Lari's Bookshelf

The following books are some on my "to-read" list that I'm particularly excited to read. The Sleepwalkers   by J. Gabriel Gates "A chilling and masterfully crafted teen horror novel guaranteed to keep the pages turning, the mind reeling, and the lamp on any reader's bedside table on long after midnight. Privileged and popular Caleb Mason is celebrating his high school graduation when he receives a mysterious, disturbing letter from his long-lost childhood playmate, Christine. Caleb and his jokester friend Bean decide to travel to his tiny hometown of Hudsonville, Florida, to find her. Upon arrival, they discover the town has taken a horrifying turn for the worse. Caleb's childhood home is abandoned and his father has disappeared. Children are going missing. The old insane asylum has reopened, and Christine is locked inside. Her mother, a witch, is consumed with madness, and Christine's long-dead twin sister whispers clues to Caleb through the static...

Today, I'm highlighting books about girls meeting the challenge of having everything, even their rights as a human, stripped from them. These books are about girls in captivity or slavery of some kind or another. The thing I appreciate about all of the following books, is that they are based on real experiences girls have faced in the past, and even today. While the African slave trade among European and American colonists is history, and World War II concentration camps are over, there are countless girls still caught in international sex trafficking rings  around the world , as well as girls being brainwashed to be plural wives to men much older than themselves in the United States. Each of these books has a protagonist with a unique background, but they all battle the challenge of oppression. Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper "Amari's life was once perfect. Engaged to the handsomest man in her tribe, adored by her family, and living in a beautiful village, she ...

I love classic horror fiction, and enjoy tales that can create a mood, setting, and leave you thorougly creeped out within 40 minutes of reading. These are some awesome short stories/novelettes you can download for free! I'm also highlighting the fact that these are all from ManyBooks . This is a fabulous free ebook site that has all sorts of literature that is available for free download in all kinds of formats. Check it out! Here are some I'd recommend: The Yellow Wall Paper   by Charlotte Perkins Stetson " A journal of the descent into madness of a woman suffering from a ''temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency.'' Hints throughout the story suggest the woman's problem is the recent birth of her child, insinuating postpartum depression. Confined in an upstairs room to recuperate by her well-meaning but dictatorial and oblivious husband, the yellow wallpaper in the room becomes the focal point of her growing insanity." ...

Who says graphic novels can't be stunning? Artistic? Moving? Graphic novels are just another medium to tell a story. And people who knock the format don't understand they are knocking a vessel, a medium for storytelling, and not the actual stories themselves. This is a total injustice to some fabulous works of art out there. The graphic novel memoir is one of my favorite mediums for storytelling. Here are some beautiful graphic novels that I'd eventually like to own. Blankets "Wrapped in the landscape of a blustery Wisconsin winter, Blankets explores the sibling rivalry of two brothers growing up in the isolated country, and the budding romance of two coming-of-age lovers. A tale of security and discovery, of playfulness and tragedy, of a fall from grace and the origins of faith." - GoodReads Rating: 4.09 The Complete Persepolis "Here, in one volume, is Marjane Satrapi's best-selling, internationally acclaimed memoir-in-comic-strips. 'Per...

And he doesn't want you reading these books! Dystopian novels have been around for a long time. Before a bunch of kids were thrown together to fight to the death in the Hunger Games , there was Lord of the Flies . Before people were forced to act, look, think and speak a certain way in the Uglies series, there was 1984 . If you are a fan of the recent deluge of dystopian novels that are flooding the literary market, you probably should check out the classics. It's great to see such a fascinating subject so widely discussed, read, and enjoyed as fiction by so many. It would certainly behoove any fan of oppressive-society-literature to delve into the roots of dystopian fiction. The Iron Heel (Penguin Classics) "Part science fiction, part dystopian fantasy, part radical socialist tract, Jack London’s The Iron Heel offers a grim depiction of warfare between the classes in America and around the globe. Originally published nearly a hundred years ago, it anticipated ma...

It took me a while to figure out what topic I wanted to highlight for today. I scrolled through Google news, trying to see if there was some kind of current event that could inform my book choices. It was depressing. I definitely didn't want to put something together about the debt ceiling, or the tragedies here and around the world. Death, cataclysm, and mayhem were the highlights of every popular news story. So I decided to do a display about death, sort of. Specifically: undead. More specifically: zombies. Let's start with the music video highlighting zombie love, before we move on to the books. Shall we? Watch it. It's got a catchy tune: OM NOM NOM. Plump up your brain with these adult and YA books: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War "The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across...