Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

A masterpiece of satire, this classic has entertained and enlightened readers the world over with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life and foibles from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to Our Father Below. At once...

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)

Rainbows End

by Vernor Vinge

Four time Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge has taken readers to the depths of space and into the far future in his bestselling novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky . Now, he has written a science-fiction thriller set in a place and time as exciting and strange as any far-future world: San Diego, California, 2025. Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was... (more)

A Man without a Country

by Kurt Vonnegut

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “<This> may be as close as Vonnegut ever comes to a memoir.” – Los Angeles Times “Like <that of> his literary ancestor Mark Twain, <Kurt Vonnegut’s> crankiness is good-humored and sharp-witted. . . . <Reading A Man Without a Country is> like sitting down on the couch for a long chat with an old friend.” –The New York Times Book Review In a volume that is... (more)

Martian Time-slip

by Philip K. Dick

On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy named Manfred Steiner. For although the UN has slated "anomalous" children for deportation and destruction, other people--especially Supreme Goodmember Arnie Kott of the Water Worker's union--suspect that Manfred's disorder may be a window into the future. In Martian Time-Slip Philip K. Dick uses power... (more)

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

by Kurt Vonnegut

In what began as a series of quirkily characteristic ninety-second interludes for New York's public radio station, Kurt Vonnegut asks, on behalf of us all, the Big Questions. Could death be a quality? A place? Not an ending but an occurrence that changes those to whom it happens? As a "reporter on the afterlife," Vonnegut bravely allows himself to be strapped to a gurney by his friend Jack Kevorkian and... (more)

Ilium

by Dan Simmons

The Trojan War rages at the foot of Olympos Mons on Mars -- observed and influenced from on high by Zeus and his immortal family -- and twenty-first-century professor Thomas Hockenberry is there to play a role in the insidious private wars of vengeful gods and goddesses. On Earth, a small band of the few remaining humans pursues a lost past and devastating truth -- as four sentient machines depart from Jovian... (more)

The Hyperion Cantos: Book 4

Rise of Endymion

by Dan Simmons

The magnificent conclusion to one of the greatest science fiction sagas of our time The time of reckoning has arrived. As a final genocidal Crusade threatens to enslave humanity forever, a new messiah has come of age. She is Aenea and she has undergone a strange apprenticeship to those known as the Others. Now her protector, Raul Endymion, one-time shepherd and convicted murderer, must help her deliver her... (more)

The Hyperion Cantos: Book 3

Endymion

by Dan Simmons

The multiple-award-winning science fiction master returns to the universe that is his greatest triumph--the world of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion --with a novel even more magnificent than its predecessors. Dan Simmons's Hyperion was an immediate sensation on its first publication in 1989. This staggering multifaceted tale of the far future heralded the conquest of the science fiction field by a man who... (more)

Hardcase (A Joe Kurtz Novel)

by Dan Simmons

Once Joe Kurtz needed revenge-and revenge cost him eleven years in Attica prison. Now Kurtz needs a job, and the price is going to be higher. Out of touch, out of prison, and with only one friend in the world, Kurtz signs on with the Farinos, a Mob family who has a problem in its own backyard. The Farinos don't know it yet, but they have a bigger problem in Kurtz himself. Searching for a mob accountant gone... (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)

Thursday Next: Book 4

Something Rotten

by Jasper Fforde

Thursday Next, Head of JurisFiction and ex-SpecOps agent, returns to her native Swindon accompanied by a child of two, a pair of dodos and Hamlet, who is on a fact-finding mission in the real world. Thursday has been despatched to capture escaped Fictioneer Yorrick Kaine but even so, now seems as good a time as any to retrieve her husband Landen from his state of eradication at the hands of the Chronoguard. It's... (more)

Thursday Next: Book 2

Lost in a Good Book

by Jasper Fforde

The inventive, exuberant, and totally original literary fun that began with The Eyre Affair continues with Jasper Fforde’s magnificent second adventure starring the resourceful, fearless literary sleuth Thursday Next. When Landen, the love of her life, is eradicated by the corrupt multinational Goliath Corporation, Thursday must moonlight as a Prose Resource Operative of Jurisfiction—the police force inside... (more)

Thursday Next: Book 3

The Well of Lost Plots

by Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde has done it again in this genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment. After two rollicking New York Times bestselling adventures through Western literature, resourceful literary detective Thursday Next definitely needs some downtime. And what better place for a respite than in the hidden depths of the Well of Lost Plots, where all unpublished... (more)

Complicity

by Iain Banks

COMPLICITY n. 1. the fact of being an accomplice, esp. in a criminal act Local journalist Cameron Colley writes articles that are idealistic, from the viewpoint of the underdog. A twisted serial killer seems to have the same MO -- he commits brutal murders on behalf of the underdog. As the two stories begin to merge, Cameron finds himself inextricably and inexplicably implicated by the killer. When the arms... (more)

Abarat

by Clive Barker

Once upon a world where time is place a journey beyond imagination is about to unfold.... It begins in the most boring place in the world: Chickentown, U.S.A. Candy Quackenbush lives in Chickentown, her heart bursting for some clue as to what her future might hold. When the answer comes, it's not one she expects. Out of nowhere comes a wave, and Candy, led by a man called John Mischief (whose brothers live... (more)

Smilla's Sense of Snow

by Peter Hoeg

She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land. And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime... It happened in the Copenhagen snow. A six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like Smilla, fell to his death from the top of his apartment building. While the boy's body is still... (more)

Luminous

by Greg Egan

LUMINOUS collects together one original story plus nine previously unpublished in book form. Greg Egan’s short fiction is at the cutting edge of the genre. His stories range from near future predictions to far future, far space improvisations. His grasp of the latest scientific breakthroughs is unparalleled in science fiction. The stories include 'Transition Dreams', 'Cocoon', 'Our Lady of Chernobyl', the... (more)

Distress

by Greg Egan

Investigative reporter Andrew Worth turns down a documentary on a mysterious new mental illness -- "Distress," or acute clinical anxiety syndrome, for another assignment. He's on his way to the artifical island of Stateless, where the world's top physicists are gathering to decide on a new TOE, or Theory of Everything, to replace Einstein's outmoded legacy. Chief among the scientists is the brilliant African Nobel... (more)

Sheva: Book 2

Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

Greg Bear’s Nebula Award–winning novel, Darwin’s Radio , painted a chilling portrait of humankind on the threshold of a radical leap in evolution—one that would alter our species forever. Now Bear continues his provocative tale of the human race confronted by an uncertain future, where “survival of the fittest” takes on astonishing and controversial new dimensions. DARWIN’S CHILDREN Eleven years have passed... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: read-not-owned

How a Senior Devil Instructs a Junior Devil in the Art of Temptation

by C. S. Lewis

by Alice Sebold

by Vernor Vinge

by Kurt Vonnegut

by Philip K. Dick

by Kurt Vonnegut

by Dan Simmons

by Dan Simmons

by Dan Simmons

by Dan Simmons

by J. M. Coetzee

by Jasper Fforde

by Jasper Fforde

by Jasper Fforde

by Iain Banks

by Clive Barker

by Peter Hoeg

by Greg Egan

by Greg Egan

by Greg Bear