Adult Challenged Books


Showing 1 - 20 of 73  There are a total of 137 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The 1619 Project"
Star rating for The 1619 Project
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...

2. 1984

Book cover for "1984"
Star rating for 1984
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
Portrays life in a future time when a totalitarian government watches over all citizens and directs all activities. Written 75 years ago, 1984 was George Orwell's chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative is timelier than ever... "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."...
Book cover for "The adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
Star rating for The adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
A feisty young boy fakes his own death to escape his abusive father and heads off down the Mississippi River with his newfound friend Jim, a runaway slave. The adventures of a mischievous young boy and his friends growing up in a Mississippi River town in the nineteenth century.
Book cover for "The adventures of Tom Sawyer"
Star rating for The adventures of Tom Sawyer
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"The classic boyhood adventure tale, updated with a new introduction by noted Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. A consummate prankster with a quick wit, Tom Sawyer dreams of a bigger fate than simply being a "rich boy." Yet through the novel's humorous escapades-from the famous episode of the whitewashed fence to the trial of Injun Joe-Mark Twain explores the deeper themes of the adult world, one of dishonesty and superstition, murder and revenge,...
Book cover for "All quiet on the western front"
Star rating for All quiet on the western front
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:

This autobiographical novel of WWI that inspired multiple film adaptions evokes “the horrors of modern warfare has lost none of its force” (The Times, London).

In 1914, as the world descends into war, twenty-year-old Paul Baümer and his classmates enlist in the German army. Full of youthful excitement and visions of adventure, they quickly find themselves caught in a whirlwind of death and brutality. Though

...
Book cover for "Angela's ashes"
Star rating for Angela's ashes
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
The author recounts his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn as the child of Irish immigrants who decide to return to worse poverty in Ireland when his infant sister dies
Book cover for "Angels & demons"
Star rating for Angels & demons
Series:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
The murder of a world-famous physicist raises fears that the Illuminati are operating again after centuries of silence, and religion professor Robert Langdon is called in to assist with the case.

8. Anthem

Book cover for "Anthem"
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Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:

Anthem takes place in a dark, dystopian future. Collectivism and socialist economics have driven mankind to a technological standstill. The individual is not acknowledged in this society, the word "I" having been eliminated from speech altogether. Rand explores the tension between collectivism and individualism and equates the errors or triumphs of these with socialism and capitalism.

Book cover for "The art of racing in the rain"
Star rating for The art of racing in the rain
Author:
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
Nearing the end of his life, Enzo, a dog with a philosopher's soul, tries to bring together the family, pulled apart by a three year custody battle between daughter Zoe's maternal grandparents and her father Denny, a race car driver.
Book cover for "The artist's way"
Star rating for The artist's way
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"A course in discovering and recovering your creative self"--Cover.
Book cover for "The bean trees"
Star rating for The bean trees
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
Young, bright Taylor Greer leaves her poverty-stricken life in Kentucky and heads west, picking up an abandoned Native American baby girl whom she names Turtle and finds a new home in Tucson with Mattie, an old woman who takes in Central American refugees.

12. Beloved

Book cover for "Beloved"
Star rating for Beloved
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
Book cover for "Between the world and me"
Star rating for Between the world and me
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT
Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary...
Book cover for "Black Boy"
Star rating for Black Boy
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:

A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author's grandson.

When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that "if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in

...
Book cover for "The bluest eye"
Star rating for The bluest eye
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Book cover for "Brave new world"
Star rating for Brave new world
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
Huxley's classic prophetic novel describes the socialized horrors of a futuristic utopia devoid of individual freedom. First published 70 years ago, the classic, prophetic novel capturing the socialized horrors of a futuristic utopia remarkably explores the now-timely themes of cloning, individual creativity and freedom, and the role of science, technology, and drugs in humankind's future.
Book cover for "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee"
Star rating for Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Description:
Brown's meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. This edition includes illustrations, essays, and excerpts from firsthand accounts and memoirs, that add depth and reflection to this momentous work.
Book cover for "The Canterbury tales"
Star rating for The Canterbury tales
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
Chaucer's work begins at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, England, where a group of pilgrims have assembled on their way to Canterbury. Harry Bailly, the innkeeper, suggests a contest: whoever tells the best tale will win a supper when they reach Canterbury.

19. Carrie

Book cover for "Carrie"
Star rating for Carrie
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
An introverted girl with remarkable powers of telekinesis faces the horrors of teenage life and unleashes a few horrors of her own when she attends the high school prom.
Book cover for "Catch-22"
Star rating for Catch-22
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
Presents the contemporary classic depicting the struggles of a United States airman attempting to survive the lunacy and depravity of a World War II airbase. Fifty years after its original publication, Catch-22 remains a cornerstone of American literature and one of the funniest--and most celebrated--books of all time. In recent years it has been named to "best novels" lists by Time, Newsweek, the Modern Library, and the London Observer. Set in Italy...