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2004–2005 Booklist

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Set in the Latino section of Chicago, the novel tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl in the process of self-invention and discovery. Join us for Everybody Reads, Multnomah County Library's annual community-wide book discussion.
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Bellow's 1953 novel is a coming-of-age story of a poor Jewish youth from Chicago and his sometimes highly comic journey through the 20th century.
Ahab's Wife: The Star-Gazer by Sena Jeter Naslund
A Kentucky girl goes to sea on a whaling ship disguised as a boy. Part love story, part adventure, and brimming with literary references, this ambitious work recreates pre-Civil War America.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
This inspirational story of a young man's journey to maturity follows a shepherd boy as he dreams of seeing the world and finding treasure in the Egyptian pyramids.
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
This fictionalized account of Willie Stark's rise to power through populist demagoguery and dirty politics is loosely based on Louisiana Governor Huey Long.
Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
A world-renowned symbologist is summoned to analyze a cryptic symbol seared into the chest of a murdered physicist and discovers a deadly vendetta against the Catholic Church by a centuries-old underground organization.
Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan
A domestic crisis becomes a crime story that changes lives in an upper-middle-class English country home on a hot summer day in 1935. This haunting novel is McEwan at his most closely observed and psychologically penetrating.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
Set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the novel tells the story of two hapless city boys sent to a remote mountain village for re-education. The author, himself an unwilling participant in Mao's re-education program, has created an enchanting and uplifting tale from one of the darkest moments in recent history.
Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee MinMin
A strikingly original, erotically charged portrayal of Madame Mao, one of the most vilified women of the 20th century. Before her stint as Mao's first lady, Jiang Ching was an actress, a singer and a star in Communist films.
Bel Canto: A Novel by Ann Patchett
When terrorists invade a vice president's mansion in an unnamed South American country, an American opera singer is taken hostage. Her singing links her fellow hostages to the outside world and breaks the boundaries between hostage and terrorist.
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
This multi-layered story uses a novel within a novel to tell of the death of a woman's sister and husband. Brilliantly weaving together seemingly disparate elements, Atwood creates a world of astonishing vision and unforgettable impact.
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz
In an informative look at the life and travels of Capt. James Cook, Horwitz combines a sharp eye for reporting with subtle wit and a wonderful knack for drawing out the many characters he discovers. The book is both a travel narrative and a biography of the renowned 18th-century British explorer widely considered one of the greatest navigators in maritime history.
Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America by Linda Hunt
This long-forgotten story is an inspiring true tale of courage and determination set in a period when women were limited in what they could attempt or accomplish.
The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy TanThis
The story of LuLing Young, who searches for the name of her mother, the daughter of the famous Bonesetter from the Mouth of the Mountain. The story conjures the pain of broken dreams, the power of myths, and the strength of love that enables us to recover in memory what we have lost in grief.
The Book of Salt by Monique Truong
Intricate, compelling, and witty, the novel weaves in historical characters, from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to Paul Robeson and Ho Chi Minh, with remarkable originality. Flavors, seas, sweat and tears — The Book of Salt is an inspired feast of storytelling riches.
The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael PollanPollan
This book ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. Who is domesticating whom?
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande
A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form, but as it actually is-complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human.
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire
From the author of the acclaimed novel Wicked comes a fresh perspective on another timeless tale — Cinderella — sure to enchant readers young and old alike.
Cookoff: Recipe Fever in America by Amy Sutherland
An engrossing look at the competitive cooking circuit culminating with the ultimate event — the Pillsbury Bake-Off.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic 15-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller
With candor and a unique and subtle sensitivity to racial issues, Fuller remembers her African childhood, describing her parents' racism and the wartime relationships between blacks and whites through a child's watchful eyes.
Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable by Mark DunnE
lla Minnow Pea saves her friends, family and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of her island's council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet. As the letters drop from a memorial statue, they also disappear from the novel. The result is a hilarious and moving story of one girl's fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at his family's business, the Empire Grill, for 20 years. What keeps him there? Author Russo delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache and grace.
Eva Moves the Furniture by Michael Cunningham
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Hilarious, energetic and touching, this novel follows a young writer as he travels to the farmlands of Eastern Europe, where he embarks on a quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Guided by his young Ukrainian translator, the writer discovers an unexpected past that will resonate far into the future.
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris
The daughter of a woman accused of a tragedy in a small French village during World War II finds a scrapbook of her mother's recipes and opens a small crêperie. As she studies the scrapbook, she discovers a deeper meaning and understanding of what really happened during that summer long ago.
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Victor Frankenstein is a visionary scientist often overcome by nervous fevers, fainting and dementia. Frankenstein's particular torture is the creature he has constructed in hopes of achieving a better human. Instead, he finds he has spawned a monster who seeks acceptance and love, or, if left unsatisfied, deadly revenge.
Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel
Drawing on the lifelong correspondence of Galileo with his daughter, Sobel has written a fascinating history of the Medici era in Italy.
Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
Eight interrelated stories describe the history of Girl in Hyacinth Blue, a painting that a math teacher has claimed is an original by the Dutch master Vermeer. Gentle and beautiful words trace the painting's ownership back three centuries to the moment of its inspiration.
A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana by Haven Kimmel
Kimmel grew up in a place that by some "mysterious and powerful mathematical principle" perpetually retains a population of 300. This is less a formal autobiography than a collection of vignettes comprising the things a small child would remember: sick birds, a new bike, reading comics at the drugstore, and the mean old lady down the street.
Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
Chevalier transports readers to a bygone time and place in this richly imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired one of Vermeer's most celebrated paintings.
The Guns of August by Barbara Wertheim Tuchman
This Pulitzer Prize-winning recreation of the powder keg that was Europe during the crucial first 30 days of World War I traces the actions of statesmen and patriots in Berlin, London, St. Petersburg and Paris.
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric sister of their dead mother. Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood illuminates the price of loss, and the dangerous undertow of transience.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Experience the classic romance between an orphaned governess and her employer, the brooding Edwin Rochester.
The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander
Drawing from decades of work, travel and research in Russia, the author has crafted an ingenious novel set in the final days of the last Russian tsar. The tragic story of Nicholas and Alexandra is told in a historically vivid and compelling narrative as seen through the eyes of their young kitchen boy, Leonka.
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Jones tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. In a daring and ambitious novel, Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all of its moral complexities.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
In the summer of 1936, the authors set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. This unsparing record of place, the people who shaped the land, and the rhythm of their lives is intensely moving and unrelentingly honest.
Life of Pi: A Novel by Yann Martel
Pi Patel practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When his family and their zoo animals emigrate to North America, their ship sinks and Pi finds himself in a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra and a 450-pound Bengal tiger as his only companions. Winner of the Man Booker Prize.
Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee
Set in turbulent South Africa, a young gardener decides to take his mother away from the violence toward a new life in the abandoned countryside, but finds that war follows wherever he goes.
Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
This autobiographical play tells the story of the Tyrones — a fictional family based on the O'Neills — in which the youngest son is sent to a sanitarium to recover from tuberculosis. His mother is wrecked by narcotics and his older brother by drink, and he despises his father for sending him away.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
A murdered 14-year-old girl looks down from heaven at her friends and family as they struggle to cope with her disappearance. The story deals with love and healing even in the midst of the worst situation a family has to face.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
This mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek-American family is a "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time."
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Probably Woolf's most famous stylistic accomplishment, this brilliant novel explores the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman's life. Woolf insists that Mrs. Dalloway locates the enormous in the mundane; that a seemingly trivial life reflects the incisive and idiotic simultaneously.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
The author studies the millions of Americans who work for poverty-level wages by joining their ranks.
Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks
Award-winning journalist Geraldine Brooks offers an intimate, often shocking, portrait of the lives of modern Muslim women. Her stunning vignettes carefully distinguish misogyny and oppressive cultural traditions from what the author considers the true teachings of the Koran.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Immediately upon setting up shop, Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's only lady private detective, is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing 11-year-old boy who may have been snatched by witch doctors.
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
Cather's first great novel is the classic American story of pioneer life as embodied by one remarkable woman and her singular devotion to the land. In this unforgettable story, Cather conveys both the physical realities of the landscape, as well as the mythic sweep of the transformation of the frontier.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
This fictional history follows several generations and the passions, thoughts and myths of a labyrinth of people. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982.
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
The small-town lives of two abandoned young boys, a pregnant teenager and two elderly bachelor brothers run parallel to each other until Maggie Jones, a teacher, makes them intersect.
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
This true tale describes the criminally insane American physician who, locked up in an English asylum for murder, spent his life compiling the Oxford English Dictionary.
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran, Iran, due to repressive policies, the author invited seven of her female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature. The women were forced to meet secretly because the books they read were officially banned by the government.
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
This unique world history shakes out all the value systems influenced by the only rock we eat.
Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
The author tells how three unlikely partners survive a phenomenal run of bad fortune, conspiracy and severe injury to transform the racehorse Seabiscuit from a neurotic also-ran into an American sports icon.
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
When her African American nanny is thrown into jail for attempting to vote during the 1964 Civil Rights movement, 14-year-old Lily rescues her and the two set across South Carolina to begin a new life.
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the study of social biology, and have forced thousands of readers to rethink their beliefs about life.
Silence by Shusaku Endo
This powerful novel of faith and doubt set in medieval Japan tells the story of a Portuguese priest at the height of the fearful persecution of a small Christian community after the rise to power of the samurai in the 17th century.
Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver
Whether Kingsolver is contemplating the Grand Canyon, motherhood, genetic engineering or the future of a nation, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as from our own backyards, and that answers may lie in both places.
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
A ninth grader falls mute and becomes a social pariah when, after a traumatic event, she calls the police and they invade a summer party.
Stupid White Men: And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! by Michael Moore
Michael Moore's screed against President George W. Bush's power elite is as crammed with infuriating facts as any right-wing bestseller, as irreverent as The Onion, and as noisily entertaining as a wrestling smackdown.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Even though Janie Crawford has married three men and been tried for the murder of one of them, she feels no need to justify herself to the town. But she tells all to her friend, Phoeby, with the implicit understanding that Phoeby will tell them what she says.
The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction by Tim O'Brien
With the creative verve of the greatest fiction and the intimacy of a searing autobiography, The Things They Carried is a testament to the men who risked their lives in America's most controversial war.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
How do social epidemics — whether they be hush puppies or STDs — work? This elegant book examines significant social trends and their reflection of that elusive critical mass: collective consciousness.
Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
In the shabby district called Tortilla Flat above Monterey, California, lives a gang whose exploits compare to those of King Arthur's knights.
Trask: A Novel by Don Berry
Set in 1848 along the Oregon coast, this book follows the eponymous mountain man, Elbridge Trask, through physical and spiritual journeys.
The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy
In Nazi-occupied Poland, two Jewish children are renamed Hansel and Gretel and then left by their father and stepmother to seek safety in the forest, where they encounter an eccentric old woman who cares for them.
Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson by Mitch Albom
The author recounts his weekly visits with a dying teacher who years before had set him straight.
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West by Stephen E. Ambrose
Ambrose follows the Lewis and Clark Expedition from Thomas Jefferson's hope of finding a waterway to the Pacific, through the heart-stopping moments of the actual trip, to Lewis' lonely demise on the Natchez Trace. Along the way, Ambrose shows us the American West as Lewis saw it-wild, awesome and pristinely beautiful.
Vintage Lopez by Barry LopezLopez
An unparalleled explorer of the relationship between humanity and nature, one he describes in prose that is both beautiful and economical.
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill BrysonBryson
Bryson hauls his out-of-shape, middle-aged self over hill and dale in this delightful chronicle of the trail, the people who created it, and the places it passes.
When the Elephants Dance: A Novel by Tess Uriza Holthe
In the waning days of World War II, the Filipino people were caught between a brutal Japanese occupation and battling U.S. forces. In this novel, 13-year-old Alejandro Karangalan, his spirited older sister Isabelle, and Domingo, a passionate guerilla commander, narrate the story of the Karangalans — a family who waits out the war huddled with their neighbors in the cellar of a house near Manila.
When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro
Christopher Banks, an English boy born in Shanghai in the early 20th century, is orphaned at age 9 when his parents disappear under suspicious circumstances. He grows up to become a renowned detective, and more than 20 years later, returns to Shanghai to solve the mystery of their disappearances.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
This story of the first Mrs. Rochester will turn your sympathies and understanding of Jane Eyre upside down.
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks
In 1666, a young woman comes of age during an extraordinary year of love and death. Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a "plague village" in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history.

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