Twenty Wishes / Summer on Blossom Street


Debbie Macomber - 2011
    At 38, her life's not what she?d expected ? she's childless and a recent widow. She owns a successful bookstore in Seattle, but there's still a feeling of emptiness. On Valentine's Day, Anne Marie and several other widows get together and each begins a list of twenty wishes, things they always wanted to do but never did. Anne Marie's list starts with: Find one good thing about life. It includes learning to knit, doing good for someone else, falling in love again. When she volunteers at a local school, an eight-year-old girl named Ellen enters her life. It's a relationship that becomes far more than Anne Marie intended. It also becomes more important than she ever imagined. As Ellen helps Anne Marie complete her list of wishes, they both learn that wishes can come true ? but not necessarily in the way you expect. Summer on Blossom Street: Knitting and life. They're both about beginnings and endings. That's why Lydia Goetz, owner of A Good Yarn in Seattle, offers a class called Knit to Quit. It's for people who want to quit something? or someone? and start a new phase of their lives. There's Phoebe Rylander, who recently ended her engagement to a man who doesn't know the meaning of faithful, and she's trying to get over him. Then there's Alix Turner. She and her husband want a baby, which means she has to quit smoking. And Bryan Hutchinson joins the class as a way to deal with the stress of running his family's business? not to mention the lawsuit brought against him. Life can be as complicated as a knitting pattern. Just ask Anne Marie Roche. She and her adopted daughter, Ellen, finally have the happiness they wished for. And then a stranger comes to her bookstore asking questions. Or ask Lydia herself. Not only is she coping with her frail mother, but she and Brad have unexpectedly become foster parents to an angry, defiant twelve-year-old. But as Lydia already knows, when life gets difficult and your stitches are snarled, your friends can always help

Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens


G.K. Chesterton - 1911
    

Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories


Anaïs Nin - 1977
    In them are many sources of the more mature work that collectors and growing writers can appreciate.Written when Anaïs Nin was in her twenties and living in Louveciennes, France, these stories contain many elements that will delight her readers: details remembered from childhood, of life in Paris, the cafés, theatres; characters including dancers, artists, writers, women who devote themselves to their work and visions as well as romance, strangers met in the night; themes such as the scruples of lovers, the search for brilliant, imaginative living; the writer’s experimentation with exotic words like “sybaritic” and “violaceous”. In the craft of these stories readers are treated to a deft sense of humor, ironic wit, much conversation as well as ecstatic prose, and surprise endings. Throughout all, the Nin personality shines, a wonderful mixture of feeling and rationality, of vulnerability and strength.

Bloodline; Master Of The Game; Rage Of Angels


Sidney Sheldon - 1993
    

A Private History of a Campaign that Failed


Mark Twain - 2009
    He gained national attention as a humourist in 1865 with the publication of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," but was acknowledged as a great writer by the literary establishment with The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn (1885). In 1880, Twain began promoting and financing the ill-fated Paige typesetter, an invention designed to make the printing process fully automatic. At the height of his naively optimistic involvement in the technological "wonder" that nearly drove him to bankruptcy, he published his satire, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Plagued by personal tragedy and financial failure, Mark Twain spent the last years of his life in gloom and exasperation, writing fables about "the damned human race."

The Case of Wagner / Nietzsche Contra Wagner / Selected Aphorisms


Friedrich Nietzsche - 1888
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

The Exit Door Leads In


Philip K. Dick - 1979
    And when one had been in the vicinity small valuable objects disappeared. A robot's idea of order was to stack everything into one pile. Nonetheless, Bibleman had to order lunch from robots, since vending ranked too low on the wage scale to attract humans.

Socrates


Voltaire - 1759
    It is set in Ancient Greece during the events just before the trial and death of Greek philosopher Socrates. It is heavy with satire specifically at government authority and organized religion. The main characters besides the titular role is that of the priest Anitus, his entourage, Socrates' wife Xantippe, several judges, and some children Socrates has adopted as his own. Like more historical accounts by Herodotus, Plato, and Xenophon, the playwright shows Socrates as a moral individual charged with baseless accusations by a conspiracy of corrupt Athenians or Athenian officials although Voltaire implies that the wrongdoers are a select few. Unlike the historical account, Socrates deals with several judges, whereas his real life counterpart receives his punishment of death by hemlock by a jury of 500 Athenians. The presence or mention of Socrates' best-known students such as Plato, Antisthenes, Zeno of Citium, and others are replaced by unnamed disciples, delivering only a few token lines at the end of the play. Socrates is also portrayed as a monotheist and a victim of religious persecution, an interpretation that is not generally shared by modern scholars and historians. Generally, this is not the most well-known of his works in comparison with Letters on the English which Voltaire published in 1778 or the Dictionnaire philosophique published earlier in 1764. However, hints of his contempt for government and religion are apparent here which later influenced the leaders of the American Revolution and the French Revolution.

Michael Connelly CD Collection 3: The Poet / Blood Work


Michael Connelly - 2011
    As the novel opens, Jack's twin brother, a Denver homicide detective, has just killed himself. Or so it seems. But when Jack begins to investigate the phenomenon of police suicides, a disturbing pattern emerges, and soon suspects that a serial murderer is at work - a devious cop killer who's left a coast-to-coast trail of "suicide notes" drawn from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. It's the story of a lifetime - except that "the Poet" already seems to know that Jack is trailing him. . . Here is definitive proof that Michael Connelly is among the best suspense novelists working today. Blood Work: Thanks to a heart transplant, former FBI agent Terrell McCaleb is enjoying a quiet retirement, renovating the fishing boat he lives on in Los Angeles Harbor. But McCaleb's calm seas turn choppy when a story in the "What Happened To?" column of the LA Times brings him face-to-face with the sister of the woman whose heart now beats in his chest. From her, McCaleb learns a terrible truth: that the donor of his heart was not killed in an accident, as he'd been told, but was murdered. Wracked with guilt over the fact that he's alive because another human being was killed, McCaleb embarks on a private investigation of his donor's murder - a crime as horrific as anything he ever encountered as a serial killer investigator for the FBI.

Mirage Free Preview


Clive Cussler - 2013
     The extraordinary new novel in the #1 New York Times–bestselling series from the grand master of adventure. In October 1943, a U.S. destroyer sailed out of Philadelphia and supposedly vanished, the result of a Navy experiment with electromagnetic radiation. The story was considered a hoax—but now Juan Cabrillo and his Oregon colleagues aren’t so sure. There is talk of a new weapon soon to be auctioned, something very dangerous to America’s interests, and the rumors link it to the great inventor Nikola Tesla, who was working with the Navy when he died in 1943. Was he responsible for the experiment? Are his notes in the hands of enemies? As Cabrillo races to find the truth, he discovers there is even more at stake than he could have imagined—but by the time he realizes it, he may already be too late.

The Bittermeads Mystery


E.R. Punshon - 1922
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Fighting France. from Dunkerque to Belport


Edith Wharton - 1915
    Sensitive without sentimentality, and offering a valuable and extremely rare female perspective of a war dominated by the male viewpoint, this series of articles is nothing less than an inspirational testament to the strength of the human spirit at a time of the greatest adversity.

The Michael Crichton Collection: Airframe / The Lost World / Timeline


Michael Crichton - 2000
    Fifty-six are injured. The interior cabin is virtually destroyed but the pilot manages to land the plane… Airframe combines a realistic situation with heart-pounding suspense to keep the listener captivated until the very last word. The Lost World It is now six years since the secret disaster at Jurassic Park, six years since the extraordinary dream of science and imagination came to a crashing end–the dinosaurs destroyed, the park dismantled, the island indefinitely closed to the public.There are rumors that something has survived. . . . Timeline In a world of unforeseen technological advances, a group of historians finds its way to the medieval past. The journey, while ground-breaking, carries the listener also into a realm of unexpected suspense and terror, twisting our most basic ideas of reality.

Surrender Trilogy Boxed Set


Maya Banks - 2014
    A story of friendship set in nineteenth-century China follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes dreams joys and tragedies through a unique secret language

The Silmarillion Volume 1


J.R.R. Tolkien - 1977
    With a superb performance by Martin Shaw, this first installment of three volumes will thrill and delight Tolkien fans of all ages, and listeners will treasure this extraordinary presentation for years to come.