Staff Picks
Rory Gilmore's Reading Challenge (List #3 - Starting with 'Bambi')
- Ariel H.
- Monday, December 13, 2021
Collection
☕ Take a deep dive into all the books seen and referenced on the Gilmore Girls from Season 1 to A Year in the Life.
📚 Just in time for our winter weather. So, grab your books, a cup of coffee (or hot cocoa), and bundle up by the fire.
❄️Smells Like Snow❄️ (except for SC)
Since there are 408 titles, there will be multiple lists sent out over the next few months. Enjoy!

Bel Canto
Published in 2018
Roxanne Coss becomes trapped in a hostage situation when she's invited to perform at a lavish party for a wealthy industrialist in South America. As a lengthy standoff ensues, hostages and captors form unexpected bonds as they overcome their differences to find their shared humanity.

Bel Canto
Published in 2018
Roxanne Coss becomes trapped in a hostage situation when she's invited to perform at a lavish party for a wealthy industrialist in South America. As a lengthy standoff ensues, hostages and captors form unexpected bonds as they overcome their differences to find their shared humanity.

Beloved
From the Academy Award-winning director of The Silence of the Lambs, the powerful story of a woman's journey to find freedom. With the help of an old friend, she is able to rediscover who she is and regain her lost sense of hope.

Beowulf
Published in 2012

Beowulf and Other Old English Poems
Published in 2011

The Bhagavad Gita.
Published in 2009
In the Bhagavad Gita, Prince Arjuna asks direct, uncompromising questions of his spiritual guide on the eve of a great battle. In this expanded edition of the most famous -and popular - of Indian scriptures, Eknath Easwaran contextualizes the book culturally and historically and explains the key concepts of Hindu religious thought and the technical vocabulary of yoga. Chapter introductions, notes, and a glossary help readers understand the book's message. Most importantly, this translation uses simple, clear language to impart the poetry, universality, and timelessness of the Gita's teachings.

The Bhagavad Gita
A New Translation
Published in 2012
A new translation of the classic Hindu text about virtue featuring a dialogue between Krishna and the warrior Arjuna before a battle over succession to the throne.

Candide
Published in 2006

The Canterbury Tales I
Published in 1998
Tales which illustrate literary themes such as greed, deception, betrayal and lust.

The Canterbury Tales III
Published in 2006
True to the style of Chaucer's original work, this program depicts scenarios that some educators may find inappropriate for classroom use.

Brick Lane
Published in 2003
Nazneen is forced into an arranged marriage with a much older man whose expectations of life are miserably low. When they flee the oppression of their Bangladeshi village for a high-rise block in the East End, she finds herself cloistered and dependent on her husband. It soon becomes apparent that of the two, she is the real survivor and more able to deal with the ways of the world and the vagaries of human behavior. Through her friendship with another Asian girl, she begins to understand the unsettling ways of her new homeland.

The Canterbury Tales
Published in 2013
Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century masterpiece The Canterbury Tales is such a rollicking good read that you'll forget many critics and scholars also regard it as one of the most important literary works in English. A group of pilgrims are traveling together to visit a holy shrine at the Canterbury Cathedral. Along the way, they decide to hold a storytelling contest to pass the time, with the winner to be awarded a lavish feast on the return trip. The tales offered up in turn by each of the travelers run the full gamut of human emotion, ranging from raucous and ribald jokes to heartrending tales of doomed romance. Even if you don't consider yourself a fan of classic literature, The Canterbury Tales is worth a read.

The Canterbury Tales
Published in 2003
This modern translation of these sometimes bawdy stories, written in the 14th century by the Father of English Poetry, entertain while telling us about England before the Renaissance.



Brave New World
Published in 2006
This outstanding work of literature is more crucial and relevant today than ever before. Cloning, feel-good drugs, anti-aging programs, and total social control through politics, programming and media - has Aldous Huxley accurately predicted our future? With a storyteller's genius, he weaves these ethical controversies in a compelling narrative that dawns in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford, the deity). When Lenina and Bernard visit a savage reservation, we experience how Utopia can destroy humanity.

![Brave New World [book Club Set]](https://secure.syndetics.com/index.php?isbn=0060535261/MC.jpg&oclc=54753602&upc=&client=richlandlib)
Brave New World [book Club Set]
And, Brave New World Revisited
Published in 2004
The astonishing novel Brave New World, originally published in 1932, presents Aldous Huxley's vision of the future-of a world utterly transformed. Through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, people are genetically designed to be passive and therefore consistently useful to the ruling class. This powerful work of speculative fiction sheds a blazing critical light on the present and is considered to be Huxley's most enduring masterpiece. Following Brave New World is the nonfiction work Brave New World Revisited, first published in 1958. It is a fascinating work in which Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with the prophetic fantasy envisioned in Brave New World, including threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion.

Brave New World
Published in 2006
Huxley's classic prophetic novel describes the socialized horrors of a futuristic utopia devoid of individual freedom.

Beloved
Published in 2004
Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is persistently haunted by the ghost of her dead baby girl.

Beloved
Published in 2004
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement. After the Civil War ends, Sethe longingly recalls the two-year-old daughter whom she killed when threatened with recapture after escaping from slavery 18 years before.

Beloved
Published in 2006
Recently named the Best work of American fiction in the last 25 years by the New York times book review. First published in 1987, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Beloved has become a modern classic, read and re-read by people of all ages and races. Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.


Bel Canto
A Novel
Published in 2005
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening -- until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents become compatriots. Friendship, compassion, and the chance for great love lead the characters to forget the real danger that has been set in motion and cannot be stopped.


The Bell Jar
Published in 2006
Beautiful and gifted, with a bright future, Esther Greenwood descends into depression, suicidal thoughts, and madness while interning at a New York City magazine.

The Bell Jar
Published in 2003
Beautiful and gifted, with a bright future, Esther Greenwood descends into depression, suicidal thoughts, and madness while interning at a New York City magazine.

The Bell Jar
A Novel
Published in 2015
Sylvia Plath's shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanityEsther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under?maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational?as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.

Bambi
A Life in the Woods
Published in 1996
Presents the story of a deer as he learns to survive the hardships of life in the forest.



Candide
Published in 2005
In this witty political satire, a gentle man plagued by misfortune who clings to the belief that "all is for the best", Voltaire mocks the "eternal optimist" philosophy of his day that proclaimed human and natural disasters are a part of a larger cosmic plan.


Candide, Or, Optimism
Published in 2009
Candide and his tutor Pangloss travel the globe trying to follow the philosophy 'All is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds'. However, they are stung and let down at every turn, being robbed, tortured and ridiculed, amongst other trials. On hearing about their often disastrous travels, a listener feels unfortunately less than empathetic, and can't help themselves laughing out loud at this very funny account of the trail our optimistic travelers take, and at their eternal and endearing joy at the world and its potential discoveries.