Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Dear Reader, You have undoubtedly picked up this book by mistake, so please put it down. Nobody in their right mind would read this particular book about the lives of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire on purpose, because each dismal moment of their stay in the village of V.F.D. has been faithfully and dreadfully recorded in these pages. I can think of no single reason why anyone would want to open a book... (more)

Nectar in a Sieve

by Kamala Markandaya

Named Notable Book of 1955 by the American Library Association, this is the very moving story of a peasant woman in a primitive village in India whose whole life was a gallant and persistent battle to care for those she loved. "Comparable in many ways to Cry, the Beloved Country ...if anything...better." ( Saturday Evening Post )

Madame Bovary

by Gustave Flaubert

One of the acknowledged masterpieces of 19th century realism, Madame Bovary is revered by writers and readers around the world, a mandatory stop on any pilgrimage through modern literature. Flaubert's legendary style, his intense care over the selection of words and the shaping of sentences, his unmatched ability to convey a mental world through the careful selection of telling details, shine on every page of this... (more)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel García Márquez

One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind.... (more)

Don't Look Back (Inspector Sejer Mysteries (Paperback))

Don't Look Back (Inspector Sejer Mysteries (Paperback))

by Karin Fossum

Don't Look Back heralds the arrival of an exotic new crime series featuring Inspector Sejer, a smart and enigmatic hero, tough but fair. The setting is a small, idyllic village at the foot of Norway's Kollen Mountain, where neighbors know neighbors and children play happily in the streets. But when the body of a teenage girl is found by the lake at the mountaintop, the town's tranquillity is shattered forever.... (more)

Shipwrecks

by Akira Yoshimura, Mark Ealey

Isaku is a nine-year-old boy living in a remote, desperately poor fishing village on the coast of Japan. His people catch barely enough fish to live on, and so must distill salt to sell to neighboring villages. But this industry serves another, more sinister purpose: the fires of the salt cauldrons lure passing ships toward the shore and onto rocky shoals. When a ship runs aground, the villagers slaughter the crew... (more)

Whiteman

by Tony D'Souza

Whiteman is an extraordinary debut novel about a maverick American relief worker deep in the West African bush. When his funding is cut off, Jack Diaz refuses to leave his post, a Muslim village in the Ivory Coast where Christians and Muslims are squaring off for war. Against a backdrop of bloody conflict and vibrant African life, Jack and his village guardian, Mamadou, learn that hate knows no color and that true... (more)

Before the Dawn

by Shimazaki Toson

Regarded in Japan (where it first appeared in serial form in the 1930s) as the historical novel of the period it portrays, this monumental work tells the turbulent story of the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, an event precipitated by the arrival of Commodore Perry's Black Ships, and the early years of the Meiji Restoration. The focus is on a mountain village lying across the highway between Tokyo and Kyoto, which... (more)

Fire in the Blood

by Irene Nemirovsky, Sandra Smith

Here is a missing piece of the remarkable posthumous legacy of Irène Némirovsky, author of the internationally acclaimed Suite Française. Written in 1941, the manuscript of Fire in the Blood was entrusted in pieces to family and a friend when the author was sent to her death at Auschwitz. The novel—only now assembled in its entirety—teems with the intertwined lives of an insular French village in the years... (more)

How To Read a Village

by Richard Muir

What constitutes a village? What is the significance of the maypole? What was the true purpose of a village green? What is a moot hall? What is the origin of lich-gates? What was the real role of a yeoman? Why have whole villages disappeared over the centuries? This book reveals the answers and provides all the tools a village detective will need. Village history, points out the author, is embedded in the village... (more)

The Legends of Tono. Translated, with an introduction by Ronald A. Morse.Kunio Yanagita

The Legends of Tono. Translated, with an introduction by Ronald A. Morse.

by Kunio Yanagita

The legends of Tono (Japan Foundation translation series)

The legends of Tono (Japan Foundation translation series)

by Kunio Yanagita

Studies in mountain village lifeKunio Yanagita

Studies in mountain village life

by Kunio Yanagita

Two Japanese villages: Matsunagi, a Japanese mountain community , Kurusu, a Japanese agricultural communityJohn Bilheimer Cornell, Robert J. Smith

Two Japanese villages: Matsunagi, a Japanese mountain community , Kurusu, a Japanese agricultural community

by John B. Cornell

Arab Folklore: A Handbook (Greenwood Folklore Handbooks)

Arab Folklore: A Handbook (Greenwood Folklore Handbooks)

by Dwight Fletcher Reynolds

The Arab world is constantly in the news. This book gives students and general readers an introduction to Arab culture by surveying the folklore of the region. The volume defines and classifies different types of folklore and provides a wide range of examples and texts. It looks at the critical and scholarly response to Arab folklore and the place of Arab folklore in contemporary culture. Included are references... (more)

Kusamakura (Penguin Classics)

by Natsume Soseki

A stunning new translation—the first in more than forty years—of a major novel by the father of modern Japanese fiction Natsume S?seki’s Kusamakura follows its nameless young artist-narrator on a meandering walking tour of the mountains. At the inn at a hot spring resort, he has a series of mysterious encounters with Nami, the lovely young daughter of the establishment. Nami, or “beauty,” is the center of... (more)

Studies in Japanese Folklore (Folklore of the World)

Text: English, Japanese (translation)

Rural England Cottage and Village LifeP. H. Ditchfield

Rural England Cottage and Village Life

by P. H. Ditchfield

Awakening

by S. J. Bolton

Clara Benning, a veterinary surgeon in charge of a wildlife hospital in a small English village, is young and intelligent, but nearly a recluse. Disfigured by a childhood accident, she generally prefers the company of animals to people. But when a local man dies following a supposed snakebite, Clara’s expertise is needed. She’s chilled to learn that the victim’s postmortem shows a higher concentration of venom... (more)

The Unfinished Angel

by Sharon Creech

Peoples are strange! The things they are doing and saying—sometimes they make no sense. Did their brains fall out of their heads? And why so much saying, so much talking all the time day and night, all those words spilling out of those mouths? Why so much? Why don't they be quiet? In the ancient stone tower of the Casa Rosa, in a tiny village high in the Swiss Alps, life for one angel has been the same,... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: villages

by Lemony Snicket

by Kamala Markandaya

by Gustave Flaubert

by Gabriel García Márquez

by Karin Fossum

by Akira Yoshimura, Mark Ealey

by Tony D'Souza

by Shimazaki Toson

by Irene Nemirovsky, Sandra Smith

by Richard Muir

by Kunio Yanagita

by Kunio Yanagita

by Kunio Yanagita

by John B. Cornell

by Dwight Fletcher Reynolds

by Natsume Soseki

by P. H. Ditchfield

by S. J. Bolton

by Sharon Creech