The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

Details:

Published in 1995 by Scholastic Point.

Best guess, I read it in 2001.

Awards:

The Carnegie Medal.

From the Publisher:

In a landmark epic of fantasy and storytelling, Philip Pullman invites readers into a world as convincing and thoroughly realized as Narnia, Earthsea, or Redwall.  Here lives an orphaned ward named Lyra Belacqua, whose carefree life among the scholars at Oxford's Jordan College is shattered by the arrival of two powerful visitors.  First, her fearsome uncle, Lord Asriel, appears with evidence of mystery and danger in the far North, including photographs of a mysterious celestial phenomenon called Dust and the dim outline of a city suspended in the Aurora Borealis that he suspects is part of an alternate universe.  He leaves Lyra in the care of  Mrs. Coulter, an enigmatic scholar and explorer who offers to give Lyra the attention her uncle has long refused her.  In this multilayered  narrative, however, nothing is as it seems. Lyra sets out for the top of the world in search of her kidnapped playmate, Roger, bearing a rare truth-telling instrument, the compass of the title.  All around her children are disappearing—victims of so-called "Gobblers"—and being used as subjects in terrible experiments that separate humans from their daemons, creatures that reflect each person's inner being.  And somehow, both Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are involved.

First Line:

Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.

Alternate Covers:

Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis

Details:

Written with Larry Sloman, published in 2004 by Hyperion. 

I read it in 2009.

From the Publisher:

As lead singer and songwriter for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Anthony Kiedis has lived life on the razor's edge. So much has been written about him, but until now, we've only had Kiedis's songs as clues to his experience from the inside. In Scar Tissue, Kiedis proves himself to be as compelling a memoirist as he is a lyricist, giving us a searingly honest account of the life from which his music has evolved.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are that rare breed of rock band. Critically lauded and popularly embraced by millions of fans, their albums consistently sell into the stratosphere -- their CD Californication sold over 13 million copies alone.

Now in Scar Tissue, Anthony Kiedis defies the rock star clichs. In his telling, we can see everything he has done has been part of a passionate journey. Kiedis is a man "in love with everything" -- the darkness, the death, the disease. Even his descent into drug addition was a part of that journey, another element that he has transformed into art.

First Line:

I'm sitting on the couch in the living room of my house in the Hollywood Hills.

The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami

Details:

The stories were written between 1983 and 1990. It was published in English by Knopf in 1993.

I read it in 2009 for an intro to fiction writing class. 

From the Publisher:

With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.

By turns haunting and hilarious, The Elephant Vanishes is further proof of Murakami's ability to cross the border between separate realities -- and to come back bearing treasure.

First Line:

I'm in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls.

Alternate Covers:

Pure by Rebbecca Ray

Details:

Published in 2000 by Grove Press.

Best guess, I read it in 2002.

From the Publisher:

A sensational and accomplished novel that made its young author one of the most talked about in Britain last year, Pure is about fourteen -- the age when you know everything, except when you don't know anything. It's about first love and the end of innocence in all its passion and absurdity. It's about the raw transition between loving your parents as a child and understanding them as an adult. It's about the cool friend for whom everything seems effortless, and the impossibly embarrassing friend you're nice to when your cool friends can't see. It's about the struggle between desire and duty, and about a chance meeting with a twenty-seven-year-old man. And it's about what happens after. Pure has the shocking immediacy that made Less Than Zero so indelible. It evokes the brutalities of adolescence with the lucidity of Two Girls, Fat and Thin. It is sure to establish its author as one of the most remarkable and fearless young writers to emerge in recent years.

First Line:

I was about 13 when I started letting the boys feel me up.

Sandry's Book by Tamora Pierce

Details:

Published in 1997 by Scholastic.

Best guess, I read it in 1999.

From the Publisher:

With her gift of weaving silk thread and creating light, Sandry is brought to the Winding Circle community. There she meets Briar, a former thief who has a way with plants; Daja, an outcast gifted at metalcraft; and Tris, whose connection with the weather unsettles everyone, including herself. At Winding Circle, the four misfits are taught how to use their magic - and to trust one another. But then disaster strikes their new home. Can Sandry weave together four kinds of magical power and save herself, her friends, and the one place where they've ever been accepted?

First Line:

In the Palace of Black Swans, Zakdin, capital of Hatar: Blue eyes wide, Lady Sandrilene fa Toren watched her near-empty oil lamp.

Alternate Cover:

Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

Details:

Published in 1912 by Harper & Brothers.

I read it in 2009 for "American Fiction 1910-1950".

From the Publisher:

Told by a master storyteller who, according to critic Russell Nye, “combined adventure, action, violence, crisis, conflict, sentimentalism, and sex in an extremely shrewd mixture,” Riders of the Purple Sage is a classic of the Western genre. It is the story of Lassiter, a gunslinging avenger in black, who shows up in a remote Utah town just in time to save the young and beautiful rancher Jane Withersteen from having to marry a Mormon elder against her will. Lassiter is on his own quest, one that ends when he discovers a secret grave on Jane’s grounds.

First Line:

A sharp clip-crop of iron-shod hoofs deadened and died away, and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the sage.

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Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling

Details:

Originally published as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Published in 1997 by Bloomsbury UK. I likely read a 1998 Scholastic (US) hardcover.

Best guess, I read it in 1999.

Awards:

National Book Award.

From the Publisher:

Harry Potter has never been the star of a Quidditch team, scoring points while riding a broom far above the ground. He knows no spells, has never helped to hatch a dragon, and has never won a cloak of invisibility. 

All he knows is a miserable life with the Dursleys, his horrible aunt and uncle, and their abominable son, Dudley--a great big swollen spoiled bully. Harry's room is a tiny closet at the foot of the stairs, and he hasn't had a birthday party in eleven years. 

But all that is about to change when a mysterious letter arrives by owl messenger: a letter with an invitation to an incredible place that Harry--and anyone who reads about him--will find unforgettable.

For it's there that he finds not only friends, aerial sports, and magic in everything from classes to meals, but a great destiny that's been waiting for him...if Harry can survive the encounter.

First Line:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

Alternate Covers: