The Library

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

Long before the events of the novel, the Dark Lord Sauron forges the One Ring to dominate the other Rings of Power and corrupt those who wear them: the leaders of Men, Elves and Dwarves. He is defeated in battle, and Isildur cuts the One Ring from Sauron's finger, claiming it as an heirloom for his line. Isildur is later ambushed and killed by Orcs, and the Ring is lost in...

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Dorothy is a young orphaned girl raised by her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em in the bleak landscape of a Kansas farm. She has a little black dog Toto, who is her sole source of happiness on the dry, gray prairies. One day the farmhouse, with Dorothy and Toto inside, is caught up in a cyclone and deposited in a field in Munchkin Country, the eastern quadrant of the Land of Oz. The...

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

They open a door and enter a world. Narnia... the land beyond the wardrobe, the secret country known only to Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy... the place where the adventure begins. Lucy is the first to find the secret of the wardrobe in the professor's mysterious old house. At first, no one believes her when she tells of her adventures in the land of Narnia. But soon Edmund...

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

When Ishmael sets sail on the whaling ship Pequod one cold Christmas Day, he is clueless to the horrors that await him on the vast and merciless ocean. The ship's strange captain, Ahab, is in the grip of an obsession to hunt down the famous white whale, Moby Dick, and will stop at nothing on his quest to annihilate his nemesis.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, "The Hunger Games," a fight to the death on...

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Alice is wondering what to do one day, when a talking rabbit steals her attention. She is so intrigued that she follows him into his hole, and tumbles down into Wonderland. Alice soon discovers that reality and logic, as she knows them, do not apply here. In an attempt get out of the hole and into, "the loveliest garden you ever saw", she eats a cake to grow large enough to...

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The narrator of the book is Death. Death is omniscient. Zusak begins the book by introducing Death as a benign and sympathetic entity with a tendency to define moments by their color (for example a sky turned red after a bombing raid). Death describes his first encounter with a nine-year-old girl named Liesel Meminger in the late 1930's in a graveyard shortly after the...

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

When former pirate Billy Bones leaves an old sea chest and an ancient treasure map at the Admiral Benbow Inn, young Jim Hawkins embarks on a treasure-hunting adventure that takes him to the South Seas.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Using alternating first-person perspectives, the novel tells the stories of Henry DeTamble (born 1963), a librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and his wife, Clare Anne Abshire (born 1971), an artist who makes paper sculptures. Henry has a rare genetic disorder, which comes to be known as Chrono-Displacement, that causes him to involuntarily travel through time...

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare

When fifteen-year-old Clary Fray heads out to the Pandemonium Club in New York City, she hardly expects to witness a murder - much less a murder committed by three teenagers covered with strange tattoos and brandishing bizarre weapons. Then the body disappears into thin air. It's hard to call the police when the murderers are invisible to everyone else and when there is...