The novel is a bildungsroman about a callow youth named David in rural Mississippi during the late 1930s to early 1950s. He learns of religious, racial, social, and sexual bigotry in the narrator''s ten strongest memories, one memory per chapter. The memories begin with David on a train, escaping the past, hoping for freedom. The story begins with Aunt Mae, a former actress and singer, moving in with David''s white-working-class family in the middle of a small southern town. Aunt Mae becomes sexually involved with a seventy-year-old man, ending when he is arrested on morality charges. From subsequent events David learns he does not get along with the other boys his own age. At this point suggestive of the 1930s Depression, David''s father, Frank, loses his factory job. The family moves to an older house on a hill overlooking the town. The family''s circumstances worsen and Frank becomes frustrated. When the family runs out of money, he buys seeds. His wife insists crops obviously cannot grow in the clay of the hill soil, and he hits her (with his knee) knocking out one of her teeth. She bleeds badly, but it eventually subsides. Subsequently Frank is shipped to Italy to fight in World War II. While Frank is in Italy, a traveling ''revival'' ministry visits town. The traveling preacher teaches that popular dance is a prelude to ''immorality''. The town''s local preacher opposes this incursion and begins a rival Bible-study class. These options divide the town. Through editorials in the newspaper and spots on the town radio station, each side attacks the other. Meanwhile Aunt Mae takes a job in the local propeller factory as a supervisor. At a company dance which she organizes, Aunt Mae successfully entertains by singing. This leads to her being invited to join the hired band, singing for pay. David''s mother goes insane after learning that Frank had been killed in Italy. David and Aunt Mae take care of her, as Aunt Mae pursues singing. At age fifteen David gets a job at the pharmacy in town. There he encounters Jo Lynne, a girl visiting the valley while her grandfather is ill. After seeing a melodramatic movie, David and Jo Lynne date. Clyde, a member of Aunt Mae''s band, is in love with her, and is certain they would get a record deal in Nashville. She leaves for Nashville promising that she''ll immediately send for David and his mother. On strength of this promise, David quits his job. After seeing Aunt Mae off, he reflects on his situation, eventually realizing his mother seems missing. She usually spends most of the day in the yard where Frank planted his failed crop. As he climbs the stairs he steps in blood. He finds his mother collapsed, bleeding from the back of her mouth. The bleeding quells before she dies exhaling one last word — "Frank." Immediately the imperious local preacher arrives announcing he is taking David''s (now dead) mother to an asylum. The preacher pushes past David to go upstairs, and as he climbs the stairs David shoots him through the back of the head. David buries his mother in the yard and uses his remaining money to board a train, hoping to start anew wherever he might be destined for. The book is told entirely from the first person, and the main character is rarely referred to as David. David''s name is mentioned very briefly at the beginning, but later more strongly.

The Neon Bible

The book is set in Portland, Oregon in the year 2002. Portland has three million inhabitants and continuous rain. It is deprived enough for the poorer inhabitants to have kwashiorkor, or protein deprivation. The culture is much the same as the 1970s in the United States, though impoverished. There is also a massive war in the Middle East, with Egypt and Israel allied against Iran. George Orr, a draftsman, has long been abusing drugs to prevent himself from having "effective" dreams, which retroactively change reality. After having one of these dreams, the new reality is the only reality for everyone else, but George retains memory of the previous reality. Under threat of being placed in an asylum, Orr is forced to undergo "voluntary" psychiatric care for his drug abuse. George begins attending therapy sessions with an ambitious psychiatrist and sleep researcher named William Haber. Orr claims that he has the power to dream "effectively" and Haber, gradually coming to believe it, seeks to use George''s power to change the world. His experiments with a biofeedback/EEG machine, nicknamed the Augmentor, enhance Orr''s abilities and produce a series of increasingly intolerable alternative worlds, based on an assortment of utopian (and dystopian) premises familiar from other science fiction works: * When Haber directs George to dream a world without racism, the skin of everyone on the planet becomes a uniform light gray. * An attempt to solve the problem of overpopulation proves disastrous when George dreams a devastating plague which wipes out much of humanity and gives the current world a population of one billion rather than seven billion. * George attempts to dream into existence "peace on Earth" – resulting in an alien invasion of the Moon which unites all the nations of Earth against the threat. Each effective dream gives Haber more wealth and status, until late in the book where he is effectively ruler of the world. Orr''s economic status also improves, but he is unhappy with Haber''s meddling and just wants to let things be. Increasingly frightened by Haber''s lust for power and delusions of Godhood, Orr seeks out a lawyer named Heather to represent him against Haber. Heather is present at one therapeutic session, and comes to understand George''s situation. He falls in love with Heather, and even marries her in one reality; however, he is unsuccessful in getting out of therapy. George tells Heather that the "real world" had been destroyed in a nuclear war in April 1998. George dreamed it back into existence as he lay dying in the ruins. He doubts the reality of what now exists, hence his fear of Haber''s efforts to improve it. Heather has seen one change of reality and has a multiple memory – remembering that her pilot husband either died early in the Middle East War or else died just before the truce that ended the war in the face of the alien threat. She tries to help George but also tries to improve the world, saying that the aliens should no longer be on the Moon. George dreams this, but the result is that they have invaded the Earth instead. In the resultant fighting, Mount Hood is bombed and the dormant volcano starts to erupt again. They go back to Haber, who has George dream another dream in which the aliens are actually peaceful. For a time there is stability, but Haber goes on changing things. His suggestion that George dream away racism results in everyone becoming gray; Heather, whose parents were of different races, never existed in this new reality. George manages to dream up a gray version of her, married to him and with a less prickly personality. Mount Hood continues to erupt and he fears the world is losing coherence. Orr has a conversation with one of the aliens, suddenly comes to understand his situation, and thereby gains the courage to stand up to Haber. Haber, frustrated with Orr''s resistance, uses what he has learned from studying George''s brain during his sessions of hypnosis and controlled dreaming, and decides to take on effective dreaming himself. Haber''s first effective dream represents a significant break with the realities created by Orr, and threatens to destroy reality altogether. Orr is able to shut off the Augmentor – even as coherent existence is dissolving into undifferentiated chaos – reaching the "off" switch through pure force of will. The world is saved, but random bits of the various recent realities are now jumbled together. Haber''s mind is left broken. Heather, presumably her original self, exists, though with only a slight memory of George.

The Lathe of Heaven

The novel opens with the beginning of the trial, which takes place in pre-1914 Munich. Right from the start Deruga, who has not been taken into custody so far, attracts the attention of everyone present through his conspicuous behaviour, which ranges from seemingly unmotivated emotional outbursts to complete indifference as to what is going on in the courtroom&mdash;at one point he even seems to have fallen asleep. Part of his idiosyncratic demeanour is attributed to his Italian ancestry&mdash;Deruga was born and raised in poor circumstances in an Italian mountain village and only came to Germany and Austria to read medicine&mdash; but the rest is ascribed to his choleric temperament. As the trial proceeds, Deruga turns out to have been living a life somewhat outside the bourgeois society which would normally harbour people of his professional standing: he neglects his run-down practice, has debts not only with one of his colleagues but also with his restaurateur, tailor, and hairdresser, shuns the local medical society, and has frequent and irregular love affairs. While Deruga himself does not seem to care one way or another, there are clearly two opposing parties: one group, headed by the Baronin Truschkowitz, who feel strongly that a murderer must be brought to justice; and another, motley group of people who have crossed the defendant''s path at some point in their lives and who, summoned to testify as character witnesses, insist that, despite his occasional rudeness, he has always been a witty, kind, sympathetic, helpful, even philanthropic, man whose lack of interest to accumulate money would never have induced him to kill his ex-wife on the sheer hope that he might be included in her will. They also point out his unblemished professional record, and therefore say that he must be acquitted. The discovery of a handwritten letter from Mingo Swieter to Deruga finally triggers a turn of events in Deruga''s favour. It is found in the inside pocket of a man''s suit which was carelessly thrown into a canal in Munich and retrieved by a poor woman who was going to sell it to a clothes peddler. In the letter, which is the first communication between the ex-spouses since their divorce, the dying woman appeals to Deruga to shorten her suffering by performing euthanasia on her. On the last day of the trial, Deruga at last explains how he received the letter, immediately took the train to Munich, disguised himself as a peddler, stole into Mingo Swieter''s flat while her daily help was away on errands, talked to the dying woman, administered the poison, waited until she was dead, and travelled back to Prague, happy to have been able to assist his ex-wife in her hour of need. In the end Deruga is acquitted. The final chapters of the novel also throw some light on the individual characters'' motives to act the way they do. Deruga''s arch enemy, the Baronin Truschkowitz, who appears throughout the trial as an embittered and vengeful woman only out to get her cousin''s inheritance, turns out to be a highly moral person trapped in a boring marriage who intended to use the money to buy her freedom from her dull husband now that their daughter Mingo has come of age. Neither her unfading beauty, which has not gone unnoticed by Deruga, nor her joie de vivre have ever tempted her to be unfaithful to her husband, but after her cousin''s death she thought the time had come to divorce him. When she meets Deruga after the end of the trial, they are surprised to see that their attraction is mutual, and Deruga admits that she is the reason why he has decided to close down his practice and go abroad for good&mdash;as far away as humanly possible. Further complications arise when Mingo von Truschkowitz declares her love for Deruga, although he is 25 years her senior. The Baroness actually offers him her daughter''s hand, but Deruga is too sensible to accept and sticks with his decision to move on.

The Deruga Case

Elsewhere tells the story of a fifteen year old girl, Elizabeth ''Liz'' Hall, who dies in a bicycle accident and wakes up to find herself traveling on a boat called the SS Nile. There, she meets a girl who had been shot and a famous musician who had died of a drug overdose. After watching her own funeral through Binoculars on the Observation decks, Liz realizes that she is truly dead. Soon afterward, she and the other passengers arrive in what is known as "Elsewhere". She meets her grandmother, Betty, who had died before Liz was born, and Liz begins to live with her. In Elsewhere, Liz learns everyone ages backwards from the day they die until they turn 7 days old, and then they are placed in the river and return to Earth as babies to begin a new life. Liz misses life on Earth, and becomes obsessed with watching her family and friends through binoculars situated on the Observation Decks. She tried to make contact with her family a few times, but gets caught by Owen with whom she falls in love. She is depressed, but in time she makes new friends in Elsewhere who help her come to terms with the fact that she has died. She gets a job working with dogs arriving from earth and realizes she can speak canine. Gradually, she learns that a life lived backwards is not much different to a life lived forwards.

Elsewhere

This is the fictional life story of a parish priest, a man of God “conscious of the indwelling of the Trinity,” living the life of grace in a drab industrial town, bringing the grace of God to weak human beings seduced by the devil’s ancient lures of the world and the flesh. It covers the activities of Father Thomas Edmund Smith in his urban Scottish parish from 1908 until his death in 1942. On this framework, the author hangs the glowing tapestry of Father Smith’s spiritual life, a life of sanctity, humility, and burning love of God. He interacts with a wide range of people, children, adults and other clerics. It also tracks the lives of two particular youths from their innocent childhood affections to their respectives lives as a priest and an actress. From the dust jacket: "This is the story of Father Smith, priest in a Scottish city - of his friends, the exiled French nuns, of the Bishop, of Monsignor O''Duffy who wages simple, violent war against simple sins, of Father Bonnyboat, the liturgical scholar, of all the people who come into the gentle orbit of Father Smith - from Lady Ippecacuanha, that tweedy convert, to the slut Annie who drives her husband to murder."

The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith

After finding that her child is diagnosed with leukemia, Anne Anderson notices a high incidence of leukemia, a relatively rare disease, in her city. Eventually she gathers other families and seeks a lawyer, Jan Schlichtmann, to consider their options. Schlichtmann originally decides not to take the case due to both the lack of evidence and a clear defendant. Later picking up the case, Schlichtmann finds evidence suggesting trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination of the town''s water supply by Riley Tannery, a subsidiary of Beatrice Foods; a chemical company, W.R. Grace; and another company named Unifirst. In the course of the lawsuit Schlichtmann gets other attorneys to assist him. He spends lavishly as he had in his prior lawsuits, but the length of the discovery process and trial stretch all of their assets to their limit. Though Unifirst settles for a little over $1 million, the money immediately is invested in the case against Grace and Beatrice. The plaintiffs'' case against Grace is far stronger for two reasons: (1) Schlichtmann has personal testimony of a former employee of Grace who had witnessed dumping, and (2) a river between Beatrice''s tannery and the contaminated wells make their contribution to the contamination less plausible. The case against Beatrice is dismissed by Judge Skinner. Though Schlichtmann''s firm anticipates a much higher settlement, the dire state of its finances forces it to accept settlement from W.R. Grace for $8 million. Schlichtmann disburses the settlement to the families, excluding expenses and attorney''s fees (which resulted in approx. $375,000 per family). When some families think Schlichtmann had overbilled expenses, he acquiesces and surrenders more of his fee. Schlichtmann later files for bankruptcy after losing his condo and car; he lives in his office for a time. Schlichtmann eventually practices environmental, civil and personal injury law. A report from the Environmental Protection Agency (which later filed its own lawsuits against the companies based on new evidence) concludes that both companies had contaminated the wells from sludge removed from the site. In 1988 Schlichtmann attempts to reraise the case against Beatrice, but the judge dismisses the case, citing testimony from Beatrice''s soil chemist. However, due to the lawsuits brought forward by the Environmental Protection Agency W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods are eventually forced to pay for the largest chemical clean up in the history of the Northeastern United States which cost about $64 million.

A Civil Action

The story is centered on two main characters: Biju and Sai. Biju is an illegal Indian immigrant living in the United States, son of a cook who works for Sai''s grandfather. Sai is a girl living in mountainous Kalimpong with her maternal grandfather Jemubhai, the cook and a dog named Mutt. Desai switches the narration between both points of view. The action of the novel takes place in 1986. The novel follows the journey of Biju, an illegal immigrant in the US who is trying to make a new life; and Sai, an Anglicised Indian girl living with her grandfather in India. The novel shows the internal conflicts in India between groups, whilst showing a conflict between past and present. There is the rejection and yet awe of the English way of life, the opportunities for money in the US, and the squalor of living in India. Many leading Indians were considered to be becoming too English and having forgotten the traditional ways of Indian life, shown through the character of the grandfather, the retired Judge. The major theme running throughout is one closely related to colonialism and the effects of post-colonialism: the loss of identity and the way it travels through generations as a sense of loss. Individuals within the text show snobbery at those who embody the Indian way of life and vice versa, with characters displaying an anger at the English Indians who have lost their traditions. The Gorkhaland movement is used as a historic backdrop of the novel. The retired judge Jemubhai Patel is a man disgusted at Indian ways and customs, so much so, that he eats chapatis with a knife and fork, hates all Indians including his father whom he breaks ties with and wife who he abandons at his father''s place after torturing her, and is never accepted by the British in spite of his education and adopted mannerisms.

The Inheritance of Loss

Willie Hunsucker is a veteran on the dole, taking a monthly trip to Roanoke so the government can use his brain power for whatever purposes it deems appropriate. Willie is starting to remember bits and pieces of this time. He has an unusually large praying mantis that soothes him when he flashes back to his war service. He doesn''t know it but the mantis''s pheromes are increasing his memories and his initiative. Dorcas Rae is a gene technician and mistress to the lab supervisor. On the sly, she created the mantises that have become so popular with people on the dole. The government wants to find who did this. She has also created a wasp that will sting when it senses aggressiveness in people. Allison is an eco-terrorist. She delivers a car to an oil refinery but her contact doesn''t arrive. Just after she''s captured by government agents, the car explodes a nuclear device that damages much of the oil refining capacity of the southern U.S. She agrees to cooperate and become an undercover agent—donating brain time to help with Dorca''s research. After Willie''s house is robbed, he falls in with a group of people who''ve each suffered from environmental or nanotechnological damage. As a result of an assignment he''d had while on the dole, they become aware of Allison and Dorcas and determine to rescue Dorcas from the government net that''s about to close around her. The chase is on. In a world where nanotechnology can alter one''s appearance in a few hours and brain images can be tracked if one uses the net to ask for any information, the chase is an intriguing combination of high and low tech.

Gaia''s Toys

This is a classic communist utopia set in a distant future. Throughout the novel, the author''s attention is focused on the social and cultural aspects of the society; there are several principal heroes (a historian, an archeologist, a starship captain) involved in several plot lines. Though the world shown in the novel is intended as ideal, there''s an attempt to show a conflict and its resolution with a voluntary self-punishment of a scientist whose reckless experiment caused damage. There''s also a fair amount of action in the episodes where the crew of a starship fight alien predators. Several civilizations of our Galaxy, including Earth, are united in the Great Circle whose members exchange and relay scientific and cultural information. Notably, there''s was no faster-than-light travel or communication in this world before events, described in novel. Moreover, interstellar missions sent by Earth are few because of very costly fuel used by interstellar (but not planetary) spaceships, and the Great Circle civilizations almost never meet in person. The Great Circle radio transmissions are pictured as taking the energy of the whole Earth and therefore infrequent; one such transmission is a lecture on the history of the Earth civilization which gives the author an opportunity to put his world into a historic context.

Andromeda

Robert Luzcak is sent by the magazine he works for to Calcutta to locate recently written poetry alleged to have been written by a poet, M. Das, who has been thought dead for the last eight years. He travels there with his Indian wife and their infant child. On arriving, he is met by Krishna, a local intellectual who claims to have been asked to assist them by a mutual friend. The next day he meets with the local writers guild who were the source of the few bits of poetry that made their way to America. When he asks to meet Das, he is told that it is out of the question. Robert considers leaving Calcutta at this point, his duty done, but feels that something is missing and that he doesn''t have enough material for an interesting article at this point. The night before he and his family are to leave, Krishna returns and takes Robert to a man who can provide him with information relevant to his story. The man tells how he and a friend had tried to join a religious secret society dedicated to Kali, a Hindu goddess associated with death and destruction. One of the prerequisites was for each initiate to bring a corpse to a secret temple, there to be laid at the feet of a statue of Kali. This man''s corpse, bloated and decayed after being dredged from the river is chosen by Kali and vivified by her, becoming animated. The corpse is that of the poet, Das. Armed with this tale, Robert again insists on the writers guild allowing him to see Das. This time they agree. He is brought to the poet, who seems to be in the advanced stages of leprosy. Das seems to corroborate the story of his return from death, but Robert again refuses to believe it. Robert is given an extensive collection of Das''s poetry, which is very different from his earlier work, describing dark, mystical, grotesque, and apocalyptic happenings. He is asked by Das to bring him books of poetry. Becoming concerned at the eerie, and sometimes frightening, events that he has experienced, Robert attempts to send his wife and child home, but they are unable to get a flight. Concealing a gun (given to him previously by Krishna) in one of the books he has bought for Das, he returns to the poet. He leaves the books and goes, but, as he exits the house, hears two gunshots. Das is dead. Robert is captured by guards and knocked unconscious. He awakens being taken somewhere in the back of a truck, but manages to escape, with Krishna''s help. He returns to the hotel, to find that their child has been kidnapped. After a couple of days of dead-end leads, a couple is caught trying to smuggle jewels hidden within the child''s body. With their child dead, Robert and his wife return to America. Robert decides to destroy the poetry, and, gradually, their relationship returns to normal. Whispers can still be heard, though, of the Song of Kali, the condition of humanity dominated by hatred and violence, perfectly embodied by the squalor and chaos of Calcutta.

Song of Kali

Snow Country is a stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha that takes place in the remote hot spring (onsen) town of Yuzawa (Kawabata himself did not mention the name of the town in his novel). The hot springs in that region were home to inns, visited by men traveling alone and in groups, where paid female companionship had become a staple of the economy. The geisha of the hot springs enjoyed nothing like the social status of their more artistically trained sisters in Kyoto and Tokyo and were usually little more than prostitutes whose brief careers inevitably ended in a downward spiral. The liaison between the geisha, Komako, and the male protagonist, a wealthy loner who is a self-appointed expert on Western ballet, is thus doomed to failure. The nature of that failure and the parts played by others form the theme of the book. As his most potent symbol of this "counter-Western modernity", the rural geisha, Komako, of his novel Snow Country embodies Kawabata''s conception of traditional Japanese beauty by taking Western influence and subverting it to traditional Japanese forms. Having no teacher available, she hones her technique on the traditional samisen instrument by untraditionally relying on sheet music and radio broadcasts. Her lover, Shimamura, comments that, “the publishing gentleman would be happy if he knew he had a real geisha—not just an ordinary amateur—practicing from his scores way off here in the mountains.” But on his way to the town, Shimamura is fascinated with a girl he sees on the train, a young girl named Yoko who is caring to a sick man traveling with her. He wants to see more of her, even though he is with Komako during his stay. Already a married man, it doesn''t faze him that he is thinking about Yoko while being public with Komako.

Snow Country

Ninette Dupond was a dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet who was chosen to be the lead when Mademoiselle Jean-Marie Augustine is injured. She is fired when her performance receives good reviews but also when she catches the eye of the La Augustine''s patron. Poor and desperate, Ninette is surprised when she finds a tomcat that is able to psychically talk to her. The cat, Thomas, convinces Ninette to migrate to England and become a premier dancer there. With no better options, Ninette takes the chance despite her disbelief in magic. On the way, Thomas teaches her English, instructs her on the basics of the magical world and convinces her to adopt the identity of the Russian ballerina, Nina Tchereslavsky. Thomas is also able to convince the owner of a music Hall, Nigel Barret, who is an Elemental Master of Air to take ''Nina'' on as the main act of his show. In a ploy based on the fairy tale, Nigel and his partners discover Ninette posing as "Nina" supposedly shipwrecked on a beach near Blackpool. Inspired, Nigel and his partners, Arthur (who is in charge of the orchestra) and Wolf (a parrot who supposedly is the reincarnation of Mozart), create a production based on the experience. They set Ninette up in a nice apartment with a maid named Alsie McKenzie (who has no magic, but has the abilities of a Sensitive, which means she can see Elemental beings and the like ) and start rehearsals, with Ninette also doing some dancing acts on the stage in the meantime. Nigel enlists the help of Elemental Master of Fire and stage magician, Jonathon Hightower, both for the production and that he suspects the shipwrecking was actually an attack on Nina. The threat becomes real, when the real Nina Tchereslavsky discovers Ninette''s impersonation. The danger in this is that the real ''Nina'' is also a troll that is able to absorb people''s identities and their memories.The troll had previously the taken on the forn of a young poet and from there seduced the real Nina into a bed then used its elemental powers to absorb her and then take her place.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

The Neon Bible

By John Kennedy Toole

The Lathe of Heaven

By Ursula K. Le Guin

The Deruga Case

By Ricarda Huch

Elsewhere

By Gabrielle Zevin

The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith

By Bruce Marshall

A Civil Action

By Jonathan Harr

The Inheritance of Loss

By Kiran Desai

Gaia's Toys

By Rebecca Ore

Andromeda

By Ivan Yefremov

Song of Kali

By Dan Simmons

Snow Country

By Yasunari Kawabata

Reserved for the Cat

By Mercedes Lackey