Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Offering spiritual guidelines for a modern generation that has broken away from organized religion, a collection of inspirational stories seeks to reintroduce God as a supportive figure in a fast-paced society. Reprint. Tour.

The Giant's House: A Romance (P.S.)

by Elizabeth McCracken

The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-six-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt -- the "over-tall" eleven-year-old boy who's the talk of the town -- walks into her library and changes her life. Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless... (more)

This Flowing Toward Me: A Story of God Arriving in Strangers

This Flowing Toward Me: A Story of God Arriving in Strangers

by Marilyn Lacey

What began in 1979 as a response to a random bulletin board posting would ultimately change Sister Marilyn Lacey's life--and the lives of countless refugees. In vivid prose, Sister Lacey narrates her twenty-five year spiritual journey of work with those displaced by conflict and disaster. In the spirit of Dead Man Walking , she invites us to solidarity with some of the world's most vulnerable. Timely and... (more)

Dear Charlie: Letters to a Lost Daughter

Dear Charlie: Letters to a Lost Daughter

by Reg Thompson

Not All Tarts Are Apple

The Time Traveler's Wife

by Audrey Niffenegger

A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's... (more)

Blame It on Paris

by Laura Florand

Can an insecure American woman find happiness with a sexy Parisian waiter--- even if she doesn’t like the French? Laura has spent most of her adult life avoiding serious relationships, flitting around the world, and keeping her romantic expectations comfortably low. The last thing she wants is to have her globe-trotting ways curtailed by a messy emotional entanglement. As far as she’s concerned, chocolate is just... (more)

Basic Guitar Lessons: Play Guitar With Happy Traum Omnibus Edition (Guitar Books)

Basic Guitar Lessons: Play Guitar With Happy Traum Omnibus Edition (Guitar Books)

by Happy Traum

Books 1, 2, 3, and 4 all brought together in one complete volume.

Tear Soup

by Pat Schweibert, Chuck DeKlyen, Pat Schwiebert, Chuck DeKlyen, Taylor Bills, Pat Schwiebert

If you are going to buy only one book on grief, this is the one to get! It will validate your grief experience, and you can share it with your children. You can leave it on the coffee table so others will pick it up, read it, and then better appreciate your grieving time. Grand's Cooking Tips section at the back of the book is rich with wisdom and concrete recommendations. Better than a casserole! Hardbound; 56... (more)

The Man in the Maze

by Robert Silverberg

Science Fiction. "At the dawn of man's galactic journeys, he was Earth's first ambassador to Beta Hydra IV. But something about his brain emanations so repulsed the Hydrans they altered his mind to radiate an aura that would soothe them - and make him anathema to human beings. Embittered, he fled to a distant planet to live out his days in utter isolation in an abandoned city of terrifying labyrinths. Then, Earth... (more)

Mallworld

by Somtow Sucharitkul

One Hundred Demons

by Lynda Barry

One Hundred Demons collects a series of memoiristic strips that appeared in Salon’s popular "Mothers Who Think" section. Here are 20 stories told in Lynda Barry’s distinctive cartoon-narrative style that delve into the funk and sweetness of love, family, adolescence, race and the 'hood, identity — all the forces that made her the "wreck" she is today. Barry distinguishes these stories with her pitch-perfect... (more)

Attention. Deficit. Disorder.: A Novel

by Brad Listi

After Wayne Fencer, a recent film school grad, attends his ex-girlfriend's funeral, he struggles to come to terms with her suicide and the startling news that she was pregnant with his child. Desperate to understand and haunted by regret, Wayne begins a journey that takes him up and down the East Coast (on foot) and across the American West (in an RV), finally arriving at the Costco Soulmate Trading Outpost in the... (more)

Diving into the Wreck

by Adrienne Cecile Rich, Adrienne Rich

A seventh volume of poetry involves a search to discover and reclaim what has been lost, forgotten, or unexplored. Reissue. NYT.

Norman Rockwell, Artist and Illustrator

by Thomas S. Buechner

A study of the artist and illustrator, Norman Rockwell, which reproduces 600 of his best illustrations, providing a panorama of nearly 60 years of American social history.

Jesus Wept

by Bruce Marchiano

Two words. John 11:35. It is the shortest verse in the entire Bible and it reads, "Jesus wept." Have you ever considered the monumental truth behind that verse? Jesus, fully man and fully God, found himself in the midst of human tragedy -- the death of a dear friend -- the death of a dear friend -- and he did what we would do. He cried. In this utterly profound book, Bruce Marchiano explores the head and heart of... (more)

Red Sky in Mourning : The True Story of a Woman's Courage and Survival at Sea

Red Sky in Mourning : The True Story of a Woman's Courage and Survival at Sea

by Tami Oldham Ashcraft

Tami Oldham and her fiance, Richard Sharp, are caught in a violent hurricane in the crystal waters of the Pacific Ocean. Richard is swept overboard and Tami is left grief-stricken and alone on a revaged yacht. Red Sky in Mourning is her amazing story of 41 days of survival recounted amoung poignant flashbacks of the adventure and romance she and Richard experienced while cruising French Polynesia.

A Leader Becomes a Leader: Inspirational Stories of Leadership for a New Generation

A Leader Becomes a Leader: Inspirational Stories of Leadership for a New Generation

by J. Kevin Sheehan

A Leader Becomes a Leader opens with a window on history: Henry David Thoreau riding a borrowed horse and wagon into the woods around Concord, Massachusetts to Walden Pond in 1845. There, he writes a classic work that has a powerful effect on the lives and philosophies of seminal leaders in the next century as diverse as Mohandas Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Thoreau believed that a... (more)

Homer & Langley

by E. L. Doctorow

From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World’s Fair, and The March , the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work. Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers–the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps... (more)

The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

On her way home from school on a snowy December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") is lured into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her neighbor, Mr. Harvey. Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, The Lovely Bones, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and... (more)

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Tags: poignant

by Douglas Coupland