Title Recommendations based on Eli
Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into haves and have-nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man's fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman's stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes the very nature of equality and justice in America.
Chappelle's Show is shocking, smart, and completely fresh. Dave Chappelle's breakthrough project showed him tackling the most serious issues in the most laugh-out-loud funny ways possible. His iconic characters include the lovable crackhead Tyrone Biggums and the blind black white supremacist Clayton Bigsby.
After moving to a new town, troublemaking teen Jim Stark is supposed to have a clean slate, although being the new kid in town brings its own problems. While searching for some stability, Stark forms a bond with a disturbed classmate, Plato, and falls for local girl Judy. However, Judy is the girlfriend of neighborhood tough, Buzz. When Buzz violently confronts Jim and challenges him to a drag race, the new kid's real troubles begin.
Nick frequents New York's indie rock scene nursing a broken heart. Norah is questioning all of her assumptions about the world. They have nothing in common except for their taste in music, until a chance encounter leads to an all-night quest to find a legendary band's secret show and ends up becoming a first date that could change both their lives.
Following the death of a publishing tycoon, news reporters scramble to discover the meaning of his final utterance.
Bounty hunters seek shelter from a raging blizzard and get caught up in a plot of betrayal and deception.
Heart of Darkness follows Marlow, a riverboat captain, on a voyage into the African Congo at the height of European colonialism. Astounded by the brutal depravity he witnesses, Marlow becomes obsessed with meeting Kurtz, a famously idealistic and able man stationed farther along the river. What he finally discovers, however, is a horror beyond imagining.
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
Malcolm is carefully surviving life in a tough neighborhood in Los Angeles while juggling college applications, academic interviews, and the SAT. A chance invitation to an underground party leads him into an adventure that could allow him to go from being a geek, to being dope, to ultimately being himself.
Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."
Terrible events occur at an isolated hotel in the off season, when a small boy with psychic powers struggles to hold his own against the forces of evil that are driving his father insane.
SoulCalibur tells the tale of warriors searching for the ultimate sword, "Soul Edge". Many strong warriors searched for years, but very few actually found it. The sword, currently in the form of a twin pair of long swords, appeared mysteriously in an auction. It was taken by the dreaded pirate Cervantes de Leon and nothing is known of his fate thereafter. Presently, nine warriors from around the world (Hwang, Li Long, Mitsurugi, Rock, Seong Mi-na, Siegfried, Sophitia, Taki, and Voldo) search for the sword for different reasons. Some desire its power, others want revenge. Some, believing that it is a benevolent sword, crave its support. Others, knowing of its evil nature, seek its destruction. Nothing is known for certain about the sword, except for one thing: it brings misfortune to those seeking it.
Suffering short-term memory loss after a head injury, Leonard Shelby embarks on a grim quest to find the lowlife who murdered his wife in this gritty, complex thriller that packs more knots than a hangman's noose. To carry out his plan, Shelby snaps Polaroids of people and places, jotting down contextual notes on the backs of photos to aid in his search and jog his memory. He even tattoos his own body in a desperate bid to remember.
Selina Meyer is Vice President of the U.S. It's one of the strangest jobs; she's a heartbeat away from being the Leader of the Free World, but until then she has little political power. Her job mostly consists of symbolic acts and photo-ops—and even those are rarely executed successfully, like the time she tried to set up the Clean Jobs Task Force. The memory of it makes her shudder.
Kvothe has talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of him. His story is a tale of sorrow, a tale of survival, a tale of one man's search for meaning in his universe, and how that search, and the indomitable will that drove it, gave birth to a legend.
