The Shadow of the Blade


R.R. King - 2017
     From #1 bestselling author R.R. King I have no name, but my enemies call me Shadow. I have killed the mightiest of warriors. Read books that have not been written yet. Drowned my enemies in their own blood and looked madness in the eyes. I've danced with Death herself and coerced her into letting me live. I've lied and uttered truths. Sinned and never forgave myself. Raised by a blind woman in the seclusion of a deep well, and then thrust out to an unforgiving world of the Seven Seasons, I seek an understanding of things not understood, salvation of from puzzles never solved, and most of all, a quest to find out who I am and what I was made for. I'm warrior of words, slayer of souls, tamer of tides, and I answer to no one but my blade.This is my story. It's up to you to decide, if I am a liar or a legend, man or myth. That's if you can handle the truth... that the quest for light is a journey into darkness.

The Other Normals


Ned Vizzini - 2012
    The world of C&C is where he feels most comfortable in his own skin. But that isn't happening--not if his parents have anything to do with it. Concerned their son lacks social skills, they ship him off to summer camp to become a man. They want him to be outdoors playing with kids his own age and meeting girls--rather than indoors alone, with only his gaming alter ego for company. Perry knows he's in for the worst summer of his life.Everything changes, however, when Perry gets to camp and stumbles into the World of the Other Normals. There he meets Mortin Enaw, one of the creators of C&C, and other mythical creatures from the game, including the alluring Ada Ember, whom Perry finds more beautiful than any human girl he's ever met. Perry's new otherworldly friends need his help to save their princess and prevent mass violence. As they embark on their quest, Perry realizes that his nerdy childhood has uniquely prepared him to be a great warrior in this world, and maybe even a hero. But to save the princess, Perry will have to learn how to make real connections in the human world as well.Bestselling author Ned Vizzini delivers a compulsively readable and wildly original story about the winding and often hilarious path to manhood.

魔道祖师 [Mo Dao Zu Shi]


NOT A BOOK
    In the end, he was back-stabbed by his dearest shidi and killed by powerful clans that combined to overpower him. He incarnates into the body of a lunatic who was abandoned by his clan and is later, unwillingly, taken away by a famous cultivator among the sects—Lan WangJi, his archenemy.This marks the start of a thrilling yet hilarious journey of attacking monsters, solving mysteries, and raising children. From the mutual flirtation along the way, Wei WuXian slowly realizes that Lan WangJi, a seemingly haughty and indifferent poker-face, holds more feelings for Wei WuXian than he is letting on...

The Digital Frontier


Alex Mulder - 2015
     Now the fate of an entire world rests on his shoulders. MMORPGs had stopped being a part of Luke’s life years ago. That is, until he tried Yvvaros, an online sandbox role playing game only accessible through the latest in virtual reality technology. The game sucked him in almost instantly. Luke discovered a world with new stakes, rewards, and philosophical complexities deeper than anything he could have expected. The human experience exists on a spectrum. One person’s reality may be fantasy or even hallucination to someone else. One person’s sense of what’s important is even more subjective. As Luke quickly learned, it was hard to justify living in a world of rejection over a world of adventure, excitement, and connection. He began a new life in Yvvaros, just as vivid and maybe even more compelling than his existence in the outside world. Earth has already been explored, and the next frontier is closer to home than anyone could have imagined.

Nam-A-Rama


Phillip Jennings - 2003
    Only the Few and the Proud know what fun Hell can be.Here it is, folks: "How the cow ate the cabbage" in the CLASSIFIED words of the President hisself [sic]. TOP SECRET stuff. EYES ONLY. If you want to know the real story (and you know you do)-Nam-A-Rama is Catch 22 meets "Apocalypse Now." It's the wildest, wackiest, saddest and truest war story ever told, because it's all made-up, which means it's all real-from the oatmeal dropped on the VC (the Marines won't eat it) to the naked movie star parachuting into Hanoi; from the jarhead who calls in air strikes from a Bangkok brothel to the "Sky-Kyke" who fills out the Marine Corps' diversity quota; from the businessmen demanding a long inventory-reducing war to the Pentagon brass hoping for a glorious medal-worthy one; from the locals who'll do anything for a Yankee dollar to the grunts nobody ever asked and never will. It starts and ends, like all the best adventures, in the air. Almost-Captain Gearheardt and his buddy, Almost-Captain Armstrong, are ferrying bodies (live in, dead out) for the CIA's Air America, but they have never forgotten their TOP SECRET orders, given when Gearheardt was delivering pizzas to the Oval Office for the CIA: Chopper into Hanoi and buy Uncle Ho a beer. Then either shoot his ass or shake his hand (the instructions get vague at this point). And so they do, Semper Fi, pausing only to get an aircraft carrier black-flagged for bubonic plague, have an affair with Mickey Mouse, cleverly decode the message sewn into a lusty spy's black panties, commandeer a Russian truck complete with a midget Chinese 'Uncle Sam,' avenge themselves on a Cuban torturer, and dutifully experience all the Honor and Glory of the next-to-the-next-to-last war that never (God forbid) made the Nightly News.And they do it all for laughs. Because if they were to stop laughing, where would the heartache end?Phillip Jennings' unpredictable novel of Vietnam is an American classic in the making, a not-so-longing look at the absurdity of a war in which the damned and the innocent share the same hootch, the same Commander-in-Chief, and sometimes even the same body-bag. You won't stop laughing, or thinking.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage


Haruki Murakami - 2013
    By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning ‘red pine’, and Oumi, ‘blue sea’, while the girls’ names were Shirane, ‘white root’, and Kurono, ‘black field’. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it.One day Tsukuru Tazaki’s friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, ever again.Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago.

The Tall Pine Polka / Your Oasis on Flame Lake


Lorna Landvik - 2005
    For each craves a change in her life: Devera desires a break from her humdrum marital routine; BiDi longs to reconnect with her distant fourteen-year-old daughter (the only girl on the high school hockey team), not to mention jump-start a sex drive stuck in neutral. So when Devera’s husband decides to fulfill his longtime dream of opening a nightclub in his basement, Your Oasis on Flame Lake arrives not a moment too soon. Nothing fancy, it’s just a BYOB joint where you can hang out, sing, dance, tell jokes, and be yourself. But then an unexpected crisis throws both families into chaos, forcing them all to take stock of their lives—and learn the power of forgiveness.

A Match


M.L. Briers - 2018
     Wasn’t it just like Grammy to do the devious thing and not tell her the whole story? What she should have done was turned on her heels and left the moment that she found out her sisters were coming to town, and how she wished she could have. But a spell had gone horribly wrong, and she didn’t have the heart to throw her Aunt under the bus, but Grammy, that was a different matter. Cassidy should have known that what you saw wasn’t always what you got where family and spells were concerned, and boy was she in for a shock when a plan went just as the spell caster knew it would? Matchmaking wasn’t for the faint-hearted, and neither was finding out that your match was an alpha wolf shifter with one thing on his mind – wooing. Join one crazy family of witches that are in for the ride of their lives in this romantic comedy that will leave you howling with laughter.

A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares


Krystal Sutherland - 2017
    Take Esther’s father, for instance: He’s an agoraphobe who hasn’t left the basement in six years. Then there’s her twin brother, Eugene, whose fear of the dark goes far beyond the things that go bump in the night. And her mother, Rosemary, is absolutely terrified of bad luck.As for Esther, she’s managed to escape the curse…so far. She doesn’t yet have a great fear because she avoids pretty much everything. Elevators, small spaces, crowds—anything that might trigger a phobia is off-limits and is meticulously recorded in her semi-definitive list of worst nightmares. Esther thinks she has it all figured out, until she’s reunited with an old elementary school classmate—and first crush—Jonah Smallwood. The encounter leaves her stranded at a bus stop and swindled out of her phone, all her cash, a Fruit Roll-Up she’d been saving, and her list—not to mention her dignity. But the theft is also the beginning of an unexpected friendship between the two, one that sends the pair on a journey of self-discovery as they try to break the curse that’s consumed Esther’s family. Together they face their greatest fears, one debilitating phobia at a time, only to discover the one fear they hadn’t counted on: love.

The Ables


Jeremy Scott - 2015
    But that couldn't actually mean that he's trying to tell me I have super powers, right? Because that would be ridiculous. It wasn’t the “sex talk” he expected. Phillip Sallinger’s dad has told him he’s a custodian—a guardian—and his genetically inherited power is telekinesis. He’ll learn to move objects with his mind. Excited to begin superhero high school until he discovers he’s assigned to a “special ed” class for disabled empowered kids, he suddenly feels like an outsider. Bullied, threatened, and betrayed, Phillip struggles, even as he and his friends—calling themselves the Ables—find ways to maximize their powers to overcome their disabilities, and are the first to identify the growing evil threatening humanity. As vital custodians disappear and the custodian leadership is mired in indecision, a mysterious and powerful figure taunts Phillip, and the enemy is poised to strike. But what if the next “one who does all,” the multi-gifted custodian predicted to come, is one of the Ables? The Ables is a fast-paced, captivating debut novel from Jeremy Scott, a bold new voice in fantasy and sci-fi, and already a widely popular storyteller as co-creator and narrator of CinemaSins, a YouTube channel that has amassed more than 3.8 million subscribers in under two years.

The Dragon Queen and Her Mates Boxed Set


Meg Xuemei X. - 2019
    I've been cursed to serve a bad-tempered elemental in my beastly form for centuries!There's only one way to lift the curse: a kiss from three true loves. To garner even one is nearly impossible. How am I going to get three? Then three gorgeous-as-sin, yet clueless dragon princes stumble into my lair. Only they do not come to kiss me. They come to slay me without knowing who I really am. Unless they cut the three heads of the Furies - my heads - or make the Fury Queen fall in love with them, they'll never shift back to dragons!Not surprisingly, the princes all choose what they think is the easiest - to behead the beasts... The boxed set includes all three novels in the series: The Fury Queen's Harem The Dragon Queen's HaremThe Fae Queen's Harem Warning: This is a WhyChoose fantasy/paranormal romance that features one hell of a strong woman and her three hot Dragon princes and a demigod mate. It contains battles, steamy scenes, raw language, magic, swordfights, dark fae, dragon shifters, vampires, and otherworldly nightmares of creatures. And at last, true loves, with a happy ever after at the end of series.

The Earthling's Brother


Earik Beann - 2020
    In fact, he’s never met another human—or seen a sunrise, smelled a flower, or eaten a regular meal. All of that is about to change.It’s night in the desert, but he doesn’t feel the cold. The sky is clear, and the stars twinkle at him. He has never seen the sky from Earth before. Everything looks so strange. So . . . alien. He shakes his head in wonderment and laughs. He can’t stop smiling. This is Earth!There is a building ahead. Other people will be inside. His heart skips a beat as he takes a step forward, the rocks crunching under his bare feet. He has dreamed of this moment for as long as he can remember.But that which can be found can just as easily be lost again. It would have been better had Sam’s arrival gone unnoticed. But the artificial life form known only as the Authority is not one to miss such things. Nearly as old as time, and almost as powerful, the Authority was built by an ancient civilization as both an enforcer and a war machine, the destroyer of worlds. It has been watching Sam his entire life. Watching, and waiting, and judging. And now, it has decided that it’s time to act.

Perhaps I've Said Too Much (A Great Big Book of Messing with People)


Rodney Lacroix - 2013
    Whether you're carving evil messages into your coworker's banana peel or telling your kids that, yes, raisins are actually dehydrated people, there's a certain, sinister-yet-fun draw to really messing with people. In Perhaps I’ve Said Too Much (the much anticipated follow-up to the heralded, award-winning Things Go Wrong For Me), Rodney Lacroix gives the reader some insight on what it's like to live the prankster life. No one is safe, including Rodney himself as not all of his antics go entirely as planned. Join him as he spins some yarns, gives you some new ideas and lets you relive the catastrophic consequences of jokes gone terribly wrong. Complete with original hand-drawn artwork and graphics, one-two punch Brain Nuggets, and the ever-popular Draw Something Files, Perhaps will not disappoint.* (Assumes you are an immature child who enjoys potty humor and making fart noises with your armpits.)

Chronicles of Arcana: The complete collection 1-4


Debbie Cassidy - 2019
    The complete collection books 1-4 City of Demons - Book 1 If Buffy and Angel could have banged without him going all evil, then we would have had Wilomena Bastion. Dragons suck, like literally suck the life out of you if you let them. Trick is not to look them directly in the eyes, like ever. So, the day Wila finds herself staring into the most dangerous Draconi’s pretty, emerald peepers, she knows she’s royally fucked.No one said saving a bunch of kids from being served up as treats to the dragon liege was going to be easy. Options are limited—immediate execution or servitude, and Wila prefers to have her head remain firmly on her shoulders.Now, the self-professed dark avenger must work to bring down a resistance of demons hell-bent on making life difficult for the dragon liege. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, her new position comes with a partner, the dragon liege’s favoured demon enforcer; a creature of fire, fury and washboard abs who—let’s face it—is just gonna cramp her style.With the help of a ghostly receptionist, a talking dog and the thing that lives in the basement, Wila will be forced to take on a most dangerous task. It looks like some serious brooding is on the menu, because for the first time in forever, Wila isn’t sure she’s up to the job. A city filled with monsters needs a woman who can kick ass, and Wilomena Bastion is just the gal for the job. A kick-ass Urban Fantasy with a slow burn Whychoose Romance.  City of the Lost When life gives you lemons, punch it in the face.  Time is running out for Wila and Azren. With the Lost loose in the city and several mechanical monster’s hell bent on attacking civilians in the mix, it’s going to take several slices of lemon cake for the gang to get through the week. City of Everdark Fate can't hold all the cards, not if she doesn't have any fingers. Mission objective, to kick the dragon leige’s ass and take back what she’s stolen.Getting answers means recon and lies, coercion and revelations. But Wila will do whatever it takes to get her Kindred and her draconi prince back, even if it means venturing into a place of nightmares, a place of everdark and monsters with not a pot of tea in sight.The darkness awaits, and Wila better hope it doesn’t swallow her whole. City of War Triumph always comes at a price, but paying it is a bitch. With the Voice finally by her side Wila must take the final steps to claiming back what is rightfully hers. The Triumph Games are looming, and all the pieces are almost in place, but hurdles have a way of springing up at the last minute, and a trip right now could be fatal.War may be coming, whether Wila wants it, or not...

Rise of Humanity: Book 1 - Arc One, The Mortal


Zai Zhu - 2018
    While all his contemporaries were embracing the various resources supplied by their tribes, he had to leave at the first light of dawn each day and search for the medicinal herbs necessary to cultivate himself. That was, until one day, when the most dangerous and calamitous event the human lands could experience unfolded all around him. Stuck in the middle of a catastrophe, powerless and knowing that no help would ever come and no rescue was possible, he struggled to stay alive. It was then that he found a copper lamp, one that changed his life forever…