"Under the Dome" by Stephen King

Title: Under the Dome

Author: Stephen King

First Published: 2003

Publisher: Scribner

Pages: 1092

Genre: Science Fiction

Format/Source: Kindle/Amazon

"[He] looked up and saw [her] brains drying high on one wall. What she used to think with now looked like a clot of oatmeal. He burst into tears."

 
On the morning of October 21, out of the blue, an invisible barrier appears all around Chester's Mill, Maine. The first two victims of the "Dome Day" are the two passengers of a little plane that crashes into the "Dome", the hand of a gardener who happened to be reaching over the town limits the exact moment is cut off by the force field, it's owner dies of blood loss.

Aside from killing another half-a-dozen or so people and one woodchuck, the Dome also prevents Dale Barbara, nicknamed Barbie, a cook and Ex-Iraq solider from leaving the town after a physical conflict with the son of the town's second selectman.

As the town scrambles to adapt with this situation, this selectman, Big Jim Rennie, is quick to hatch a plan and try to take on control over Chester's Mill, whatever the price is.

But Barbie and Julia Shumway - the publisher of the local paper - see through this plan and suspect there's a little more to Big Jim than the dutiful selectman and used car dealer than it seems.

"The Alchemist" by Paul Coelho - Review

Title: The Alchemist
Author: Paul Coelho
First Published: 1988
Original Language: Portugese

Publisher: Harper San Francisco
Pages: 197 (including bookclub guide, interview etc.)   
Genere: Adventure/Bildungsroman

"The secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better." - The Seer

The Andalusian sheperd boy Satiago dreams of a treasure that lies under the great pyramids. A man who claims to be the king of Salomon gives him two stones that should tell his faith and advises him to follow his personal legend, his destiny. The next day the boy sells all his sheep and sets out from Spain to Egypt to find his treasure. On his way he encounters an Englishman, his true love, a few thieves and an alchemist who teaches him that everything on this world is the same and everyhing speaks one language, the "language of the world".