Catalog Search Results
Author
Lexile Measure
970L
Summary
When spoiled rich girl, Mary Lennox, is orphaned, she is shipped from India to live in her uncle's enormous manor in faraway England. The lonely girl is forbidden to play in most of the imposing house ? struggling to adjust to her new surroundings, she goes out into the grounds every day. Before long, Mary finds a key to a secret garden that has been left untouched for ten years, and a whole new world of enchantment opens up to her. For the first...
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
680L
Appears on list
Summary
First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads-driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet...
Author
Lexile Measure
710L
Summary
Great Expectations is among the most masterful of Charles Dickens's novels. Displaying extraordinary tragicomic range, Dickens blends an atmosphere of brooding violence and guilt with sharp and often disturbing humor to create a drama charged with the thrilling intensity of a detective story and the poignancy of a spiritual autobiography. Much of the novel's power comes from Dickens's unequaled skill at making even the most wildly eccentric of characters...
Author
Lexile Measure
810L
Summary
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound, but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer. Late in the afternoon the sun slanted down into the mossy yard belonging to Francie Nolan's house,...
26) Cannery row
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
930L
Summary
Published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Drawing on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, including longtime friend Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Dora, Mack and his boys, Lee Chong, and the other characters in this world where only the fittest survive, to create a novel that is at once one of his...
27) Animal farm
Author
Lexile Measure
1170L
Summary
Since its publication fifty years ago, Animal Farm has become one of the most controversial books ever written. It has been translated into seventy languages and sold millions of copies throughout the world. This edition is being published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its original U.S. publication. It features 100 full-color and halftone illustrations by world-renowned artist Ralph Steadman. As vital and relevant as it was fifty years...
28) The way west
Author
Appears on list
Summary
Second in the epic adventure Big Sky series. The wise and paternal mountain man Dick Summers agrees to pilot a wagon train full of 'greenhorns' on a journey from Missouri to Oregon. The passengers confront not only the wild grandeur of the untamed west, but also their own reasons for leavign everything behind. They struggle with the imperfect reality of their long held dreams. Resolve is tested, nature is conquered, and men are made or unmade in this...
29) Emma
Author
Lexile Measure
710L
Summary
"The culmination of Jane Austen's genius, a sparkling comedy of love and marriage--now in a stunning 200th-anniversary Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition Beautiful, clever, rich--and single--Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to...
30) 1984
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
1090L
Summary
A chilling portrait of a totalitarian society under the ever-watchful gaze of Big Brother, where love, privacy, and individuality are banned. The year 1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell's nightmare vision from 1949 of the world we are becoming is timelier that ever. 1984 is the great modern classic of a 'negative utopia' - a startlingly original and haunting novel that creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing
32) My Antonia
Author
Lexile Measure
990L
Summary
Widely recognized as Willa Cather's finest book and one of the outstanding novels of American literature, My Antonia deals with the life of Bohemian immigrant and native American settlers in the vast frontier farmlands of Nebraska. It is a work which is particularly noted for its lucid and moving depiction of the prairie and the lives of those who live close beside it.
Author
Lexile Measure
790L
Appears on list
Summary
The hero-narrator of "The Catcher in the Rye" is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden...
Author
Lexile Measure
820L
Summary
"Voted greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers? Association in 1990, Josephine Tey recreates one of history?s most famous?and vicious?crimes in her classic bestselling novel, a must read for connoisseurs of fiction, now with a new introduction by Robert Barnard. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, recuperating from a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a contemporary portrait of Richard III that bears no resemblance to the Wicked...
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
1020L
Summary
Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank's remarkable diary has since become a world classic -- a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another...
39) Cranford
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
1220L
Summary
A gently comic picture of life in an English country town in the mid-nineteenth century, Cranford describes the small adventures of Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, two middle-aged spinster sisters striving to live with dignity in reduced circumstances. Rich with humor and filled with vividly memorable characters?including the dignified Lady Glenmire and the duplicitous showman Signor Brunoni?Cranford is a portrait of kindness, compassion, and hope.
40) Invisible man
Author
Series
Lexile Measure
870L
Appears on these lists
Summary
In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity -- powerfully imagined and written with a savage,...
