Astrid's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 11 Apr 2025 11:06:17 -0700 60 Astrid's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Dud Avocado 11158255 "I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed "The Dud Avocado." It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm)." -Groucho Marx
" "The Dud Avocado"] is one of the best novels about growing up fast..." "-The Guardian"]]> 288 Elaine Dundy 1844087603 Astrid 0 currently-reading 3.64 1958 The Dud Avocado
author: Elaine Dundy
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1958
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald]]> 61313960
‘For awhile after you quit Keats,� Fitzgerald once wrote, ‘All other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.�

John Keats died two hundred years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began one hundred years ago, the Jazz Age.

In this biography, prizewinning author Jonathan Bate recreates these two shining, tragic lives in parallel. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender is the Night and other works from the poet’s lines, but the two lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love, and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence.

Luminous and vital, this biography goes through the looking glass to meet afresh two of the greatest and best-known Romantic writers in their twinned centuries.]]> 432 Jonathan Bate 0008425000 Astrid 3 4.33 Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald
author: Jonathan Bate
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/04/11
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]]> Rubyfruit Jungle 25804436 Fifty years after its first publication, discover the classic coming-of-age novel that confronts prejudice and injustice with power and humanity.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RITA MAE BROWNMolly Bolt is a young lady with a big character. Beautiful, funny and bright, Molly figures out at a young age that she will have to be tough to stay true to herself in 1950s America. In her dealings with boyfriends and girlfriends, in the rocky relationship with her mother and in her determination to pursue her career, she will fight for her right to happiness. Charming, proud and inspiring, Molly is the girl who refuses to be put in a box.]]> 242 Rita Mae Brown Astrid 4 4.04 1973 Rubyfruit Jungle
author: Rita Mae Brown
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> Hard Times 15778981 Thomas Gradgrind is the guiding luminary of the Coketown school, stern proponent of the Philosophy of Fact, whose ill-conceived idealism blinds him to the essential humanity of those around him, with calamitous results. His daughter Louisa becomes trapped in a loveless marriage and falls prey to an idle seducer, and her brother Tom is ruined thanks to their father's pet theories. Meanwhile Sleary's circus offers a vision of escape and entertainment, a joyful contrast to the dreariness of life in Coketown. The hardship of the workers and the victimization of Stephen Blackpool are set against the exuberance of the circus people in Dickens's much-loved moral tale. Gradgrind is forced to reconsider his cherished system when he realizes that 'Facts alone' are not, after all, enough. (From the back cover)



Hard Times is Dickens's shortest novel, and arguably his greatest triumph. A useful appendix of the author's working notes, together with an enlightening introduction and full explanatory notes, will ensure that this edition becomes the obvious choice for anyone studying the novel. Paul Schlike is Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen.

]]> 356 Charles Dickens 0141199563 Astrid 2 3.37 Hard Times
author: Charles Dickens
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.37
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2023/06/26
date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> Getting Lost 60246617 Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an attaché to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate and unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living in the suburbs of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters. She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives merely to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the moment of desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.




Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Translated brilliantly for the first time by Alison L. Strayer, Getting Lost is a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and despair.]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1913097005 Astrid 4 3.43 2001 Getting Lost
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
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]]> Revolutionary Road 2476034 338 Richard Yates 0099518627 Astrid 4 4.14 1961 Revolutionary Road
author: Richard Yates
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
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]]> Moab Is My Washpot 41021665 Wilde, costarring in A Civil Action, and writing funny, distinguished novels.

This irresistible book, the best-written celebrity memoir of 1999, concentrates on Fry's first two tumultuous decades, but beware! A Fry sentence can lead anywhere, from a ringing defense of beating schoolchildren to a thoughtful comparison of male and female naughty parts. Fry's deepest regrets seem to be the elusiveness of a particular boy's love and the fact that, despite his keen ear for music, Fry's singing voice can make listeners "claw out their inner ears, electrocute their genitals, put on a Jim Reeves record, throw themselves cackling hysterically onto the path of moving buses... anything, anything to take away the pain." A chance mention of Fry's time-travel book about thwarting Hitler, Making History (a finalist for the 1998 Sidewise Award for Best Alternative History), leads to the startling real-life revelation that Fry's own Jewish uncle may have loaned a young, shivering Hitler the coat off his back.

Fry's life is full of school and jailhouse blues overcome by jaunty wit, à la Wilde. The title, from Psalm 108:9, refers to King David's triumph over the Philistines. Fry triumphs similarly, and with more style. --Tim Appelo

]]> 436 Stephen Fry 1616951451 Astrid 0 currently-reading 3.79 1997 Moab Is My Washpot
author: Stephen Fry
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> Enbury Heath 55877575 320 Stella Gibbons 1784877190 Astrid 3 3.80 1935 Enbury Heath
author: Stella Gibbons
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1935
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Sidesplitter: How To Be From Two Worlds At Once]]> 57443881
Phil Wang has been asked this question so many times he’s finally written a book about it.

In this mix of comic memoir and observational essay, one of the UK’s most exciting stand-up comedians reflects on his experiences as a Eurasian man in the West and in the East. Phil was born in Stoke-on-Trent, raised in Malaysia, and then came of age in Bath � ‘a spa town for people who find Cheltenham too ethnic�.

Phil explores the contrasts between Eastern and Western cultures and delves into Britain and Malaysia’s shared histories, bringing his trademark cynicism and wit to topics ranging from family, food, and comedy to race, empire, and colonialism.

Sidesplitter is a hilarious and incisive look at being mixed race and belonging to two home countries at once.]]> 304 Phil Wang 1529350271 Astrid 4 4.20 2021 Sidesplitter: How To Be From Two Worlds At Once
author: Phil Wang
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> But What Can I Do? 62601716 321 Alastair Campbell 1529153336 Astrid 3 3.82 But What Can I Do?
author: Alastair Campbell
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/07
date added: 2025/02/07
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]]> Deep Water 39926749
'If I really don't like somebody, I kill him . . . You remember Malcolm McRae, don't you?'

Melinda Van Allen is beautiful, headstrong and sexy. Unfortunately for Vic Van Allen, she is his wife. Their love has soured, and Melinda takes pleasure in flaunting her many affairs to her husband. When one of her lovers is murdered, Vic hints to her latest conquest that he was responsible. As rumours spread about Vic's vicious streak, fiction and reality start to converge. It's only a matter of time before Vic really does have blood on his hands.]]> 292 Patricia Highsmith 0349010323 Astrid 3 3.95 1957 Deep Water
author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1957
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
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]]> Orbital 218505320 137 Samantha Harvey Astrid 3 3.78 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> After Sappho 193839069 What did we want? To begin with, we wanted what half the population had got by just being born.

It’s 1895. Amid laundry and bruises, Rina Pierangeli Faccio gives birth to the child of the man who raped her � the man she has been forced to marry. Unbroken, she determines to change her name and, alongside it, her life.

1902. Romaine Brooks sails for Capri. She has barely enough money for the ferry, nothing for lunch; her paintbrushes are bald and clotted. But she is sure she can sell a painting � and is fervent in her belief that the island is detached from all fates she has previously suffered.

In 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: I want to make life fuller � and fuller.

Told in a series of cascading vignettes, featuring a multitude of voices, After Sappho reimagines the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as they battle for liberation, justice and control over their own lives.

Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, Eileen Gray, Lina Poletti: these are just a few of the women (some famous, others hitherto unsung) sharing the pages of a novel as fierce as it is luminous. Lush and poetic, furious and funny, After Sappho celebrates the women and trailblazers of the past � and offers hope for our present, and our futures.]]> 288 Selby Wynn Schwartz 1913111393 Astrid 5 3.72 2022 After Sappho
author: Selby Wynn Schwartz
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/21
date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> The Garden Party 37119750 'They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it.'

A windless, warm day greets the Sheridan family on the day of their garden party. As daughter Laura takes the reins on party preparations the news of a neighbour's demise casts a cloud over the host and threatens the entire celebration.

The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.]]> 181 Katherine Mansfield 0241341647 Astrid 3 3.65 1921 The Garden Party
author: Katherine Mansfield
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1921
rating: 3
read at: 2020/03/23
date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> She's Always Hungry 216563981 Hunger devours.
Takeaway food and human flesh. Sexual humiliation or humanity's survival. Smooth, unblemished skin.

It cannot be sated.
But people try. They push eager hands into their own gaping injuries. They suck the blood of rabbits and other people. They buy from a restaurant that only serves food they didn't order. They do everything the song from the ocean demands.

This outstanding first collection cements Eliza Clark's place as one of the UK's most extraordinary voices. Its ten dark, visceral stories range from urban teenage fantasies to dystopian, each bursting with unexpected and insatiable intruders into bodies, communities and ecosystems - both deeply desired and violently resisted.]]> 225 Eliza Clark 0571371817 Astrid 4 3.84 2024 She's Always Hungry
author: Eliza Clark
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/15
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]]> <![CDATA[For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain: Winner of the Scottish National First Book Awards 2023]]> 209308082
In the year of 1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich.

Margery has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey. Her visions of Christ - which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband's abuse - have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic.

Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty-­three years. She has told no one of her own visions - and knows that time is running out for her to do so.

The two women have stories to tell one another. Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more the powerful than the world is ready to hear. Their meeting will change everything.

Sensual, vivid and humane, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain cracks history open to reveal the lives of two extraordinary women]]> 163 Victoria Mackenzie 1526647931 Astrid 2 3.60 2023 For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain: Winner of the Scottish National First Book Awards 2023
author: Victoria Mackenzie
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> The Woman in White 5890 Librarian note: Alternate covers can be found here and here.

'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop... There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth, stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter becomes embroiled in the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons, and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

Matthew Sweet's introduction explores the phenomenon of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, and discusses Wilkie Collins's biographical and societal influences. Included in this edition are appendices on theatrical adaptations of the novel and its serialisation history.]]> 672 Wilkie Collins Astrid 4 4.00 1859 The Woman in White
author: Wilkie Collins
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1859
rating: 4
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]]> The Overstory 40781099
An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut.

A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.

A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.

These four, and five other strangers � each summoned in different ways by trees � are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.

There is a world alongside ours � vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.]]> 625 Richard Powers 1784708240 Astrid 5 4.01 2018 The Overstory
author: Richard Powers
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Lord Sunday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #7)]]> 58052007
The tide of Nothing continues to rise, destroying everything in its path, and Lord Sunday makes his move...]]> 324 Garth Nix 1471410277 Astrid 3 4.10 2010 Lord Sunday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #7)
author: Garth Nix
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> Businessmen as Lovers 212536496 Fun, witty and sun-soaked � literary cartwheels and seaside capers from the astoundingly brilliant mid-century writer who destroyed her own books.

Great friends, Mimi and Caroline, are off on holiday to a beautiful Italian island. There they find themselves part of an eccentric cast of characters including their debonair host and his mistress, a relentless venture capitalist and a villain in the form of the local dentist. There is also Beetle, with whom Mimi is completely and simply in love. As everyone relaxes into island living and the demands of real life drift away, the holiday hijinks culminate in a very Mediterranean prank � the cutting down of the dentist’s prize lemon tree.

Back in print after many decades, this is a glorious novel by an extraordinary and little-known writer, the inimitable Rosemary Tonks.]]> 160 Rosemary Tonks 1784879320 Astrid 4 3.57 1969 Businessmen as Lovers
author: Rosemary Tonks
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/24
date added: 2024/12/24
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]]> Burnt Sugar 52969580
Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery, choking cord of memory and myth that binds mother and daughter. Is Tara’s memory loss real? Are Antara’s memories fair? In vivid and visceral prose, Tibor Jones South Asia Prize–winning writer Avni Doshi tells a story, at once shocking and empathetic, about love and betrayal between a mother and a daughter. A journey into shifting memories, altering identities, and the subjective nature of truth, Burnt Sugar is a stunning and unforgettable debut.]]> 240 Avni Doshi 024144151X Astrid 0 to-read 3.25 2019 Burnt Sugar
author: Avni Doshi
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Superior Saturday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #6)]]> 57986739
The identity of The Architect.

The complete Will of the House.

The fulfillment of his fate.

Arthur Penhaligon is getting closer and closer to these things... but not without risks, conflict, and adventure.

]]> 283 Garth Nix 1471410250 Astrid 3 3.87 2008 Superior Saturday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #6)
author: Garth Nix
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
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]]> Mansfield Park 45032 488 Jane Austen Astrid 3 3.86 1814 Mansfield Park
author: Jane Austen
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/11/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Lady Friday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #5)]]> 58051976
Seven days. Seven keys. One very unlikely hero.

Four of the seven trustees have been defeated and their Keys taken, but for Arthur Penhaligon, the week is still getting worse. His friends have been captured by the Piper, and the New Nithling army still controls most of the Great Maze. Meanwhile, Superior Saturday is causing trouble wherever she can, including turning off all the elevators in the House and blocking the Front Door to prevent escape.

Amidst all this trouble, Arthur must weigh an offer from Lady Friday that is either a cunning trap for the Rightful Heir, or a golden opportunity he must seize before Superior Saturday or the Piper beats him to it. The race to find the secret of the Middle House is on - and Arthur is in the thick of it.]]> 317 Garth Nix 1471410234 Astrid 3 3.71 2007 Lady Friday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #5)
author: Garth Nix
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Sir Thursday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #4)]]> 58051955
On the fourth day there was war... Following their adventures in the Border Sea, Arthur and Leaf head for home. But only Leaf gets through the Front Door. Arthur is blocked because someone . . . or something . . . has assumed his identity and is taking over his life. Before Arthur can take action, he is drafted by Sir Thursday and forced to join the Glorious Army of the Architect. While Leaf tries to banish Arthur's doppleganger on earth, Arthur must survive his basic training, avoid getting posted to the Front and work out how he can free Part Four of the Will....]]> 354 Garth Nix 1471410218 Astrid 3 3.85 2006 Sir Thursday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #4)
author: Garth Nix
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/11/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Drowned Wednesday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #3)]]> 58051530
With his unlimited imagination and thrilling storytelling, Garth Nix has created a character and a world that become even more compelling with each book. As Arthur gets closer to the heart of his quest, the suspense and mystery grow more and more intense...]]> 393 Garth Nix 1471410196 Astrid 3 3.81 2004 Drowned Wednesday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #3)
author: Garth Nix
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/21
date added: 2024/11/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Grim Tuesday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #2)]]> 58051517 ]]> 318 Garth Nix 147141017X Astrid 3 3.86 2004 Grim Tuesday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #2)
author: Garth Nix
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/14
date added: 2024/11/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Mister Monday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #1)]]> 58051498 368 Garth Nix 1471410153 Astrid 3 3.88 2003 Mister Monday (The Keys to the Kingdom, #1)
author: Garth Nix
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
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comfort rereading this one which i first read when i was smol
]]> Into the War 11538738
Into the War is Calvino at his autobiographical best, combining brilliantly recollected memory with compelling wit and perfect prose.]]> 109 Italo Calvino 0141193735 Astrid 3 3.50 1954 Into the War
author: Italo Calvino
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1954
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
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]]> The Rainbow 31491 The Rainbow, follows the lives and loves of three generations of the Brangwen family between 1840 and 1905. Their tempestuous relationships are played out against a backdrop of change as they witness the arrival of industrialization - the only constant being their unending attempts to grasp a higher form of existence symbolized by the persistent, unifying motif of the "rainbow". Lawrence's fourth novel, a prequel to Women in Love, is an invigorating, absorbing tale about the undying determination of the human soul.]]> 544 D.H. Lawrence 0451530306 Astrid 5 3.71 1915 The Rainbow
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1915
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/09/29
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]]> The Goldfinch 17333223
Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.]]> 771 Donna Tartt 0316055433 Astrid 0 to-read 3.94 2013 The Goldfinch
author: Donna Tartt
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> I'm Glad My Mom Died 59364173
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,� eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?� She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly , she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!�), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.]]> 320 Jennette McCurdy Astrid 0 to-read 4.45 2022 I'm Glad My Mom Died
author: Jennette McCurdy
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Too Much: the hilarious, heartfelt memoir]]> 74045206 'An extraordinary portrait of a son navigating his way through grief and loss in real time. Funny, candid, and measured' GRAHAM NORTON

Happily settled in a new relationship and with a dream house of his own, Tom Allen could finally call himself an adult. But when his beloved dad died suddenly, Tom's life was rocked by a fresh set of challenges, and he started to find comfort in his friends, his past and his newly dug vegetable patch.

With his hallmark honesty and wit, Tom writes beautifully about those days, weeks and months following loss, and about how bewildering the practicalities of life can be in the wake of an upheaval - those moments, really, when everything can start to feel a bit too much . . .

'Hilarious and poignant' JO BRAND
'Heartfelt, vulnerable and touchingly sincere' GUARDIAN
'Life-affirming' ATTITUDE]]> 234 Tom Allen Astrid 5 4.37 2022 Too Much: the hilarious, heartfelt memoir
author: Tom Allen
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/27
date added: 2024/08/27
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]]> Saints and Strangers 81035 An alternate cover edition can be found here.

Black Venus (also published as Saints and Strangers), is an anthology of short fiction. Angela Carter takes real people and literary legends - most often women - who have been mythologized or marginalized and recasts them in a new light. In a style that is sensual, cerebral, almost hypnotic, "The Fall River Axe-Murders" portrays the last hours before Lizzie Borden's infamous act: the sweltering heat, the weight of flannel and corsets, the clanging of the factory bells, the food reheated and reserved despite the lack of adequate refrigeration, the house "full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors." In "Our Lady of the Massacre" the no-nonsense voice of an eighteenth-century prostitute/runaway slave questions who is civilized - the Indians or the white men? "Black Venus" gives voice to Charles Baudelaire's Creole mistress, Jeanne Duval: "you could say, not so much that Jeanne did not understand the lapidary, troubled serenity of her lover's poetry but, that it was a perpetual affront to her. He recited it to her by the hour and she ached, raged and chafed under it because his eloquence denied her language." "The Kiss" takes the traditional story of Tamburlaine's wife and gives it a new and refreshing ending. Sometimes disquieting, sometimes funny, always thought-provoking, Angela Carter's stories offer a feminist revision of images that lie deep in the public psyche.]]> 126 Angela Carter 014008973X Astrid 0 to-read 3.92 1985 Saints and Strangers
author: Angela Carter
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman]]> 198483 A satirical tale of magic and sex, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is a dazzling quest for truth, love and identity.]]> 221 Angela Carter 0140235191 Astrid 0 to-read 3.78 1972 The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
author: Angela Carter
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories]]> 49011 126 Angela Carter 014017821X Astrid 5 3.96 1979 The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
author: Angela Carter
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1979
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales]]> 81021 Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales. This collection contains lyrical tales, bloody tales and hilariously funny and ripely bawdy stories from countries all around the world - from the Arctic to Asia - and no dippy princesses or soppy fairies. Instead, we have pretty maids and old crones; crafty women and bad girls; enchantresses and midwives; rascal aunts and odd sisters.]]> 486 Angela Carter 1844081737 Astrid 0 to-read 4.14 1992 Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales
author: Angela Carter
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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]]> The Passion of New Eve 581720
New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn. But this young Englishman's fate lies in the arid desert, where a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield her scalpel to transform him into the new Eve.]]> 187 Angela Carter 0860683419 Astrid 0 to-read 3.68 1977 The Passion of New Eve
author: Angela Carter
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1977
rating: 0
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]]> Nights at the Circus 653651
Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia.]]> 295 Angela Carter 0140077030 Astrid 0 to-read 3.91 1984 Nights at the Circus
author: Angela Carter
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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]]> Love 81022 Love is Angela Carter's fifth novel and was first published in 1971. With surgical precision it charts the destructive emotional war between a young woman, her husband and his disruptive brother as they move through a labyrinth of betrayal, alienation and lost connections.

This revised edition has lost none of Angela Carter's haunting power to evoke the ebb of the 1960s, and includes an afterword which describes the progress of the survivors into the anguish of middle age.]]> 122 Angela Carter 0099594218 Astrid 5 3.68 1971 Love
author: Angela Carter
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1971
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/26
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]]> <![CDATA[The Blazing World and Other Writings]]> 354620
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 272 Margaret Cavendish 0140433724 Astrid 3 university 3.25 The Blazing World and Other Writings
author: Margaret Cavendish
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.25
book published:
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: university
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]]> <![CDATA[the complete poems of emily dickinson]]> 48572159 1467 Emily Dickinson Astrid 5 university 4.23 1890 the complete poems of emily dickinson
author: Emily Dickinson
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1890
rating: 5
read at: 2020/01/30
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: university
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]]> The Marriage Portrait 90590095
Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.

Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now enter an unfamiliar court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her new husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appeared to be before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?

As Lucrezia sits in constricting finery for a painting intended to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance.

Full of the beauty and emotion with which she illuminated the Shakespearean canvas of Hamnet , Maggie O’Farrell turns her talents to Renaissance Italy in an extraordinary portrait of a resilient young woman’s battle for her very survival.]]> 339 Maggie O'Farrell 0593315081 Astrid 5 3.98 2022 The Marriage Portrait
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/03
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]]> The Bone Clocks 20819685
For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.

A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.]]> 624 David Mitchell 1400065674 Astrid 0 to-read 3.82 2014 The Bone Clocks
author: David Mitchell
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/16
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]]> <![CDATA[The War of the Worlds (Penguin Clothbound Classics)]]> 42643855
From the planet of war they came to conquer the Earth ...

The night after a shooting star is seen streaking across the sky, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common. Fascinated and exhilarated, the local people approach the mysterious object armed with nothing more than a white flag. But when gruesome alien creatures emerge armed with all-destroying heat-rays, their rashness turns rapidly to fear. As the rays blaze towards them, it soon becomes clear they have no choice but to flee - or die.

The forces of the Earth, however, may prove harder to beat than they at first appear ...]]> 199 H.G. Wells 024138270X Astrid 3 3.70 1898 The War of the Worlds (Penguin Clothbound Classics)
author: H.G. Wells
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1898
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
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]]> <![CDATA[The Last Devil to Die (Thursday Murder Club, #4)]]> 75293475 It's rarely a quiet day for the Thursday Murder Club.

Shocking news reaches them � an old friend has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing.

The gang's search leads them into the antiques business, where the tricks of the trade are as old as the objects themselves. As they encounter drug dealers, art forgers, and online fraudsters � as well as heartache close to home � Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim have no idea whom to trust.

With the body count rising, the clock ticking down, and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out?

And who will be the last devil to die?]]> 353 Richard Osman 0593299426 Astrid 4 4.47 2023 The Last Devil to Die (Thursday Murder Club, #4)
author: Richard Osman
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/10
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]]> Between the Acts 141303639
Highly symbolic, and dealing with many of the themes that were most dear to Virginia Woolf, such as the condition of the individual in the current of history, sexual ambiguity and the tension between life and art, Between the Acts was the author’s final novel, offering a tantalizing glimpse of the direction her fiction might have taken.]]> 256 Virginia Woolf 1847498906 Astrid 4 4.25 1941 Between the Acts
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1941
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/29
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]]> Shrines of Gaiety 61087085
The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie's empire faces threats from without and within. For beneath the dazzle of Soho's gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost.

With her unique Dickensian flair, Kate Atkinson brings together a glittering cast of characters in a truly mesmeric novel that captures the uncertainty and mutability of life; of a world in which nothing is quite as it seems.]]> 440 Kate Atkinson 1473568749 Astrid 4 4.13 2022 Shrines of Gaiety
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/23
date added: 2024/06/23
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]]> The Years 145625252 Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008.

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written� by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I� for the “we� (or “they�, or “one�) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents� generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents� generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we� and impersonal pronouns.”]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1609807871 Astrid 5 4.22 2008 The Years
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/25
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]]> The House on the Strand 18869972 The classic time travel novel from the legendary writer behindRebeccaand "The Birds." "The House on the Strand is prime du Maurier." --New York Times Dick Young is lent a house in Cornwall by his friend Professor Magnus Lane. During his stay he agrees to serve as a guinea pig for a new drug that Magnus has discovered in his scientific research. When Dick samples Magnus's potion, he finds himself doing the traveling through time while staying in place, thrown all the way back into Medieval Cornwall. The concoction wear off after several hours, but its effects are intoxicating and Dick cannot resist his newfound powers. As his journeys increase, Dick begins to resent the days he must spend in the modern world, longing ever more fervently to get back into his world of centuries before, and the home of the beautiful Lady Isolda...]]> 316 Daphne du Maurier 0316252999 Astrid 3 3.82 1969 The House on the Strand
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1969
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/18
date added: 2024/05/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Cranford (Hardcover Classics) Reprint edition by Gaskell, Elizabeth (2009) Hardcover]]> 133384292 0 Elizabeth Gaskell Astrid 3 3.00 1853 Cranford (Hardcover Classics) Reprint edition by Gaskell, Elizabeth (2009) Hardcover
author: Elizabeth Gaskell
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1853
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing]]> 1643785 487 Joseph Moxon 048623617X Astrid 5 Wow printing 4.33 1958 Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing
author: Joseph Moxon
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1958
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/07
date added: 2024/04/23
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Wow printing
]]> <![CDATA[Life After Life (Todd Family, #1)]]> 15790842
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.

Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can - will she?]]> 544 Kate Atkinson 0316176486 Astrid 0 3.76 2013 Life After Life (Todd Family, #1)
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/14
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]]> Corelli’s Mandolin 3388 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is set in the early days of the second world war, before Benito Mussolini invaded Greece. Dr Iannis practices medicine on the island of Cephalonia, accompanied by his daughter, Pelagia, to whom he imparts much of his healing art. Even when the Italians do invade, life isn’t so bad—at first anyway. The officer in command of the Italian garrison is the cultured Captain Antonio Corelli, who responds to a Nazi greeting of “Heil Hitler� with his own “Heil Puccini�, and whose most precious possession is his mandolin. It isn't long before Corelli and Pelagia are involved in a heated affair--despite her engagement to a young fisherman, Mandras, who has gone off to join Greek partisans. Love is complicated enough in wartime, even when the lovers are on the same side. And for Corelli and Pelagia, it becomes increasingly difficult to negotiate the minefield of allegiances, both personal and political, as all around them atrocities mount, former friends become enemies and the ugliness of war infects everyone it touches.

British author Louis de Bernières is well known for his forays into magical realism in such novels as The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. Here he keeps it to a minimum, though certainly the secondary characters with whom he populates his island—the drunken priest, the strongman, the fisherman who swims with dolphins—would be at home in any of his wildly imaginative Latin American fictions. Instead, de Bernières seems interested in dissecting the nature of history as he tells his ever-darkening tale from many different perspectives. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin works on many levels, as a love story, a war story and a deconstruction of just what determines the facts that make it into the history books.]]> 437 Louis de Bernières 067976397X Astrid 0 to-read 3.97 1994 Corelli’s Mandolin
author: Louis de Bernières
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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]]> Happening 129263635
This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.

In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

Now an award-winning film by Audrey Diwan

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival

Official Selection of the Sundance Film Festival]]> 96 Annie Ernaux 1609809483 Astrid 0 to-read 4.36 2000 Happening
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley]]> 58949795
Growing up amongst the cogs and springs of his father's workshop, Zachary is intensely curious, ferociously intelligent, unwittingly funny and always honest - perhaps too honest. But when a fateful accident leaves six-year-old Zachary nearly blinded, Abel is convinced that the safest place for his son is in the care of his eccentric Aunt Frances and her menagerie of weird and wonderful animals.

So when a precarious job in Constantinople is offered to him, Abel has no reason to say no. A job presented to him by a politician with dubious intentions, Abel leaves his son, his workshop and London behind. The decision will change the course of his life forever.

Since his accident, Zachary is plagued by visions that reveal the hearts and minds of those around him. A gift at times and a curse at others, it is nonetheless these visions that will help him complete a journey that he was always destined to make - to travel across Europe to Constantinople and find out what happened to his father all those years ago.

With a Dickensian cast of characters that are brilliantly bonkers one moment and poignant the next, Sean Lusk's debut will take readers on an immersive journey into the wonders of the world of Zachary Cloudesley.]]> 368 Sean Lusk 085752805X Astrid 3 3.86 2022 The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley
author: Sean Lusk
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/04
date added: 2024/04/04
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more of a 3.5 ⭐️ - loved the first half, didn’t love the rest
]]> <![CDATA[The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat]]> 25525225 Fully updated throughout and with a new foreword for this edition.Why do most diets fail? Why does one person eat a certain meal and gain weight, while another eating the same meal loses pounds? Why, despite all the advice about what to eat, are we all still getting fatter?The answers are much more surprising - and fascinating - than we've been led to believe. The key to health and weight loss lies not in the latest fad diet, nor even in the simple mantra of 'eat less, exercise more', but in the microbes already inside us. Drawing on the latest science and his own pioneering research, Professor Tim Spector demystifies the common misconceptions about fat, calories, vitamins and nutrients. Only by understanding what makes our own personal microbes tick can we overcome the confusion of modern nutrition, and achieve a healthy gut and a healthy body.]]> 419 Tim Spector Astrid 5 4.25 2015 The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat
author: Tim Spector
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/04
date added: 2024/04/04
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]]> The Details 63313297 An acclaimed Swedish author makes her English language debut with this intoxicating novel in the vein of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, about a woman in the throes of a fever remembering the important people in her past, her memories laid bare in vivid detail as her body temperature rises.

A woman lies bedridden from a high fever. Suddenly she is struck with an urge to revisit a novel from her past. Inside the book is an inscription: a get-well-soon message from Johanna, an ex-girlfriend who is now a famous television host. As she flips through the book, pages from the woman's own past begin to come alive, scenes of events and people she cannot forget.

There are moments with Johanna, and Niki, the friend who disappeared years ago without a phone number or an address and with no online footprint. There is Alejandro, who gleefully campaigns for a baby even though he knows their love has no future. And Brigitte, whose elusive qualities mask a painful secret.

The Details is a novel built around four portraits; the small details that, pieced together, comprise a life. Can a loved one really disappear? Who is the real subject of the portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush? Do we fully become ourselves through our connections to others? This exhilarating, provocative tale raises profound questions about the nature of relationships, and how we tell our stories. The result is an intimate and illuminating study of what it means to be human.]]> 144 Ia Genberg 0063309718 Astrid 0 to-read 3.94 2022 The Details
author: Ia Genberg
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/03
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]]> You Are Here 201465867
Michael is coming undone. Adrift after his wife's departure, he has begun taking himself on long, solitary walks across the English countryside. Becoming ever more reclusive, he’ll do anything to avoid his empty house.

Marnie, on the other hand, is stuck. Hiding alone in her London flat, she avoids old friends and any reminders of her rotten, selfish ex-husband. Curled up with a good book, she’s battling the long afternoons of a life that feels like it’s passing her by.

When a persistent mutual friend and some very unpredictable weather conspire to toss Michael and Marnie together on the most epic of ten-day hikes, neither of them can think of anything worse. Until, of course, they discover exactly what they’ve been looking for.

Michael and Marnie are on the precipice of a bright future . . . if they can survive the journey.]]> 368 David Nicholls 0063394057 Astrid 0 to-read 3.97 2024 You Are Here
author: David Nicholls
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath]]> 50607347
With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials—including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews—Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s.

Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Plath's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more.

Clark's clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.]]> 1152 Heather Clark 0307961168 Astrid 0 to-read 4.72 2020 Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
author: Heather Clark
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.72
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/03
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]]> Walden 16902 352 Henry David Thoreau Astrid 2 3.77 1854 Walden
author: Henry David Thoreau
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1854
rating: 2
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]]> <![CDATA[The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy]]> 15994742 'I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it for my soul; so must be obliged to go on writing like a Dutch commentator to the end of the chapter, unless something be done ...'

Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters, including Dr Slop, Corporal Trim and the parson Yorick. A joyful celebration of the endless possibilities of the art of fiction, Tristram Shandy is also a wry demonstration of its limitations.]]> 640 Laurence Sterne 0141199997 Astrid 0 to-read 3.33 1767 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
author: Laurence Sterne
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.33
book published: 1767
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/01
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]]> Decline and Fall 1615370 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Evelyn Waugh's first, funniest novel immediately caught the ear of the public with his account of an ingénu abroad in the decadent confusion of 1920s high society.]]> 304 Evelyn Waugh 0141180900 Astrid 5 3.65 1928 Decline and Fall
author: Evelyn Waugh
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1928
rating: 5
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]]> The Moonstone 19308013
'Here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond - bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man'

When Rachel Verinder's birthday present - the Moonstone, a large Indian diamond - is stolen at her party, suspicion and the diamond's mysterious curse seem set to ruin everyone and everything she loves. Only Sergeant Cuff's famous detective skills offer any hope of peace and a future for them all. The intricate plot and modern technique of multiple narrators made Wilkie Collins' 1868 work a huge success in the Victorian sensation genre. With a reconstruction of the crime, red herrings and a 'locked-room' puzzle, The Moonstone was also a major precursor of the modern mystery novel.

The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.]]> 607 Wilkie Collins 0141973765 Astrid 4 4.29 1868 The Moonstone
author: Wilkie Collins
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1868
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/04/01
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]]> The Call of the Wild 37119748 'The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect and, while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused.'

The biting cold and the aching silence of the far North become an unforgettable backdrop for Jack London's vivid, rousing, superbly realistic wilderness adventure stories featuring the author's unique knowledge of the Yukon and the behavior of humans and animals facing nature at its cruelest.

The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.

Contents of this edition:
- The Call of the Wild
- To Build a Fire
- Bâtard
- Love of Life]]> 160 Jack London 0241341493 Astrid 3 3.88 1903 The Call of the Wild
author: Jack London
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1903
rating: 3
read at: 2020/06/29
date added: 2024/03/31
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]]> Orlando 18839 Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.]]> 336 Virginia Woolf 0141184272 Astrid 5 3.88 1928 Orlando
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/28
date added: 2024/03/28
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]]> The Understudy 366842
Josh is the star of Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know, a biographical play about Lord Byron–and Stephen is his understudy. Not only is Josh fantastically, infuriatingly good-looking, internationally renowned, and remarkably talented, he’s also frustratingly healthy. No matter how many all-night booze-and-coke benders Josh goes on, he always shows up at the stage door for his call like clockwork. Stephen doubts he’ll ever get his chance to slip on the puffy shirt and tight breeches of Byron and tread the boards in the role that would certainly be the break he’s always waited for.

And just when Stephen’s sure he couldn’t resent Josh more, he meets Josh’s witty, restless American wife, Nora... and discovers he likes her a little too much. Another man might curse his luck at finding that his potential dream woman is a rival’s wife, but at this point, Stephen would expect nothing else. Caught between his stirring feelings for Nora, the demands of an insistent and secretive Josh, and his lifelong desire for a real career in show business, Stephen must make a terrible decision: Will it be the girl or the fame?

A hapless, bumbling bloke in love, an arrogant megastar with a potpourri of addictions, a sexy married woman out of her element in the fast lane–David Nicholls brings them all together in this knockout romantic comedy.]]> 368 David Nicholls 0812971418 Astrid 0 3.35 2005 The Understudy
author: David Nicholls
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/25
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]]> One Day 6280118
So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that?

And every year that follows?
--back cover]]> 435 David Nicholls 0340896965 Astrid 0 3.86 2009 One Day
author: David Nicholls
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/25
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]]> Starter for Ten 107896 University Challenge—and now, finally, it seems the dream is about to become reality. He's made the school team, and they've completed the qualifying rounds and are limbering up for their first televised match. (And, what's more, he's fallen head over heels for one of his teammates, the beautiful, brainy, and intimidatingly posh Alice Harbinson.) Life seems perfect and triumph inevitable—but as his world opens up, Brian learns that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.]]> 338 David Nicholls 0345498127 Astrid 0 3.65 2003 Starter for Ten
author: David Nicholls
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/25
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]]> Strong Female Character 59903149
1. I'm diagnosed with autism 20 years after telling a doctor I had it.

2. My terrible Catholic childhood.

3. My friendship with an elderly man who runs the corner shop and is definitely not trying to groom me. I get groomed.

4. Homelessness.

5. Stripping.

6. More stripping but with more nervous breakdowns.

7. I hate everyone at uni and live with a psycho etc.

8. REDACTED as too spicy.

9. After everyone tells me I don't look autistic, I try to cure my autism and get addicted to Xanax.

10. REDACTED as too embarrassing.]]> 288 Fern Brady 1914240448 Astrid 5 4.43 2023 Strong Female Character
author: Fern Brady
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/10
date added: 2024/03/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens]]> 152034931 A rollicking historyof England's earliest kings and queens, a story ofnarcissists, excessive beheadings, middle-management insurrection, uncivil wars,and more, fromaward-winning British actor and comedian David Mitchell

Think you know the kings and queens of England? Think again.

In Unruly , David Mitchell explores how early England’s monarchs, while acting as feared rulers firmly guiding their subjects� destinies, were in reality a bunch of lucky bastards who were mostly as silly and weird in real life as they appear to us today in their portraits.

Taking us right back to King Arthur ( he didn’t exist), Mitchell tells the founding story of post-Roman England right up to the reign of Elizabeth I ( she dies), as the monarchy began to lose its power. It’s a tale of bizarre and curious ascensions, inadequate self-control, and at least one total Cnut, as the English evolved from having their crops stolen by the thug with the largest armed gang to bowing and paying taxes to a divinely anointed King.

How this happened, who it happened to, and why the hell it matters are all questions Mitchell answers with brilliance, wit, and the full erudition of a man who once studied history—and is damned if he’ll let it off the hook for the mess it’s made of everything.

A funny book that takes history seriously, Unruly is for anyone who has ever wondered how the monarchy came to be—and who is to blame.]]> 433 David Mitchell 0593728491 Astrid 5 4.13 2023 Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens
author: David Mitchell
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/08
date added: 2024/03/08
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]]> Frost in May 37487185 224 Antonia White 0748127488 Astrid 4 4.00 1933 Frost in May
author: Antonia White
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1933
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/09
date added: 2024/02/09
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance]]> 16171221 Now a New York Times Bestseller! With a new chapter added to the paperback.

In high school, I wondered whether the Jamaican Americans who made our track team so successful might carry some special speed gene from their tiny island. In college, I ran against Kenyans, and wondered whether endurance genes might have traveled with them from East Africa. At the same time, I began to notice that a training group on my team could consist of five men who run next to one another, stride for stride, day after day, and nonetheless turn out five entirely different runners. How could this be?

We all knew a star athlete in high school. The one who made it look so easy. He was the starting quarterback and shortstop; she was the all-state point guard and high-jumper. Naturals. Or were they?

The debate is as old as physical competition. Are stars like Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, and Serena Williams genetic freaks put on Earth to dominate their respective sports? Or are they simply normal people who overcame their biological limits through sheer force of will and obsessive training?
The truth is far messier than a simple dichotomy between nature and nurture. In the decade since the sequencing of the human genome, researchers have slowly begun to uncover how the relationship between biological endowments and a competitor’s training environment affects athleticism. Sports scientists have gradually entered the era of modern genetic research.

In this controversial and engaging exploration of athletic success, Sports Illustrated senior writer David Epstein tackles the great nature vs. nurture debate and traces how far science has come in solving this great riddle. He investigates the so-called 10,000-hour rule to uncover whether rigorous and consistent practice from a young age is the only route to athletic excellence.

Along the way, Epstein dispels many of our perceptions about why top athletes excel. He shows why some skills that we assume are innate, like the bullet-fast reactions of a baseball or cricket batter, are not, and why other characteristics that we assume are entirely voluntary, like an athlete’s will to train, might in fact have important genetic components.

This subject necessarily involves digging deep into sensitive topics like race and gender. Epstein explores controversial questions such as:
Are black athletes genetically predetermined to dominate both sprinting and distance running, and are their abilities influenced by Africa’s geography?
Are there genetic reasons to separate male and female athletes in competition?
Should we test the genes of young children to determine if they are destined for stardom?
Can genetic testing determine who is at risk of injury, brain damage, or even death on the field?
Through on-the-ground reporting from below the equator and above the Arctic Circle, revealing conversations with leading scientists and Olympic champions, and interviews with athletes who have rare genetic mutations or physical traits, Epstein forces us to rethink the very nature of athleticism.
]]> 338 David Epstein 1591845114 Astrid 4 4.19 2013 The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance
author: David Epstein
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/30
date added: 2024/01/30
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]]> The Librarian 43430881
Her mission is to fire the enthusiasm of the children of East Mole for reading. But her love affair with the local married GP, and her befriending of his precious daughter, her neighbour's son and her landlady's neglected grandchild, ignite the prejudices of the town, threatening her job and the very existence of the library with dramatic consequences for them all.]]> 385 Salley Vickers 0241330238 Astrid 3 3.36 2018 The Librarian
author: Salley Vickers
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/26
date added: 2024/01/26
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]]> The Lacuna 144102875
Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico--from a coastal island jungle to 1930s Mexico City--Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He discovers a passion for Aztec history and meets the exotic, imperious artist Frida Kahlo, who will become his lifelong friend. When he goes to work for Lev Trotsky, an exiled political leader fighting for his life, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible violence.

Meanwhile, to the north, the United States will soon be caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. There in the land of his birth, Shepherd believes he might remake himself in America's hopeful image and claim a voice of his own. He finds support from an unlikely kindred soul, his stenographer, Mrs. Brown, who will be far more valuable to her employer than he could ever know. Through darkening years, political winds continue to toss him between north and south in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach--the lacuna--between truth and public presumption.

With deeply compelling characters, a vivid sense of place, and a clear grasp of how history and public opinion can shape a life, Barbara Kingsolver has created an unforgettable portrait of the artist--and of art itself. "The Lacuna" is a rich and daring work of literature, establishing its author as one of the most provocative and important of her time.]]> Barbara Kingsolver Astrid 5 5.00 2009 The Lacuna
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Astrid
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/07
date added: 2024/01/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Help I S*xted My Boss: A Hilarious Guide to Avoiding Life’s Awkward Moments]]> 76081594 'Funny, filthy and fantastic. Cackled from start to finish' - Rylan Clark

How do you ask your mate for that £50 back?
When is OK to trump in front of your partner?
And what should you do if you've accidentally sexted your boss?

William and Jordan are from very different worlds.


William's an etiquette expert, with his tongue firmly in his teacup and unparalleled knowledge of table linen. Jordan's a TV and radio presenter, the patron saint of Burnley and an expert in all things common. Together they've entertained millions of listeners worldwide with their hit podcast Help I Sexted My Boss.

Now, they’ve pooled all of their wisdom on how to get through life’s most awkward moments.


From candlelight suppers to picky teas, first dates to flatmate dramas, Help I Sexted My Boss is full of both useful and useless advice. This is your indispensable guide to navigating the trepidation and challenges of modern life.

'Hilarious lads.. and weirdly useful. This generation’s Ant and Dec. If one of them was really posh. Great read' - Vicky Pattison

Sunday Times bestseller, November 2023]]> 360 William Hanson 180494579X Astrid 4 3.83 Help I S*xted My Boss: A Hilarious Guide to Avoiding Life’s Awkward Moments
author: William Hanson
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.83
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/19
date added: 2023/12/19
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]]> Lady Chatterley's Lover 70944 276 D.H. Lawrence 1840224886 Astrid 5 3.34 1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.34
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/04
date added: 2023/12/19
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]]> <![CDATA[James Acaster's Guide to Quitting Social Media]]> 60389766
When James quit all forms of social media in 2019 he felt like he'd been born anew, but he was worried he'd suffer withdrawal and get lured back online to compete in a never ending popularity contest with only one possible winner (f*cking Zuckerberg). He knew that in order to stay clean he'd have to replace everything social media used to give him with three-dimensional, real-life activities.

And so it was that James found ways to anonymously bully strangers, see photos of everyone's dogs, get invited to as many parties as possible, immediately know about all celebrity deaths, get public figures fired, argue with everybody about everything, and so much more without even owning a phone (he painted over the screen of his old one to stop himself looking at Instagram).

His life is amazing and yours could be too if you buy JAMES ACASTER'S GUIDE TO QUITTING SOCIAL MEDIA, BEING THE BEST YOU YOU CAN BE AND SAVING YOURSELF FROM LONELINESS VOL. 1.

You will also need to do everything the book tells you to. Including helping us promote the book by tweeting about it.]]> 304 James Acaster 1472288564 Astrid 2 3.36 2022 James Acaster's Guide to Quitting Social Media
author: James Acaster
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2023/11/20
date added: 2023/11/20
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]]> <![CDATA[Glutton: The Multi-Course Life of a Very Greedy Boy]]> 152221770 The hilarious memoir from comedian, Off Menu host and Great British Menu judge, Ed Gamble.

From a young age, Ed Gamble's immaculate bibs and extremely dirty nappies hinted at his capacious appetite. Before he could walk, Ed already knew that he preferred poached salmon to puree, that celery was a calorie-sapping waste of time, and that mashed potatoes should be made with lashings of butter.

Whilst he might ordinarily have been upset by the calls of 'precocious little sh*t' coming from his family, he was too busy stuffing his gob and staging rebellions against the patronising list of misery that is a children's menu.

In Glutton, Ed shares a relatable buffet of experiences and stories from a life lived through food. From the trials of being a diabetic with a sweet tooth to his teenage battles with obesity, to the joy of cooking and the power of food to bring us together, this is a wonderful, hilarious and heart-warming memoir of a delightful obsession.]]> 279 Ed Gamble 1529194695 Astrid 4 3.78 2023 Glutton: The Multi-Course Life of a Very Greedy Boy
author: Ed Gamble
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/18
date added: 2023/11/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn't Food� and Why Can't We Stop?]]> 74843812 An eye-opening investigation into the science, economics, history and production of ultra-processed food.

It's not you, it's the food.

We have entered a new 'age of eating' where most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food, food which is industrially processed and designed and marketed to be addictive. But do we really know what it's doing to our bodies?

Join Chris in his travels through the world of food science and a UPF diet to discover what's really going on. Find out why exercise and willpower can't save us, and what UPF is really doing to our bodies, our health, our weight, and the planet (hint: nothing good).

For too long we've been told we just need to make different choices, when really we're living in a food environment that makes it nigh-on impossible. So this is a book about our rights. The right to know what we eat and what it does to our bodies and the right to good, affordable food.]]> 399 Chris van Tulleken Astrid 4 4.49 2023 Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn't Food… and Why Can't We Stop?
author: Chris van Tulleken
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/08
date added: 2023/10/08
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]]> The Stranger 49552 The Stranger has long been considered a classic of twentieth-century literature. Le Monde ranks it as number one on its "100 Books of the Century" list. Through this story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."]]> 123 Albert Camus Astrid 0 to-read 4.04 1942 The Stranger
author: Albert Camus
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1942
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6)]]> 1 652 J.K. Rowling Astrid 0 4.57 2005 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4)]]> 6 734 J.K. Rowling 0439139597 Astrid 0 4.56 2000 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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]]> And Then There Were None 16299
"Ten little boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine. Nine little boys sat up very late; One overslept himself and then there were eight. Eight little boys traveling in Devon; One said he'd stay there then there were seven. Seven little boys chopping up sticks; One chopped himself in half and then there were six. Six little boys playing with a hive; A bumblebee stung one and then there were five. Five little boys going in for law; One got in Chancery and then there were four. Four little boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three. Three little boys walking in the zoo; A big bear hugged one and then there were two. Two little boys sitting in the sun; One got frizzled up and then there was one. One little boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none."

When they realize that murders are occurring as described in the rhyme, terror mounts. One by one they fall prey. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. Who has choreographed this dastardly scheme? And who will be left to tell the tale? Only the dead are above suspicion.]]> 264 Agatha Christie 0312330871 Astrid 0 to-read 4.28 1939 And Then There Were None
author: Agatha Christie
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1939
rating: 0
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]]> The Color Purple 52892857 Read the original inspiration for the new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker's epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.

𲹻徱Բ The Color Purple was the first time I had seen Southern, Black women’s literature as world literature. In writing us into the world—bravely, unapologetically, and honestly—Alice Walker has given us a gift we will never be able to repay.� —Tayari Jones

�The Color Purple was what church should have been, what honest familial reckoning could have been, and it is still the only art object in the world by which all three generations of Black artists in my family judge American art.� —Kiese Laymon]]> 287 Alice Walker 0143135694 Astrid 0 to-read 4.40 1982 The Color Purple
author: Alice Walker
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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]]> Great Expectations 2623
Pip must discover his true self, and his own set of values and priorities. Whether such values allow one to prosper in the complex world of early Victorian England is the major question posed by Great Expectations, one of Dickens's most fascinating, and disturbing, novels.

This edition includes the original, discarded ending, Dickens's brief working notes, and the serial instalments and chapter divisions in different editions. It also uses the definitive Clarendon text.]]> 544 Charles Dickens 0192833596 Astrid 0 to-read 3.78 1861 Great Expectations
author: Charles Dickens
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1861
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/01
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]]> Matilda 39988 “The Trunchbull� is no match for Matilda!

Matilda is a little girl who is far too good to be true. At age five-and-a-half she's knocking off double-digit multiplication problems and blitz-reading Dickens. Even more remarkably, her classmates love her even though she's a super-nerd and the teacher's pet. But everything is not perfect in Matilda's world...

For starters she has two of the most idiotic, self-centered parents who ever lived. Then there's the large, busty nightmare of a school principal, Miss ("The") Trunchbull, a former hammer-throwing champion who flings children at will, and is approximately as sympathetic as a bulldozer. Fortunately for Matilda, she has the inner resources to deal with such annoyances: astonishing intelligence, saintly patience, and an innate predilection for revenge.

Roald Dahl was a spy, ace fighter-pilot, chocolate historian, and medical inventor. He was also the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, and many more brilliant stories. He remains the World's No. 1 Storyteller.]]> 240 Roald Dahl 043512398X Astrid 0 4.33 1988 Matilda
author: Roald Dahl
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3)]]> 5 435 J.K. Rowling 043965548X Astrid 0 4.57 1999 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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]]> A Tale of Two Cities 1953 A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens’s great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author’s novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores many of his enduring themes—imprisonment, injustice, social anarchy, resurrection, and the renunciation that fosters renewal.]]> 489 Charles Dickens 0141439602 Astrid 0 to-read 3.86 1859 A Tale of Two Cities
author: Charles Dickens
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1859
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7)]]> 136251
In this final, seventh installment of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling unveils in spectacular fashion the answers to the many questions that have been so eagerly awaited.]]> 759 J.K. Rowling Astrid 0 4.61 2007 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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]]> The Time Traveler's Wife 18619684 537 Audrey Niffenegger 1939126010 Astrid 0 to-read 4.07 2003 The Time Traveler's Wife
author: Audrey Niffenegger
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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]]> One Hundred Years of Solitude 320 417 Gabriel García Márquez Astrid 0 to-read 4.10 1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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]]> Charlotte’s Web 24178 Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan, is a classic of children's literature that is "just about perfect." This high-quality paperback features vibrant illustrations colorized by Rosemary Wells!

Some Pig. Humble. Radiant. These are the words in Charlotte's Web, high up in Zuckerman's barn. Charlotte's spiderweb tells of her feelings for a little pig named Wilbur, who simply wants a friend. They also express the love of a girl named Fern, who saved Wilbur's life when he was born the runt of his litter.

E. B. White's Newbery Honor Book is a tender novel of friendship, love, life, and death that will continue to be enjoyed by generations to come. This edition contains newly color illustrations by Garth Williams, the acclaimed illustrator of E. B. White's Stuart Little and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, among many other books.]]> 184 E.B. White 0064410935 Astrid 0 4.20 1952 Charlotte’s Web
author: E.B. White
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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]]> Romeo and Juliet 18135 Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a violent world, in which two young people fall in love. It is not simply that their families disapprove; the Montagues and the Capulets are engaged in a blood feud.

In this death-filled setting, the movement from love at first sight to the lovers� final union in death seems almost inevitable. And yet, this play set in an extraordinary world has become the quintessential story of young love. In part because of its exquisite language, it is easy to respond as if it were about all young lovers.]]> 281 William Shakespeare 0743477111 Astrid 0 3.74 1597 Romeo and Juliet
author: William Shakespeare
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1597
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1)]]> 28187 Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here

Percy Jackson is a good kid, but he can't seem to focus on his schoolwork or control his temper. And lately, being away at boarding school is only getting worse - Percy could have sworn his pre-algebra teacher turned into a monster and tried to kill him. When Percy's mom finds out, she knows it's time that he knew the truth about where he came from, and that he go to the one place he'll be safe. She sends Percy to Camp Half Blood, a summer camp for demigods (on Long Island), where he learns that the father he never knew is Poseidon, God of the Sea. Soon a mystery unfolds and together with his friends—one a satyr and the other the demigod daughter of Athena - Percy sets out on a quest across the United States to reach the gates of the Underworld (located in a recording studio in Hollywood) and prevent a catastrophic war between the gods.]]> 377 Rick Riordan 0786838655 Astrid 0 4.31 2005 The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1)
author: Rick Riordan
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5)]]> 2
Harry has had enough. He is beginning to think he must do something, anything, to change his situation, when the summer holidays come to an end in a very dramatic fashion. What Harry is about to discover in his new year at Hogwarts will turn his world upside down...]]> 912 J.K. Rowling Astrid 0 4.50 2003 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5)
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/01
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]]> Letters to a Young Poet 46199 Listy do mlodego poety 80 Rainer Maria Rilke 0486422453 Astrid 0 to-read 4.32 1929 Letters to a Young Poet
author: Rainer Maria Rilke
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1929
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/01
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]]> Women in Love 9784 Women in Love is both a lucid account of English society before the First World War, and a brilliant evocation of the inexorable power of human desire.

Women in Love continues where The Rainbow left off, with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships, Ursula's with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gudrun's with industrialist Gerald Crich, and later with a sculptor, Loerke. Quintessentially modernist, Women in Love is one of Lawrence's most extraordinary, innovative and unsettling works.]]> 416 D.H. Lawrence 0486424588 Astrid 0 to-read 3.68 1920 Women in Love
author: D.H. Lawrence
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1920
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness]]> 6359469 Nudge is the book that changed the way we think about decision-making. Nudge is about choices—how we make them and how we can make better ones.

Every day we make decisions: about the things that we buy or the meals we eat; about the investments we make or our children's health and education; even the causes that we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. We are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to make bad decisions.

And, as Thaler and Sunstein show, no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way. By knowing how people think, we can make it easier for them to choose what is best for them, their families and society. Using dozens of eye-opening examples and original research, the authors demonstrate how to nudge us in the right directions, without restricting our freedom of choice.]]> 306 Richard H. Thaler 0141040017 Astrid 4 3.75 2008 Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness
author: Richard H. Thaler
name: Astrid
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/09
date added: 2023/08/09
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]]> Circe 35959740
Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts, and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from or with the mortals she has come to love.]]> 393 Madeline Miller 0316556343 Astrid 4 4.22 2018 Circe
author: Madeline Miller
name: Astrid
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/07
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves:
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