Others: Positive Sy Levin, a high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves New York for the Pacific Northwest to start over, imagining that an extraordinary new life awaits him there. Soon after arriving, he realizes that he had fallen for the myth of the West as a place of personal reinvention.
Lists: …
Denis Johnson
2006 · 122 pages · 3 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveDenis Johnson’s Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. Robert Grainer is a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss
What made the match, strongest first
Richard Powers
2018 · 512 pages · 4 reviews
Others: Leaning positiveThe Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late-twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
What made the match, strongest first
Amy Hatvany
2011 · 343 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveA story about a single mother dealing with an alcohol addiction.
David Mitchell
2004 · 528 pages · 8 reviews
Others: Leaning positiveFrom David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists 2003” issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope. A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; an ambitious journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing the mendicant and violent family of his star author; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation -- the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small. In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity’ s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us
What made the match, strongest first
Samuel R. Delany
1968 · 220 pages · 5 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveThese are at least some of the ways you can read NOVA: as a fast-action farflung interstellar adventure; as archetypal mystical/mythical allegory (in which the Tarot and the Grail both figure prominently); as modern myth told in the S-F idiom... the reader observes, recollects, or participates in a range of personal experience including violent pain and disfigurement, sensory deprivation and overload, man-machine communion, the drug experience, the creative experience - and inter-personal relationships which include incest and assassination, father-son, leader-follower, human-pet, and lots more! The balance of galactic power in the 31st century revolves around Illyrion, the most precious energy source in the universe. The varied and exotic crew who sign up with Captain Lorq van Ray know their mission is dangerous, and they soon learn that they are involved in a deadly race with the charismatic but vicious leader of an opposing space federation. But they have no idea of Lorq's secret obsession: to gather Illyrion at the source by flying through the very heart of an imploding star.
What made the match, strongest first
Vikram Seth
1986 · 307 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveOne of the most highly regarded novels of 1986, Vikram Seth's story in verse made him a literary household name in both the United States and India. John Brown, a successful yuppie living in 1980s San Francisco meets a romantic interest in Liz, after placing a personal ad in the newspaper. From this interaction, John meets a variety of characters, each with their own values and ideas of "self-actualization." However, Liz begins to fall in love with John's best friend, and John realizes his journey of self-discovery has only just begun.
What made the match, strongest first
Loved itthe novel was awesome by the way whoever did it you know thank you it's a great campass novel that taught me how the inner conflicts of Academia for instance between pragmatism and idealism between prophet and principle are really nothing new
