Why does the transition to parenthood so often spell erotic disaster? Does good intimacy always make for good sex? Ether Perel takes on these tough questions, grappling with the obstacles and anxieties that arise when our quest for secure love conflicts with our pursuit of... (more)

The Abstinence Teacher

by Tom Perrotta

“Some people enjoy it.” That was all Ruth had said. Even now, when she’d had months to come to terms with the fallout from this remark, she still marveled at the power of those four words, which she’d uttered without premeditation and without any sense of treading on forbidden ground. (p. 11) Thanks to an off-hand remark made during a class discussion of oral sex, sex-ed teacher Ruth Ramsey finds herself a... (more)

The Sex Life of My Aunt

by Mavis Cheek

Dily's life is perfect. Apart from the envy of her less contented sister, she has everything she could possibly want - a loving husband, a beautiful home, a privileged lifestyle - and she's proud that she has achieved so much when she began with so little. But then one day her illusion of perfection is shattered when she meets a man at a train station. As she hurtles towards either her destruction or her... (more)

Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is LaidMalcolm Lowry

Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid

by Malcolm Lowry

Information

by Martin Amis

From the author of London Fields and Time's Arrow comes the story of Richard Tull, a novelist whose literary criticism is the only work to actually see publication. His life is not going well. Now, he has dedicated his life to screwing up the political aspirations of his best friend and bestselling novelist, Gwyn Barry.

Straight Man

by Richard Russo

In this uproarious new novel, Richard Russo performs his characteristic high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak. Russo's protagonist is William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character--he is a born anarchist-- and partly in the fact that his department is... (more)

The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (Studies in Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts)

The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (Studies in Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts)

by James Hollis

Author James Hollis’s eloquent reading provides the listener with an accessible and yet profound understanding of a universal condition—or what is commonly referred to as the Mid-life crisis. The book shows how we may travel this Middle Passage consciously, thereby rendering our lives more meaningful and the second half of life immeasurably richer.

Housebuilding for Children: Step-by-Step Plans for Houses Children Can Build Themselves

Housebuilding for Children: Step-by-Step Plans for Houses Children Can Build Themselves

by Les Walker

A favorite of kids and parents since the 1970s, Housebuilding for Children offers step-by-step illustrated instructions for building six different houses with a description of the necessary tools and equipment. Youngsters will learn the joy of buying and using their own tools, setting up their own workshop, and building any one of seven wonderful houses. More than 100 black-and-white photographs and ... (more)

The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression

The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression

by Jed Diamond

A hopeful book that offers psychological and spiritual wisdom to those men who are struggling with anger, depression, and the changing emotional realities of their lives.Fredric E. Rabinowitz, PhD, coauthor of Men and Depression and Man AliveFrom the bestselling author of Male Menopause comes another life-transforming book for menand the women who love themon overcoming the mood and behavior changes caused by... (more)

Crazy Aunt Purls Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair: The True-Life Misadventures of a 30-Something Who Learned to Knit After He Split

Crazy Aunt Purls Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair: The True-Life Misadventures of a 30-Something Who Learned to Knit After He Split

by Laurie Perry, Laurie Beasley Perry

If you've ever been dumped, duped, or three minutes from crazy, you'll love Crazy Aunt Purl. Side-splittingly funny and profoundly moving, Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair is the true-life misadventures of Laurie Perry, aka Crazy Aunt Purl, a slightly neurotic, displaced Southerner trying to create a new life after her husband leaves her to 'get his creativity back.' (Whatever that means.) But will she... (more)

Autumn Shadows in August

by Robert W. Norris

Modeled roughly on Malcolm Lowry's "Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid," Robert W. Norris's "Autumn Shadows in August" is part homage to Lowry and Hermann Hesse, part mushroom retrospective, and part middle-aged love story. David Thompson is an expatriate American teaching at a Japanese university and suffering from hepatitis C. His wife Kaori is recovering from cancer surgery. Feeling a strong sense of... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: mid-life crisis

by Michael Gates Gill

by J. M. Coetzee

by Michael Gill

by Ken Grimwood

by Elizabeth Berg

by Jim Lehrer

by Beth Lisick

by J. M. Coetzee

by Alan Ball

by Esther Perel

by Tom Perrotta

by Mavis Cheek

by Malcolm Lowry

by Martin Amis

by Richard Russo

by James Hollis

by Les Walker

by Jed Diamond

by Laurie Perry, Laurie Beasley Perry

by Robert W. Norris