Life's A Book

Fahrenheit 451  by Ray Bradbury (Science Fiction)
First published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 is a classic novel set in the future when books forbidden by a totalitarian regime are burned. The hero, a book burner, suddenly discovers that books are flesh-and-blood ideas that cry out silently when put to the torch.

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Taking refuge in fairy tales after the loss of his mother, 12-year-old David finds himself violently propelled into an imaginary land in which the boundaries of fantasy and reality are disturbingly melded.

Booked to Die by John Dunning (Mystery)
Cliff Janeway, a burnt-out Colorado cop and rare book collector, investigates the murder of his book scout friend, who was tracking down a valuable find when his life was brought to an abrupt conclusion. This is the first in the Cliff Janeway Mysteries series.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
In seven days of apocalyptic terror, a killer strikes seven times – and seven monks die. The year is 1327. The place is a wealthy abbey in Italy. And the crimes committed there are beyond the wildest imaginings. It will be the task of English Brother William of Baskerville to decipher secret symbols and dig into the eerie labyrinth of abbey life to solve the mystery. Also try Foucault’s Pendulum.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
In a world where one can literally get lost in literature, Thursday Next, a Special Operative in literary detection, tries to stop the world's Third Most Wanted criminal from kidnapping characters, including Jane Eyre, from works of literature. Also try the rest of the Thursday Next novels, continuing with Lost in a Good Book.

Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
Finding two thought-inducing philosophical questions in her mailbox, Sophie enrolls in a correspondence course with a mysterious philosopher, and begins receiving some equally strange letters.

The Princess Bride by William Goldman
As a boy, William Goldman claims, he loved to hear his father read the S. Morgenstern classic, The Princess Bride. But as a grown-up he discovered that the boring parts were left out of good old Dad's recitation, and only the "good parts" reached his ears. Now Goldman does Dad one better. He's reconstructed the "Good Parts Version" to delight wise kids and wide-eyed grownups everywhere.

Codex by Lev Grossman
An investment banker is sent by his firm to organize a collection of rare books for a mysterious client and realizes that there may be a medieval codex hidden among the volumes that parallels a computer game's addictive virtual reality world.

The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber
Desperately typing out the details of a case that puts him at the center of a deadly conspiracy, intellectual property lawyer Jake Mishkin recounts how a bookstore fire led to the discovery of the whereabouts of one of the most valuable historical items in the world.

The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay
Coming to New York from Tasmania at the age of 18, Rosemary takes a job at a used and rare bookstore run by the gruff Mr. Pike and his idiosyncratic staff and becomes caught up in the search for a long-lost Melville manuscript.

Unsolicited by Julie Wallin Kaewert
Trying to save both his family publishing company and his life, young Alex Plumtree searches for a missing author, whose unfinished fact-based novel about kidnapped World War II orphans is the focus of death threats and murder.

Literacy and Longing in L.A. by Jennifer Kaufman
Whenever her life hits a crisis, Dora escapes into a carefully selected stack of books, shutting herself away from the outside world until she emerges from her book binge capable of facing her problems.

Ex-Libris by Ross King
Hired to restore a once-magnificent library that had been ravaged during the English Civil War, London bookseller Isaac Inchbold becomes embroiled in the search for a missing manuscript and a conspiracy of spies, smugglers and forgery.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Sixty years after a book's publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl named for one of the book's characters seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Lucas Corso is a book detective, a mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found hanged, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices and swashbuckling derring-do.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz-Zafon
A boy named Daniel selects a novel from a library of rare books, enjoying it so much that he searches for the rest of the author's works, only to discover that someone is destroying every book the author has ever written.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, two boys are sent to the country for re-education, where their lives take an unexpected turn when they meet the beautiful daughter of a local tailor and stumble upon a forbidden stash of Western literature.

Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
A major writer in the "cyberpunk" genre, the author of Snow Crash imagines a future ruled by a rebirth of Victorian thinking, inhabited by a brilliant technologist who dares to rebel against it.