Book Lists

In Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't put out fires but start them--to burn books. It's a time when trivial information is valued and true knowledge perceived as dangerous and subversive. Guy Montag is a fireman with a wife who's goading him to work harder so they could afford another television set. When Montag befriends their neighbor Clarisse, whose love for books and knowledge is contrasted to the Montags' mindless existence, Clarisse suddenly disappears. As a result, Guy begins to hide her books. When his wife turns him in, Guy is ordered to hand them over. Refusing, he runs away, joining an outlawed group of intellectuals who store the contents of the books in their heads, waiting for the time the society will want to think again.

"Imagine if Willie Wonka had been a video-game designer. Now imagine a world in which most people spend their time as avatars in a virtual reality. The founder of this virtual reality leaves his fortune to the first to win a contest, comprised of puzzles and tasks based on 1980s popular culture. Three teens compete to win against an evil conglomerate." - School Library Journal

The year is 2066. A Caltech intern inadvertently notices an anomaly from a space telescope--something is approaching Saturn, and decelerating. Space objects don't decelerate. Spaceships do. A flurry of top-level government meetings conclude that whatever built that ship is at least one hundred years ahead in technology, and whoever can get their hands on it exclusively and bring it back will have an advantage so large, no other nation can compete. A conclusion the Chinese definitely agree with when they find out. The race is on...

Mark Watney was nearly killed by a dust storm on Mars and was abandoned by his crew who thought him dead. Now he's all alone with no way of letting Earth know he's alive, which doesn't matter because his supplies would run out before they'd get there. Either way, the environment or human error will likely kill him first. Not giving in, Mark works to survive, battling obstacle after obstacle, but will it be enough?

Cassie Sullivan, the survivor of an alien invasion, must rescue her young brother from the enemy with help from a boy who may be one of them.

In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss's skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place.

In this new collection he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it. Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King's finest gifts to his constant reader, "I made them especially for you," says King.

A man returns to the site of his childhood home where, years before, he knew a girl named Lettie Hempstock who showed him the most marvelous, dangerous, and outrageous things, but when he gets there he learns that nothing is as he remembered.

When the daughter of a cult horror film director is found dead in an abandoned Manhattan warehouse, investigative journalist Scott McGrath, disbelieving the official suicide ruling, probes into the strange circumstances of the young woman's death.

An account of the decade-long conflict between humankind and hordes of the predatory undead is told from the perspective of dozens of survivors who describe in their own words the epic human battle for survival.